Literature Quotes and Sayings
Great poets are great copy editors.
- Dejan Stojanovic
A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.
- John Henry Newman
Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.
- Jules Renard
Books and movies, they are not mere entertainment. They sustain me and help me cope with my real life.
- Arlaina Tibensky
There is nothing political about American literature.
- Laura Bush
We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it.
- F. Sionil José
She was addicted to literature like some people were addicted to heroin.
- Allie Burke
Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.
- Oscar Wilde
What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.
- Brent Weeks
Literature is always personal, always one man’s vision of the world, one man’s experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.
- W.B. Yeats
Literature always anticipates life. It doesn’t copy it but moulds it to it’s purpose.
- Oscar Wilde
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
- Margaret Atwood
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
- E.M. Forster
In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.
- C.S. Lewis
All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.
- Franz Kafka
People don’t expect too much from literature. They just want to know they’re not alone with being confused.
- Jonathan Ames
My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.
- Gene Wolfe
Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.
- Colum McCann