Great Literature quotes:

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Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. -- Ezra Pound
I'm not writing great literature. I'm writing commercial fiction for people to enjoy the stories and to like the characters. -- Kathy Reichs
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote. -- E. M. Forster
Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal. -- Francoise Sagan
When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language. -- James Earl Jones
Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted. -- Robert Benchley
To me, characters are at the heart of great literature. -- Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth. -- Margaret Atwood
In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself. -- C. S. Lewis
The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great. -- Doris Lessing
I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic. -- Rabih Alameddine
I doubt if anything learnt at school is of more value than great literature learnt by heart. -- Richard Livingstone
I think you can find all the elements that you can find in great literature in mundane experiences. -- Harvey Pekar
All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. -- Leo Tolstoy
There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly. -- Ernest Hemingway
When I was a kid, I went through the whole process of reading great literature and trying to be very widely read. -- Terry Hayes
All great popular literature today one day will be seen as great literature and will no longer be seen as popular literature. -- Walter Mosley
Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions. -- A. E. Housman
Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that? -- Kurt Vonnegut
And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature. -- Jerry Pournelle
Literature is the adventure. It's the story, it's the fight, it's people falling in love, it's people with deep personality disorders who succeed anyway beyond themselves. That's what great literature is. -- Walter Mosley
It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born? -- Jeff Vandermeer
No one bothered reading the books and understanding - and again, I'm not being high-falutin' about it - but I think our books are great literature with great metaphors of real life dealing with fears and hopes. -- Avi Arad
He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to. -- Stephen King
I never wanted to become an actress because I'd read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like, why they said all the strange things they did. -- Julie Walters
in a sense much great literature is subversive, since its very existence implies that what matters is art, imagination, and truth. In what we call the real world, on the other hand, what usually counts is money, power, and public success. -- Alison Lurie
Oldboy makes us feel a part of something bigger than ourselves. It's a grand, gritty, indelible experience, the sort of picture that mimics great literature in the way it envelops you in a well-told story while also evoking subtle but strong gradations of emotion. -- Stephanie Zacharek
The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it. -- Nathan Myhrvold
Nothing better protects a human being against the stupidity of prejudice, racism, religious or political sectarianism, and exclusivist nationalism than this truth that invariably appears in great literature: that men and women of all nations and places are essentially equal, and only injustice sows among them discrimination, fear, and exploitation. -- Mario Vargas Llosa
Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has begun to change into something else. -- William Butler Yeats
Leisure, itself the creation of wealth, is incessantly engaged in transmuting wealth into beauty by secreting the surplus energy which flowers in great architecture, great painting and great literature. Only in the atmosphere thus engendered floats that impalpable dust of ideas which is the real culture. A colony of ants or bees will never create a Parthenon. -- Edith Wharton
But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do. -- C. S. Lewis
I was enthralled and moved by Azar Nafisi's account of how she defied, and helped others to defy, radical Islam's war against women. Her memoir contains important and properly complex reflections about the ravages of theocracy, about thoughtfulness, and about the ordeals of freedom-as well as a stirring account of the pleasures and deepening of consciousness that result from an encounter with great literature and with an inspired teacher. -- Susan Sontag
A great speech is literature. -- Peggy Noonan
Literature bores me, especially great literature -- John Berryman
All great art and literature is propaganda. -- George Bernard Shaw
The great Cham of literature. (Samuel Johnson) -- Tobias Smollett
Literature gives us the great gift of the present moment. -- Natalie Goldberg
Literature is a great staff, but a very sorry crutch. -- Walter Scott
The life of the spirit is enfold in great literature. -- Lailah Gifty Akita
Literature throws us many great heroes. Real life invariably outdoes them. -- Wilbur Smith
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature. -- Henry James
Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading. -- Gilbert Murray
All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one. -- Walter Benjamin
All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one. -- Walter Benjamin
A people's literature is the great text-book for real knowledge of them. -- Edith Hamilton
A critic at best is a waiter at the great table of literature. -- Louis Dudek
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations. -- Ezra Pound
That's the great thing about literature -- it makes the world less lonely. -- Robert Stone
A great piece of literature encompasses all that is and all that will be. -- Jamaica Kincaid
Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature. -- Ravi Shankar
Early Islam was a time of great creativity. Scholars excelled in sciences and literature. -- Basmah bint Saud
