Quotes about literature
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“As an Egyptian of Palestinian origin teaching English literature at an American university, who had built his scholarly career on a Polish sailor that became an English writer (Joseph Conrad), Said’s assertion that western orientalists could not comprehend the East and easterners because they were born into a different culture, seems somewhat bizarre.”

Edward Said (1935–2003) Professor of English and literature

Yoav Gelber, Nation and History: Israeli Historiography between Zionism and Post-Zionism (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2011), p. 56

Universe

“Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself, and the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character appear in spite of him.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 14

Music, Appearance

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”

Ernest Hemingway book Green Hills of Africa

[…] it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.
Part I, Ch. 1
Green Hills of Africa (1935)

Books

“Jane Austen is thus a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface. She stimulates us to supply what is not there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet is composed of something that expands in the reader’s mind and endows with the most enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial. Always the stress is laid upon character. How, we are made to wonder, will Emma behave when Lord Osborne and Tom Musgrave make their call at five minutes before three, just as Mary is bringing in the tray and the knife-case? It is an extremely awkward situation. The young men are accustomed to much greater refinement. Emma may prove herself ill-bred, vulgar, a nonentity. The turns and twists of the dialogue keep us on the tenterhooks of suspense. Our attention is half upon the present moment, half upon the future. And when, in the end, Emma behaves in such a way as to vindicate our highest hopes of her, we are moved as if we had been made witnesses of a matter of the highest importance. Here, indeed, in this unfinished and in the main inferior story, are all the elements of Jane Austen’s greatness. It has the permanent quality of literature. Think away the surface animation, the likeness to life, and there remains, to provide a deeper pleasure, an exquisite discrimination of human values.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1925)

Life, Men, Pleasure, Making love

“Fuck literature.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Letter (1924) to Ezra Pound; published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker, p. 113

“One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.
But paradoxically, we create fiction out of human concern for the victims of the revelations. This concern is at the root of literature.”

Anaïs Nin book The Diary of Anaïs Nin

The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Truth

“When we talk about culture, it includes literature, paintings, music, dance, sculpture, folklores, festivals, and celebrations.”

Mubarak Ali (1941) Historian, activist, scholar

In Search of History, Chapter I: War and Peace in Historical Perspectives, p. 1
Culture

Music, Dance, Painting

“…Even though we talk about race a lot in the literature, there’s still this idea of “Well, if we make this person blue and give them pointy ears, then we don’t have to actually talk about what’s happening in the real world.””

Nalo Hopkinson (1960) Jamaican Canadian writer

And those of us who live in racialized bodies feel that lack, we feel that erasure, so yes, there was something quite deliberate in my doing half the speech as an alien. On race still being a taboo topic in the world of science fiction in “Interview: Nalo Hopkinson” http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-nalo-hopkinson/ in Lightspeed (June 2013)

World, Making love, Idea, Personality

“We need a literature, not solely for highly intellectual persons, but of a more simple character, which attempts to appeal to ordinary common-sense minds who are really fainting for such moral and mental assistance as is not reached by the more pretentious works.”

William Quan Judge (1851–1896) American occult writer

Letters That Have Helped Me (1891)

Sense, Personality

“We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.”

B.F. Skinner (1904–1990) American behaviorist

As quoted in B. F. Skinner : The Man and His Ideas (1968) by Richard Isadore Evans, p. 73

Love, Books, Making love, Reading

“We must no longer have a pacific conception of peace. In the Middle Ages it was otherwise. The existence of the individual had no exaggerated importance. Pacifist literature depicts death on the field of battle as an unnatural death because it does not understand the ancient Germanic horror of death on a bed, and arteriosclerosis appears to it more virile than a bullet. Pacifists dwell on the horrors of the war dead as if a peace corpse were more aesthetic. The representatives of the national revolution are men and soldiers who are physically and morally warriors.”

