Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

If I didn't see its place in the Saga when I planned it, I probably wouldn't write it at all.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad.

If I had life to live over again, I would give my life to poetry, to music, to literature, and to art to make life richer and happier. In my youth I steeled myself against them and thought them so much waste.

If I had never touched Holmes, who has tended to obscure my higher work, my position in literature would at the present moment be a more commanding one.

If I hear the word 'perky' again, I'll puke.

If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.

If I might control the literature of the household, I would guarantee the well-being of Church and State.

If I'm in danger then it's usually my fault and it's up to me to get myself out of it. I am not in it just to get an adrenalin rush. No way!

I find it exciting to get any historical material from the ground. As you know, I love to put ancient Israel and its literature into their ancient contexts. And to rebuild - that is, to me, a very exciting historical task.

If information is true, if it can be verified, and if it's really important, the newspaper needs to be willing to take the risk associated with using unidentified sources.

If I play hard to get, soon the phone stops ringing altogether.

If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.

I first came out against Castro in June 1968, fifteen months after my book had been published, and you cannot imagine how quickly a void was created around me

I first got to know Charles in the late seventies when I wrote an article and then a book about him and I think at the time he came across as quite appealing, it was probably the height of his popularity.

If it's a woman it's caustic, if it's a man it's authority, If it's a woman it's too pushy, if it's a man it's aggressive in the best sense of the word.

If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.

If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.

If modesty disappeared, so would exhibitionism.

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.

If matters go badly now, they will not always be so.

If Moses had been paid newspaper rates for the Ten Commandments, he might have written the Two Thousand Commandments.

If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one's life, without seeing oneself in the "mirror" of literature?

If one sticks too rigidly to one's principles, one would hardly see anybody.

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.

I found that dance, music, and literature is how I made sense of the world... it pushed me to think of things bigger than lifes daily routines... to think beyond what is immediate or convenient.

I found the offer of a knighthood something that I couldn't possibly accept. I found it to be somehow squalid, a knighthood. There's a relationship to government about knights.

If pleasures are greatest in anticipation, just remember that this is also true of trouble.

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

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