Literature Quotes - Page 27

• It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.

  Anthony Trollope

  Art, Writing, Snakes

  Anthony Trollope (1871). “Ralph the heir. With illustr. by F.A. Fraser”, p.425

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• What is there that money will not do?

  Anthony Trollope

  Anthony Trollope (2015). “The Way We Live Now”, p.198, Booklassic

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• When I got to 40 or so... I had the sense when I looked back over my life I would actually see a mess of decisions, a few of which I had thought about, some of which I had sort of stumbled on, and many that I had no control over whatsoever.

  Kazuo Ishiguro

  Decision, Mess

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• I'm not into high literature, but I think all my books are literate.

  James Herbert

  Book, Thinking

  "From the archive: James Herbert on rats and redemption". Interview with Andrew Billen, www.theguardian.com. 1993.

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• In 1938, when I had decided that the only way to see the country was in a trailer, and I built the trailer which I still have and lived in it for eighteen months, and learned America from San Diego to the Canadian border, from Miami to New Jersey, and east to west in between.

  Leslie Charteris

  Country, America, West

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• I take it that a monograph of this sort belongs to the ephemera literature of science. The studied care which is warranted in the treatment of the more slowly moving branches of science would be out of place here. Rather with the pen of a journalist we must attempt to record a momentary phase of current thought, which may at any instant change with kaleidoscopic abruptness.

  Gilbert N. Lewis

  Moving, Science, Thinking

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• ...a man estimable for his learning, amiable for his life, and venerable for his piety. Arbuthnot was a man of great comprehension, skilful in his profession, versed in the sciences, acquainted with ancient literature, and able to animate his mass of knowledge by a bright and active imagination; a scholar with great brilliance of wit; a wit who, in the crowd of life, retained and discovered a noble ardour of religious zeal.

  Samuel Johnson

  Religious, Science, Men

  Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt (1854). “Johnson's Lives of the British Poets”, p.205

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• The case I shall find evidence for is that when literature arrives, it expels science.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Cases, Evidence

  Peter Brian Medawar (1973). “The hope of progress: a scientist looks at problems in philosophy, literature and science”, Anchor

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• New media may at first appear as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought. But nobody could make the mistake of supposing that phonetic writing merely made it possible for the Greeks to set down in visual order what they had though and known before writing. In the same way printing made literature possible. It did not merely encode literature.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Mistake, Writing, Media

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• Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation-who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him-but he must go on writing, reflecting disorder, defeat, despair, should that be all he sees at the moment, but ever searching for the elusive love, joy, and hope-qualities which, as in the act of life itself, are best when they have to be struggled for, and are not commonly come by with much ease, either by a critic's formula or by a critic's yearning.

  William Styron

  Writing, Past, Judging

  William Styron (2015). “My Generation: Collected Nonfiction”, p.417, Random House

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• Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of "I's," and a listening audience somehow turns each "I" into a "me." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.

  Adam Gopnik

  Sex, Writing, Self

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• When I write something, every word of it is meant. I can't say it enough.

  Anne Rice

  Writing, Enough, I Can

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• Literature is a form of permanent insurrection. Its mission is to arouse, to disturb, to alarm, to keep men in a constant state of dissatisfaction with themselves.

  Mario Vargas Llosa

  Writing, Men, Alarms

  Mario Vargas Llosa (2011). “Making Waves: Essays”, p.52, Macmillan

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• Literature is my calling To hold up the mirror to my countrymen comes natural to me; and in the open field of invention I am not without hopes of giving them pleasure.

  T. E. Brown

  Mirrors, Giving, Calling

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• According to the United Nations' latest count, of the approximately 3,000 languages spoken in the world today, only some 78 have a literature. Of those 78, a scant five or six enjoy a truly international audience.

  Barry Sanders

  World, Today, Six

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• The story [Henny-Penny] has the best opening in all literature-"The sky is falling," cried Henny-Penny, "and a piece of it fell on my tail.

  John Steinbeck

  Fall, Sky, Tails

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• A multitude of books distracts the mind.

  Socrates

  Book, Reading, Mind

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• The writer interweaves a story with his own doubts, questions, and values. That is art.

  Naguib Mahfouz

  Art, Doubt, Stories

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• There are no heroes in most of my stories. I look at our society with a critical eye and find nothing extraordinary in the people I see.

  Naguib Mahfouz

  Hero, Eye, People

  FaceBook post by Naguib Mahfouz from Dec 20, 2010

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• I was suffering from a peculiar and persistent sense that I was being pursued, and also the conviction that under the political order of the times, our lives had no meaning.

  Naguib Mahfouz

  Order, Political, Suffering

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• The Constitution is more than literature, but as literature, it is primarily a work of the imagination. It imagined a country: fantastic. More fantastic still, it imagined a country full of people imagining themselves.

  Roger Rosenblatt

  Country, People, Imagination

  Roger Rosenblatt (1994). “The Man in the Water: Essays and Stories”, Random House

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• There is a vast difference between how things seem from the outside and how they feel on the inside.

  Nigella Lawson

  Differences, Feels, Seems

  "Nigella Lawson: Who'd be a goddess?" by Sally Vincent, www.theguardian.com. October 15, 2004.

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• People like us who are on their last leg can only understand comedies.

  Friedrich Durrenmatt

  People, Legs, Lasts

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• Who sows fear, reaps weapons.

  Friedrich Durrenmatt

  Weapons, Reap

  "About Tolerance" by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, 1977.

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• There must always be some pretentiousness about literature, or else no one would take its pains or endure its disappointments.

  Glenway Wescott

  Pain, Disappointment, Endure

  Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Thomas Wolfe (1945). “The Crack-up”

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