Literature quotes
4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside literature — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"It is true that women tend to be more identified with their bodies because in this crazy world, both men and women measure women's value as human beings in relationship to their physical appearance."
"You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one without almost without bothering to read the other."
"Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary."
"A foreign country can best be understood through its literature."
"The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean."
"Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures"
"A children's biography doesn't have to be comprehensive, and it doesn't have to be definitive. It does have to be accurate, to the extent that's possible. And most of all, it has to be a piece of literature, a compelling read. I want the reader to discover the joy of reading."
"I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature."
"Moriarty is arguably the most famous super-villain in terms of literature."
"The past is but the past of a beginning."
"It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean."
"I don't like to meddle in my private affairs."
"I want to be an honest man and a good writer."
"To turn events into ideas is the function of literature."
"If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one's life, without seeing oneself in the "mirror" of literature?"
"I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme."
"The riches of scholarship, the benignities of literature, defy fortune and outlive calamity. They are beyond the reach of thief or moth or rust. As they cannot be inherited, so they cannot, be alienated."
"Le mensonge et les vers de tout temps sont amis. Lies and literature have always been friends."
"I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose."
"The little man is still a man."