Franz von Papen (1879–1969) German chancellor

Speech to the Stalhelm in Münster (13 May 1933), quoted in Frederick Schuman, Hitler and the Nazi Dictatorship (London: Hale, 1936), pp. 345-346
1930s

Death, Men, War, Age

“I need hardly say that I agree with almost every word of my critics. I have repeatedly dwelt on the entirely hypothetical character of the dates I ventured to assign to the first three periods of Vedic literature. All I have claimed for them has been that they are minimum dates”

Max Müller (1823–1900) German-born philologist and orientalist

Max Muller. (Preface to the text of the Rigveda, Vol.4, p.xiii). Quoted in https://talageri.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-recorded-history-of-indo-european_27.html

“Whether France or Italy or Germany or England has made the greatest contribution in the history of modern civilisation—however that speculative controversy may be settled, this at least is certain, that those are not wrong who hold that Germany's high and strict standard of competency, the purity and vigour of her administration of affairs, her splendid efforts and great success in all branches of science, her glories—for glories they are—in art and literature, and the fixed strength of character and duty in the German people entitle her national ideals to a supreme place among the greatest-ideals that now animate and guide the world. Do not let us forget all that. German ambition is a perfectly intelligible and even lofty ambition.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1911/nov/28/morocco#column_384 in the House of Lords during the Agadir Crisis (28 November 1911) 1910s

People, World, Art, History

“I don't really like to work with literary allusions very much. I never want to be in a position where I'm saying, "You've got to read a lot of other stuff" or "You've got to have had a good education in literature to fully appreciate what I'm doing."”

Kazuo Ishiguro (1954) Japanese-born British author

... I actually dislike, more than many people, working through literary allusion. I just feel that there's something a bit snobbish or elitist about that. I don't like it as a reader, when I'm reading something. It's not just the elitism of it; it jolts me out of the mode in which I'm reading. I've immersed myself in the world and then when the light goes on I'm supposed to be making some kind of literary comparison to another text. I find I'm pulled out of my kind of fictional world, I'm asked to use my brain in a different kind of way. I don't like that. Rukeyser, Rebecca. " Kazuo Ishiguro: Mythic Retreat https://www.guernicamag.com/mythic-retreat/" guernicamag.com interview. 1 May 2015.

Education, Reading

“The early days of esto no tiene nombre were the happiest time in my life. I had a vision, I had hope, and I was not alone. There was a lot of love going around then — sexual love, spiritual love, friendship love, literature love, publishing love. Perfect love.”

Tatiana de la tierra (1961–2012) Latina writer and activist

On her time working for the lesbian magazine esto no tiene nombre (as quoted in “Celebrating Tatiana De La Tierra And The Latina Lesbian Zine Culture Of The '90s” https://bust.com/books/194419-tatiana-de-la-tierra-zine-culture.html in Bust Magazine)

Love, Life, Friendship, Making love

“…The resistance to English, the fear of English, has made us bad readers of English literature, because of our fear of contaminating the Spanish language, of losing it in the avalanche of North American influence…”

Luis Rafael Sánchez (1936) Puerto Rican playwright and novelist

On some people’s resistance to reading English literature in “Luis Rafael Sánchez: Counterpoints" https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00096005/00024/14j (Sargasso, 1984)

Bad luck, Fear

“…every day I’m convinced that if one is firmly planted in his own world, the work necessarily appeals to a greater number of people. In that sense, I want to profit from my Caribbean self and incorporate it into my literature, hoping to give testimony to who and what I am…”

Luis Rafael Sánchez (1936) Puerto Rican playwright and novelist

On the lack of ubiquity regarding Puerto Rican writings in “Luis Rafael Sánchez: Counterpoints" https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00096005/00024/14j (Sargasso, 1984)

People, World, Hope, Sense

“…The responsibility, the burden, is much heavier for us. If we don’t exercise our collective imagination—and not just documentation —we’ll always be at a certain disadvantage. I think what literature could provide us with is showing other possibilities. What I fear most is homogeneity.”

Rawi Hage (1964) Canadian writer

On the burden of racialized writers to represent their communities in “‘What I Fear Most is Homogeneity’: An Interview with Rawi Hage” https://hazlitt.net/feature/what-i-fear-most-homogeneity-interview-rawi-hage in Hazlitt (2018 Sep 12)

Fear, Exercises, Imagination, Thinking

“A sense of art mixes with our modern piety. We are apt to admire the evangelical reticence for its dignity,[…] we are apt to respect the Scripture narratives with their few intense details, their close events and their great omissions alike, for their simplicity, and—it is to be feared that our literature leads us so far—for their "effect."”

