“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.
This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.”

— Fernando Pessoa , book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

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Fernando Pessoa 288

Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publi… 1888–1935

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“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

A literatura é a maneira mais agradável de ignorar a vida.
Variant: To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life.
Source: The Book of Disquietude, trans. Richard Zenith, text 116

“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”

Jean-Luc Godard (1930) French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic

Quoted in: Richard Roud, Godard, introduction (1970).

“Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.”

Françoise Sagan (1935–2004) French writer

Paris Review interview (1956)

“The retreat of the nation's largest cultural minority from literary discourse does not make art healthier. Instead, it weakens the dialectic of cultural development. It makes American literature less diverse, less vital, and less representative”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

28
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“Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Angel's Game

Source: The Angel's Game

“Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.”

H. Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) British physician, writer, and social reformer

Source: The Dance of Life http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300671.txt (1923), Ch. 2

“The people of China forged their own literature apart from letters. And today this is what lives, to be part of what is to come, and all the formal literature, which was called art, is dead. The plots of these novels are often incomplete, the love interest is often not brought to solution, heroines are often not beautiful and heroes often are not brave. Nor has the story always an end; sometimes it merely stops, in the way life does, in the middle of it when death is not expected.
In this tradition of the novel have I been born and reared as a writer.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

The Chinese Novel (1938)

“Because we live in such a mind-dominated culture, most modern art, architecture, music, and literature are devoid of beauty, of inner essence, with very few exceptions.”

Eckhart Tolle book The Power of Now

Source: The Power of Now (1997)

“No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School

“Not to know the Bible is, in some ways, to be illiterate, to neglect the very roots of philosophy, art, architecture, literature, poetry and music.”

Chris Hedges book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America

Source: American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Chapter One: Faith

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