Literature Quotes - Page 3

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.

Anyone who says writing is easy isn't doing it right.

Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time.
Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!

A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

You can't eat [literature], that's the problem," he said. "I've tried, it's very dry, and not at all nutritious.

Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don’t want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons.

In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.

No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We’ve got too many dexterous drudges as it is.

A word only writes
Its night and rides
Its dream.

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

Hold your pen and spare your voice.

In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul

The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.

Trying to live up to yourself is the most trying thing.

this is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity...You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.

It perhaps might be said-if any one dared-that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another.