Quotes of: Literature Keyword

Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.

Vladimir Nabokov

Size has nothing to do with literature. All legs are long enough to touch the ground, and all books are big enough to fill their covers.

Walter Kirn

The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not suffice.

Wole Soyinka

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.

Don DeLillo

I just happen to like the work. I like preparing for a role. I like reading. I like analyzing. I like literature. I like emotions. I like working with other actors.

Elle Macpherson

I am more and more convinced that literature is made up of works, genres, schools, discussions, problems, collective work in order to solve certain problems.

Italo Calvino

Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation of literature enhanced by information about the writer's work.

Leland Ryken

The beliefs and behaviour of the Restoration reflect the theories of society put forward by Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan, which was written in exile in Paris and published in 1651. Like many texts of the time, The Leviathan is an allegory. It recal...

The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland

The range and variety of Chaucer's English did much to establish English as a national language. Chaucer also contributed much to the formation of a standard English based on the dialect of the East Midlands region which was basically the dialect of ...

The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland

Old English poetry is characterised by a number of poetic tropes which enable a writer to describe things indirectly and which require a reader imaginatively to construct their meaning. The most widespread of these figurative descriptions are what ar...

The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland

It is the voice of everyday people, rather than of a self-conscious 'artist', that we hear in Caedmon's Hymn, and in such texts as Deor's Lament (also known simply as Deor) or The Seafarer. These reflect ordinary human experience and are told in the ...

The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland

Moreover, it is not just that the early documents are silent about so much of Jesus that came to be recorded in the gospels, but that they view him in a substantially different way -- as a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a...

George Albert Wells

The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

Come Back, Dr. Caligari

Literature sustains life because it captures death in its forward march. Clickety-clickety-clack, the wheels go round and round ...

In Conversation

Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

The Death of the Author

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

Existentialists and Mystics Writings on Philosophy and Literature

He yelled, "Charlie, you know where I am, don't you? All right, Charlie, this isn't literature. This is life.

Humboldt's Gift

Charlie, you know where I am, don't you? All right, Charlie, this isn't literature. This is life.

Humboldt's Gift

Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature

Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

It's a special form of scholarly neurosis,´ said Camel. `He's no longer able to distinguish between life and literature.´

The British Museum Is Falling Down

The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.

Bouvard and Pecuchet