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Literature Quotes by Famous Authors
1.
“When in doubt, I read Oscar Wilde.”
Camille Paglia
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
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
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
5.
“Damn the age. I’ll write for antiquity.”
Charles Lamb
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
7.
“What is reading, but silent conversation.”
Charles Lamb
8.
“Literature is a bad crutch, but a good walking-stick.”
Charles Lamb
9.
“Books which are no books.”
Charles Lamb
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
11.
“I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.”
Charles Lamb
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
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
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
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
16.
““Write from Beyond what you know. From the authority of your senses.” – author of Meditations in Green.”
Steven Wright
17.
“Imagine Pulitzer prizefighting.”
Steven Wright
18.
“If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?”
Steven Wright
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
20.
“Writing has to support itself.”
V.S. Naipaul
21.
“Everything of value about me is in my books.”
V.S. Naipaul
22.
“Making a book is such a big enterprise.”
V.S. Naipaul
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
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
25.
“Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.”
V.S. Naipaul
26.
“I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.”
V.S. Naipaul
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
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
29.
“I’ve never abandoned the novel.”
V.S. Naipaul
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
31.
“My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.”
V.S. Naipaul
32.
“If a writer knows everything that is going to happen, then his book is dead before he begins it.”
V.S. Naipaul
33.
“The biography of a writer – or even the autobiography – will always have this incompleteness.”
V.S. Naipaul
34.
“If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.”
V.S. Naipaul
35.
“I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.”
V.S. Naipaul
36.
“My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Fernando Garcia Lorca.”
Leonard Cohen
37.
“A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book.”
Thomas Merton
38.
“The conceited, benevolent tone of the prefaces, the abundance of translator’s notes, which disturb my concentration, the parenthetical question marks and sic’s that the translator generously scatters through the article or book, are for me like an encroachment both upon the person of the author and upon my independence as a reader.”
Anton Chekhov
39.
“The aim of fiction is absolute and honest truth.”
Anton Chekhov
40.
“You are right to demand that an author take conscious stock of what he is doing, but you are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.”
Anton Chekhov
41.
“Women writers should write a lot if they want to write. Take the English women, for example. What amazing workers.”
Anton Chekhov
42.
“When all is said and done, no literature can outdo the cynicism of real life; you won’t intoxicate with one glass someone who has already drunk up a whole barrel.”
Anton Chekhov
43.
“I divide all literary works into two categories: Those I like and those I don’t like. No other criterion exists for me.”
Anton Chekhov
44.
“Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress.”
Anton Chekhov
45.
“Oh, I have now a mania for shortness. Whatever I read – my own or other people’s works – it all seems to me not short enough.”
Anton Chekhov
46.
“Common hypocrites pass themselves off as doves; political and literary hypocrites pose as eagles. But don’t be fooled by their eagle-like appearance. These are not eagles, but rats or dogs.”
Anton Chekhov
47.
“Write only of what is important and eternal.”
Anton Chekhov
48.
“The aim of fiction is honest and absolute truth.”
Anton Chekhov
49.
“To describe drunkenness for the colorful vocabulary is rather cynical. There is nothing easier than to capitalize on drunkards.”
Anton Chekhov
50.
“When you want to touch the reader’s heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief.”
Anton Chekhov
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