Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

If someone knows me and likes me or my work, they're more likely to allow me to tell their story. But it also cuts the other way.

If the detective should suffer overmuch from the artistic temperament, and his fellow lodger should dwell overlong upon the fairness of a wrist or the timber of a feminine voice, so much the better for us. Literature never produced a relationship more symbiotic nor a warmer and more timeless friendship.

If the Earth could be made to rotate twice as fast, managers would get twice as much done. If the Earth could be made to rotate twenty times as fast, everyone else would get twice as much done since all the managers would fly off.

If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.

If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.

If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life is not merely brutish and short, but dull and mechanical.

If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

If the public likes you, you're good. Shakespeare was a common, down-to-earth writer in his day.

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.

If the urge to write should ever leave me, I want that day to be my last.

If the world would apologize, I might consider a reconciliation.

If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.

If we must have a tyrant, let him at least be a gentleman who has been bred to the business, and let us fall by the axe and not by the butcher's cleaver.

If we reduce social life to the smallest possible unit we will find that there is no social life in the company of one.

If we're so cruel to minorities, why do they keep coming here? Why aren't they sneaking across the Mexican border to make their way to the Taliban?

If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go.

If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.

If we think about the obvious long enough, it dissolves.

If we want to be sincere, we must admit that there is a well-nourished love and an ill-nourished love. And the rest is literature.

If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop?

If you are looking down while you are walking it is better to walk up hill the ground is nearer.

If you are truly serious abut preparing your child for the future, don't teach him to subtract teach him to deduct.

If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to the people.

If you can afford to advertise, you don't need to.

If you covet fame, if you covet all the superficial accolades, you're gonna be miserable 'cause you're never going to get enough praise. If you covet contributing something substantive to movies, music, literature, then you won't be unhappy.

If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't.

If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?

If you haven't read Shakespeare's Hamlet yet, it means that you haven't reached the summit of the literature yet!

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?

If you have an anecdote from one source, you file it away. If you hear it again, it may be true. Then the more times you hear it the less likely it is to be true.

If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.

If you interviewed 1,000 politicians and asked about whether the media's "too soft" or "too hard," about 999 would say "too hard.

If you're going to binge, literature is definitely the way to do it.

If you're a Conservative, why aren't you behind conserving the land?

If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.

If you read the literature of Soviet Communism, you see a dogma that's chilling. On the other hand, if you read the literature of anti-communism, it's every bit as dogmatic.

If you're young enough, any kind of writing you do for a short period of time is a marvelous apprenticeship.

If your treat an individual... as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.

If you see the magic in a fairy tale, you can face the future.

If you start to think of your physical and moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.

If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.

If youth be a defect, it is one that we outgrow only too soon.

If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him.

If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls.

If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city.

If you would have me weep, you must first of all feel grief yourself.

Ignorance of one's misfortunes is clear gain.

Ignorance and error are necessary to life, like bread and water.

I get up at an unholy hour in the morning my work day is completed by the time the sun rises. I have a slightly bad back which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

I give lectures for money, but all the money goes to charity. So, I make no money from it.