Quotes about Literature

124 was spiteful. Full of baby's venom

Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant within a human landscape.

Being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn't limit my imagination; it expands it," Toni Morrison, who turns eighty-eight today

Literature is a power to be possessed, not a body of objects to be studied.

A book or poem which has no pity in it had better not be written.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.'

You and I are what we are, and will be what we will be. As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that... The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame. That is all.

If a man is known by the company he keeps, so also his character is reflected in the books he reads.

The truth is, he tired of criticism, tired of prose measured by the yard. --Disgrace

Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.

Most books, after all, are ephemeral; their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the Hundred Years' War.

I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.