Excessive literary production is a social offense.
George Eliot – Literature
Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Gaston Bachelard – Literary imagination
Literature is a kind of intellectual light which, like the light of the sun, enables us to see what we do not like; but who would wish to escape unpleasing objects, by condemning himself to perpetual darkness?
Samuel Johnson – Literature and intellect
From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.
Oscar Wilde – Literature, Kipling
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
George Bernard Shaw – Literature, Skill
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
George Bernard Shaw – Literature
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
John Updike – Writing, Literature
Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day’s progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
John Updike – Characters, Literature
To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.
Andre Gide – Reading
All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.
Arthur Christopher Benson – Literature, Story
There is first the literature of knowledge, and secondly, the literature of power.
Thomas De Quincey – Literature
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.
Borges – Literature
One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.
Borges – Literary Text
A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can’t be much good.
T.S. Eliot – Play
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
