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Literature Quotes by Famous Authors

Explore the best timeless quotes on Literature, including thoughts on Literature. Discover the best Literature quotes by renowned authors.

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1. “When in doubt, I read Oscar Wilde.”

Camille Paglia

Literature, Reading, Philosophy, Humor, Wisdom

2. “Literature and art are never created for scholars but for a universal audience. If academics cannot see that audience, they cannot see art.”

Camille Paglia

Literature, Art, Scholars, Audience, Perspective

3. “I am waiting impatiently for the day when beleaguered, like-minded academics can order James Wolcott’s collected essays for their classes.”

Camille Paglia

Academia, Criticism, Essays, Literature, Education

4. “If people want to be better writers, they can’t just read the blogs! You’ve got to look at something that’s outside this rushing world of evanescent words.”

Camille Paglia

Writing, Blogs, Literature, Education, Creativity

5. “Damn the age. I’ll write for antiquity.”

Charles Lamb

Writing, Legacy, Time, Literature, Perspective

6. “I like you and your book, ingenious Hone! In whose capacious all-embracing leaves The very marrow of tradition’s shown; And all that history, much that fiction weaves.”

Charles Lamb

Literature, Tradition, History, Fiction, Appreciation

7. “What is reading, but silent conversation.”

Charles Lamb

Reading, Knowledge, Communication, Literature, Reflection

8. “Literature is a bad crutch, but a good walking-stick.”

Charles Lamb

Literature, Support, Knowledge, Perspective, Dependency

9. “Books which are no books.”

Charles Lamb

Literature, Quality, Criticism, Reading, Writing

10. “Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.”

Charles Lamb

Books, Reading, Attention, Literature, Modernity

11. “I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.”

Charles Lamb

Parnassus, Creativity, Growth, Literature, Discipline

12. “I can scarce bring myself to believe, that I am admitted to a familiar correspondence, and all the license of friendship, with a man who writes blank verse like Milton.”

Charles Lamb

Friendship, Milton, Literature, Writing, Admiration

13. “Shakespeare is one of the last books one should like to give up, perhaps the one just before the Dying Service in a large Prayer book.”

Charles Lamb

Shakespeare, Literature, Legacy, Reading, Importance

14. “Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which who listen had need bring docile thoughts and purged ears.”

Charles Lamb

Milton, Music, Literature, Thought, Reflection

15. “A great work of Art demands a great thought or a thought of beauty adequately expressed. – Neither in Art nor Literature more than in Life can an ordinary thought be made interesting because well-dressed.”

Margaret Fuller

Art, Thought, Beauty, Literature, Expression

16. ““Write from Beyond what you know. From the authority of your senses.” – author of Meditations in Green.”

Steven Wright

Writing, Experience, Creativity, Perspective, Literature

17. “Imagine Pulitzer prizefighting.”

Steven Wright

Pulitzer, Prize, Fighting, Literature, Humor

18. “If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?”

Steven Wright

Shakespeare, Writing, Humor, Creativity, Literature

19. “My favorite book is anything by Kurt Vonnegut – he’s my literary hero. I got to meet him several times, which was a great thrill for me. I don’t really remember what we talked about.”

Steven Wright

Books, Inspiration, Writing, Literature, Memory

20. “Writing has to support itself.”

V.S. Naipaul

Writing, Sustainability, Career, Literature, Practicality

21. “Everything of value about me is in my books.”

V.S. Naipaul

Writing, Legacy, Expression, Literature, Self

22. “Making a book is such a big enterprise.”

V.S. Naipaul

Writing, Creativity, Effort, Literature, Process

23. “Actually, we owe a great deal to those British officers and men and scholars who went deep into our literature, to translate the texts which the brahmins didn’t want known outside their own coterie.”

V.S. Naipaul

History, Scholarship, Literature, Influence, Knowledge

24. “I find that the most difficult thing in prose narrative is linking one thing with the other. The link might just be a sentence, or even a word. It sums up what has gone before and prepares one for what is to come.”

V.S. Naipaul

Writing, Narrative, Literature, Structure, Storytelling

25. “Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.”

V.S. Naipaul

Writing, Reflection, Legacy, Life, Literature

26. “I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.”

V.S. Naipaul

Writing, Perception, Literature, Identity, Reputation

27. “I still think it’s really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.”

V.S. Naipaul

Writing, Legacy, Creativity, Literature, Reflection

28. “Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.”

V.S. Naipaul

Writing, Creativity, Literature, Evolution, Process

29. “I’ve never abandoned the novel.”

V.S. Naipaul

Writing, Dedication, Literature, Passion, Commitment

30. “The novel is part of that Western concern with the condition of men, a response to the here and now. In India, thoughtful men have preferred to turn their backs on the here and now and to satisfy what President Radhakrishnan calls ‘the basic human hunger for the unseen’. It is not a good qualification for the writing and reading of novels.”

V.S. Naipaul

Literature, Culture, Thought, Philosophy, Society

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