Alice Meynell (1847–1922) English publisher, editor, writer, poet, activist

Source: Mary, the Mother of Jesus: An Essay (1912), Ch. II. "Mary in the Scriptures", pp. 18, 21

Fear, Art, Sense

“To be learned in literature is such a different thing from liking it.”

Frank Moore Colby (1865–1925) American historian

Frank Moore Colby, Imaginary Obligations, Dodd, Mead, and Company (1904) ISBN 9780848692599. p. 217.

Learning

“You talk of Paine with more respect than he deserves: He is utterly incapable of comprehending his subject. He has not even a moderate portion of learning of any kind. He has learnd the instrumental part of literature, a style, and a method of disposing his ideas, without having ever made a previous preparation of Study or thinking—for the use of it. ... [Paine] possesses nothing more than what a man whose audacity makes him careless of logical consequences, and his total want of honour and morality makes indifferent as to political consequences, may very easily write. They indeed who seriously write upon a principle of levelling ought to be answerd by the Magistrate—and not by the Speculatist.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Letter to William Cusac Smith (22 July 1791), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789–December 1791 (1967), pp. 303-304
1790s

Pain, Making love, Idea, Thinking

“For the unbroken life of the English nation over a thousand years and more is a phenomenon unique in history. ... Institutions which elsewhere are recent and artificial creations, appear in England almost as works of nature, spontaneous and unquestioned. The deepest instinct of the Englishman—how the word “instinct” keeps forcing itself in again and again!—is for continuity; he never acts more freely nor innovates more boldly than when he most is conscious of conserving or even of reacting. From this continuous life of a united people in its island home spring, as from the soil of England, all that is peculiar in the gifts and the achievements of the English nation, its laws, its literature, its freedom, its self-discipline. ... And this continuous and continuing life of England is symbolised and expressed, as by nothing else, by the English kingship. English it is, for all the leeks and thistles and shamrocks, the Stuarts and the Hanoverians, for all the titles grafted upon it here and elsewhere, “her other realms and territories”, Headships of Commonwealths, and what not. The stock that received all these grafts is English, the sap that rises through it to the extremities rises from roots in English earth, the earth of England's history.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech to the Royal Society of St George (22 April 1961), quoted in A Nation Not Afraid. The Thinking of Enoch Powell (1965), pp. 145–146

Life, People, Law, Home

“Etymologically, patient means sufferer. It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. That illness can be not an epic of suffering but the occasion of some kind of self-transcendence is affirmed by sentimental literature and, more convincingly, by case histories offered by doctor-writers. Some illnesses seem more apt than others for this kind of meditation.”

Susan Sontag book AIDS and Its Metaphors

Source: AIDS and Its Metaphors, (1989), ch. 4, p. 125, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-312-42013-7 ; later published in combination with Illness As Metaphor. This combined edition is the one referenced here.

Fear, History, Suffering, Self-confidence

“I discovered the existence of an underground... This underground only occasionally intermingles in part with the worlds of business, science, politics, academia, and the so-called arts... it definitely...infiltrates all of Western civilization.... one thing is usually certain: members of this underground who are respected in their communities don't talk about the interest or beliefs that qualify them for membership unless they know you too are in the club. They have learned from experience that to be outspoken brings censure —from their ministers, customers, employers, or even friends... They are found in all walks of life: scientists, psychiatrists, physicians, housewives, college students, businessmen, teenagers, and at least a few ministers in formal religions... They gather in small groups, quietly and often semi-secretly... usually discuss affairs of the underground only with other members... All are to some degree emotionally and intellectually dedicated to a cause. Finally, the underground has its own literature, language, technology, and to some extent demigods.”

