 |
|
|
|
Quotes about literature
|
|
People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with the bad. (Assante Armand)
To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature. (Assante Armand)
Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst. (Assante Armand)
In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented. (Assante Armand)
| |
Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason. (Assante Armand)
Literature, as a field of glory, is an arena where a tomb may be more easily found than laurels; and as a means of support, it is the chance of chances. (Assante Armand)
The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency. (Assante Armand)
A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate (Assante Armand)
The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it. (Assante Armand)
I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions. (Assante Armand)
How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him. (Assante Armand)
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since. (Assante Armand)
All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently . Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness. (Assante Armand)
Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about. (Assante Armand)
The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do. (Assante Armand)
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention. (Assante Armand)
The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood. (Assante Armand)
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature. (Assante Armand)
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. (Assante Armand)
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. (Assante Armand)
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. (Assante Armand)
In the electronic age, books, words and reading are not likely to remain sufficiently authoritative and central to knowledge to justify literature. (Assante Armand)
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence? (Assante Armand)
The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs; or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold. (Assante Armand)
Despair, feeding, as it always does, on phantasmagoria, is imperturbably leading literature to the rejection, en masse, of all divine and social laws, towards practical and theoretical evil. (Assante Armand)
|
literature | [2] | [3] | [4] | [5]
|
|
