Literary Quotes

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
Anais Nin

Religion, Political, Become

Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent.
Frank Sinatra

Hell, Hustler, Agent

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.
Erma Bombeck

Start, Themselves, Seriously

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.
Voltaire

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.
Stephen King

Big, Mac, Equivalent

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

Great, Men, Made

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.
T. S. Eliot

Different, Year, Emotions

Excessive literary production is a social offense.
George Eliot

Social, Production, Offense

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.
George Eliot

Social, Production, Conviction

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.
Marcel Proust

Different, Made, Others

No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.
P. J. O'Rourke

History, Says, Answers

They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?'
Samuel Butler

Power, Write, Whether

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.
Samuel Johnson

Men, Quotation, Classical

Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.
Richard Dawkins

True, Fight, Same

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least.
Horace

Public, Eye, Kept

To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.
Mason Cooley

Understand, Style, Consider

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.
H. G. Wells

Knowledge, Nothing, Straight

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Freedom, Laziness, Criticism

Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.
Stendhal

Work, Politics, Ignore

The aim of literary ambition is to demonstrate one's greatness of soul.
Mason Cooley

Soul, Ambition, Greatness

Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.
Mason Cooley

History, Last, Word

First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.
Mason Cooley

Literature, Theory, Refer

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.
Jose Saramago

Positive, Doubt, Until

Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.
Robert Hall

History, Attention, Individual

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.
Audre Lorde

Black, Racism, Whatever

I often find myself privately stewing about much British art, thinking that except for their tremendous gardens, that the English are not primarily visual artists, and are, in nearly unsurpassable ways, literary.
Jerry Saltz

Art, Thinking, Find

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.
Charles Baudelaire

Two, Irony, Qualities

As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.
Joseph Conrad

Political, Passion, Friends

Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking.
Gertrude Stein

Important, Woman, Thinking

I can't change overnight into a serious literary author. You can't compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.
John Grisham

Change, Great, Serious

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James Russell Lowell

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