Robert Monroe (1915–1995) American founder of The Monroe Institute

Journeys Out of the Body (1971), Chapter 2. Search and Research

Life, World, Religion, Art

“It should also be remembered that the Bible is written in the language of symbols, a special category of literature designed both to conceal and to reveal spiritual truths. Blindness is a symbol for temporary unawareness of spiritual light. The Christ partly represents spiritual intuitiveness. When one who is spiritually blind becomes intuitively awakened and active or, symbolically, enters the presence of the Christ and is healed by him, the scales are said to have fallen from his eyes. This I believe to be the true symbolical interpretation; for I look upon the story as one of the many beautiful miniature mystery dramas to be found in the Bible, portraying in allegory and symbol the soul’s awakening from darkness to light. Nevertheless, symbolism apart, the answer given by the Lord was, as stated above, doctrinally and technically correct.”

Geoffrey Hodson (1886–1983) New Zealand occultist

Reincarnation & Christianity (1967)

Truth, Beauty, Soul, Light

“I do think that our perception of reality is fragmentary, and in 20th-century literature, it's totally normal to not describe reality as something whole and completely transportable and explicable. That's been accepted in novels. But genre films always pretend that reality is transportable, which means that it is explicable.”

Michael Haneke (1942) Austrian film director and screenwriter

Lawrence, Chua. "Michael Haneke" http://bombsite.com/issues/80/articles/2489, BOMB Magazine, Summer, 2002. Retrieved 29 July 2011.

Thinking, Reality

“We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

Vol. I, ch. 2, p. 60.
Motto proposed by Smith for the Edinburgh Review.
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

“I follow in this tradition because I believe literature matters, and in this book I insist that Asian American literature literally embodies the contradictions, conﬂicts, and potential future options of Asian American culture”

Viet Thanh Nguyen (1971) American author of fiction

Source: As quoted in “Race & Resistance Literature & Politics In Asian America" (2002) p.3

Books, Future

“Sanskrit was a complete success and became the language of all cultured people in India and in countries under Indian influence. All scientific, philosophical, historical works were henceforth written in Sanskrit, and important texts existing in other languages were translated and adapted into Sanskrit. For this reason, very few ancient literary, religious, or philosophical documents exits in India in other languages. The sheer volume of Sanskrit literature is immense, and it remains largely unexplored.”

Alain Daniélou (1907–1994) French historian, musicologist, Indologist and expert on Shaivite Hinduism

Alain Danielou in: Virtue, Success, Pleasure, and Liberation: The Four Aims of Life in the Tradition of Ancient India https://books.google.co.in/books?id=IMSngEmfdS0C&pg=PA17, Inner Traditions / Bear & Co, 1 August 1993, p. 17.

People, Success, Country

“For me, filmmaking is but a means of achieving things that one cannot achieve with either literature or music.”

Kaori Momoi (1952) Japanese actress

Kaori Momoi http://www.midnighteye.com/interviews/kaori-momoi/ (16 March 2008)

Music

“Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.”

Ismail Kadare (1936) Albanian writer

Ismail Kadare

Nature

“Epic literature is not history but is again a way of looking at the past.”

Romila Thapar (1931) Indian historian

Source: Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, p. 100.

Way, History, Past

“We relate the poems and plays and novels we read and see, not to the men who wrote them, nor even directly to ourselves; we relate them to each other. Literature is a world that we try to build up and enter at the same time.”

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

The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time

Men, World, Time, Reading

“In literature you don't just read one poem or novel after another, but enter into a complete world of which every work of literature forms part. This affects the writer as much as it does the reader.”

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

The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time

World, Reading, Parting

“The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve.'”

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

Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions. The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html

Problem

“I could be as jittery as you if I wanted to. But I've studied history and literature. And architecture, and a lot of things. Just to balance this psycho work. There’s a lot more perfection in a Doric column than in you.”

Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) American author

Source: Short fiction, The Fairy Chessmen (1946), Chapter 4 (p. 29)

History, Study, Perfection

“I think that literature, when it’s good, as opposed to journalism, gives you the freedom to be the characters, to enter into their lives, their psyche and so their experiences become, in a way, yours.”

Irene Sabatini (1967) writer from Zimbabwe

What these works of fiction have allowed me to do is to enter the pain and despair, the hope, to share in the struggles of certain characters that I have identified with (because of the artistry of the writers in making these individuals come alive). Source: Institute of Education Alumni Life Issue 33 Summer 2010 https://www.irenesabatini.com/files/IS-Novel-Revolutionary-IOE-July-2010.pdf

Way, Thinking, Freedom

“Because of the nature of my work and because I was suffering from a grave ailment, my doctors advised me to take part in cultural activities to improve the balance of my sense of hearing and sense of sight. Thus, I came into contact with some literature and art.”