Great literature transcends its native land, but none that I know of ignores its soil. -- J. Frank Dobie
This is a great mind at work examining itself. This is where literature comes from. -- Katharine Weber
The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible. -- Hugh Blair
If you read great literature every day, you will uplift your spirit, soul and self. -- Lailah Gifty Akita
I am an admirer of haiku, and I'm a great admirer of Japanese literature in general. -- Richard Flanagan
The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature." -- Kate Zambreno
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All great literature has an uncreeded and luminous theology behind it... Art [is] a form of active prayer. -- Melissa Pritchard
If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature. -- Jim Leach
It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature. -- John Banville
A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature. -- John Henry Newman
Small presses take chances. Chances are at the heart of all the literature we later know as great. -- Kay Ryan
It's a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature. -- Lev Grossman
I am especially indebted to a 10th grade English teacher who encouraged me to read great works of literature. -- Samuel Alito
The man who does not read miss a great literature of knowledge. You must dare to read and reread. -- Lailah Gifty Akita
A great literature is chiefly the product of inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation -- H. L. Mencken
One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent. -- Justin Cronin
...our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding. -- Helen Keller
There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry. -- Khaled Hosseini
I love and care about literature, and great writers are our teachers. You're studying their mind when you read their work. -- Natalie Goldberg
I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world. -- Don DeLillo
We enjoy the great prophets of literature most when we have not yet lived enough to realize all they tell us. -- Mary Augusta Ward
A taste for literature and a turn for business, united in the same person, never fails to make a great man. -- John Adams
One of the great joys of my job is that you spend a huge amount of time investigating different areas of literature. -- Stephen Daldry
Take the time to discover how African-Americans have had a great impact on this country. In science, education, literature, art, and politics. -- Lynn Swann
I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature, -- John Berryman
There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write. -- Thomas Carlyle
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I have a vision of artists putting into film, drama, literature, music, and paintings great themes and great characters from the Book of Mormon. -- Ezra Taft Benson
Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead. -- Shirley Hazzard
I read anything I saw lying around. Pulp fiction, great literature and everything in between - I gave them all the same rough treatment. -- Ian Mcewan
Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth. -- Edward Dahlberg
Literature has done great work for feminism - writing and reading are a practice of empathy - and great literature will continue to do so. -- Julianna Baggott
The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689. -- Richard Flanagan
A taste for the best reading is not cultivated in Spanish girls, even where the treasures of that great Castilian literature are accessible to them. -- Katharine Lee Bates
In literature only trouble is interesting. It takes trouble to turn the great themes of life into a story: birth, love, sex, work, and death. -- Janet Burroway
In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought. -- Lytton Strachey
It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history. -- Gilbert Murray
The great universal literature has always had a tragic relation with freedom. The Greeks renounced absolute freedom and imposed order on chaotic mythology, like a tyrant. -- Ismail Kadare
The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to be a perversion. -- John Dewey
Canada has always been a great place for literature. It's strong and growing stronger, and there will always be reading, and there will always be great writers. -- Ruth Ozeki
Within a week I walked the streets of Tel-Aviv, I wandered around Budapest and found myself admiring the Architecture of Paris. That's the power of great literature. -- Byron Ortiz
I'm interested in pressure, I'm interested in duress. All the great works of art, or film or literature, in my opinion, have elements of those in them. -- Cillian Murphy
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Great fiction can often present moral messages with greater power and clarity than instructional writing - since literature, after all, penetrates not just the intellect, but the imagination. -- Charles Colson
A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can. -- Edith Hamilton
Inequality may linger in the world of material things, but great music, great literature, great art and the wonders of science are, and should be, open to all. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next? -- Karen Thompson Walker
I like literature that you respond to in some way. You laugh, you cry, you turn the light on - that's great, it's eliciting a response by proxy. -- Joanne Harris
Sanity -- that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power. -- Matthew Arnold
Besides," he said breezily, "were it not for misunderstandings, we would be sadly lacking in great literature." She looked at him questioningly. "Where would Romeo and Juliet be?" "Alive. -- Julia Quinn
The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature. -- Willa Cather
Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings. -- Russell Kirk
Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch. -- P. D. James

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