Literature Quotes, Quotations, and Sayings

173 Literature Quotes
“Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.”
Georges Simenon Quotes
Source: in an interview, in the "Paris Review"
“We cultivate literature on a little oat-meal.”
Sydney Smith Quotes
Source: Lady Holland's Memoir (vol. I, p. 23)
“The great Cham of literature. (Samuel Johnson)”
Tobias George Smollett Quotes
Source: Letter to Wilkes
“People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with the bad.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.”
Cyril Connolly Quotes
“Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.”
Ford Madox Ford Quotes
“People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.”
Chinua Achebe Quotes
“The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
“Literature is the question minus the answer.”
Roland Barthes Quotes
“For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.”
Herman Melville Quotes
“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
Italo Calvino Quotes
“Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.”
John Morley Quotes
“To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.”
Ernst Fischer Quotes
“Learning why one great book is just like every other great book is the key to understanding literature”
John Moschitta Quotes
“Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn Quotes
“Literature is news that stays news.”
Ezra Pound Quotes
“All literature is gossip.”
Truman Capote Quotes
“Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.”
Jules Renard Quotes
“Literature is the immortality of speech.”
August Wilhelm Von Schlegel Quotes
“To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.”
Alvin Toffler Quotes
“A poet is someone who is astonished by everything.”
Anonymous Quotes
“Good children's literature appeals not only to the child in the adult, but to the adult in the child.”
Anon. Quotes
“All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.”
Richard Hughes Quotes
“Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.”
Jules Renard Quotes
“When I give a lecture, I accept that people look at their watches, but what I do not tolerate is when they look at it and raise it to their ear to find out if it stopped.”
Anonymous Quotes