Jiang Qing (1914–1991) Chinese political figure and wife of Mao Zedong

Source: Speech at the Reception for the Representatives of the Beijing Workers Propaganda Team and the People's Liberation Army Propaganda Team (14 September 1968)

Art, Nature, Sense, Suffering

“We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our own life stories and—equally important—to find ourselves by understanding our own life stories more clearly in the context of others’.”

Maureen Corrigan (1955) American journalist and writer

Source: Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005), Chapter 1 (p. 34)

Life, Understanding, Reading

“I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic.”

Rabih Alameddine (1959) Lebanese-American painter and writer.

Source: On the unpredictability of how a written work will be received in “Rabih Alameddine: 'Right now in the west, Arabs are the other'” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/09/rabih-alameddine-interview-an-unnecessary-woman-national-book-award in The Guardian (2015 Jan 9)

“It’s frustrating, that you know what good literature is but you cannot get it totally right.”

Geling Yan (1958) Chinese writer and screenwriter

Source: "Chinese writer finds freedom in English" in Reuters https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-literature-yan-interview/chinese-writer-finds-freedom-in-english-idUSTRE53M00D20090423 (22 April 2009)

“I don’t believe in identity politics in literature—or in life much, either. Indeed the current scholarly enchantment with identity politics strikes me as a more intellectual version of the warning oft heard around Sunnyside when I was growing up: “Stick with your own kind.””

Maureen Corrigan (1955) American journalist and writer

Source: Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005), Chapter 2 (p. 70)
Context: Family and cultural origins are crucial to self-definition, but they’re not the end of the story. I certainly don’t think that we readers only or even chiefly enjoy or understand books whose main characters mirror us. In fact, the opportunity to become who we are decidedly not—whether it’s Amis’s Dixon or Philip Roth’s Portnoy or Ellison’s Invisible Man or Kafka’s beetle—is one of the greatest gifts reading offers. Women readers get to serve on that floating boy’s club, the Pequod; male readers get to step into Elizabeth Bennet’s shoes and teach Mr. Darcy the dance of humility; readers of either gender who are not African American get to crawl toward freedom alongside Toni Morrison’s Sethe. One of the most magical and liberating things about literature is that it can transport us readers into worlds totally unlike our own.

Life

“There is a big academic literature on under what conditions sanctions work and don’t work, on when they can change the behavior of targeted countries. And most times, they don’t work. That’s what the literature says.”

Michael McFaul (1963) American academic and diplomat

"Toward a “Grander Strategy of Containing Putin’s Russia”: Ambassador Michael McFaul on Engagement and Containment in a New Era of Great Power Competition" in The Yale Review of International Studies http://yris.yira.org/comments/5314 (June 2021)

Behavior, Change, Time, Country

“The literature of India makes us acquainted with a great nation of past ages, which grasped every branch of knowledge, and which will always occupy a distinguished place in the history of the civilization of mankind.”

Magnus Björnstjerna (1779–1847) Swedish count and general (1779-1847)

Source: Count Magnus Fredrik Ferdinand Bjornstjerna in: The Theogony of the Hindoos with Their System of Philosophy and Cosmogony by Count M. Björnstjerna https://books.google.co.in/books?id=mHNK92IkdUkC&pg=PA85, Murray, 1844 , p. 85.

Age, History, Knowledge, Past

“Those in power (even if it's only for a little while) known nothing about literature, all they care about is power. And I'll play the fool for my readers, if I feel like it, but never for the powerful.”

Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) Chilean author

Between Parentheses. Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998–2003. ed. Ignacio Echevarría, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: New Directions, 2011 [2004]). 358.
Variant: Alternative translation: "Those who have power—even for a short time—know nothing about literature; they are solely interested in power. I can be a clown to my readers, if I damn well please, but never to the powerful." Interview with Mónica Maristain for Playboy (Mexican edition), "The Last Interview" (2003), 102, in: The Last Interview. trans. Sybil Perez (New York: Mellville House, 2009). 93-123

Fools, Feeling