Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?

What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?

What is well done, I feel as if I did; what is ill-done, I reck not of.

What I teach is literary criticism and comparative literature and so on and that's my function, but from time to time it's possible for me actually to help a writer. I read something and something strikes me then, I feel I can talk to that writer about it.

What is there more kindly than the feeling between host and guest?

What I try to do in a play is put a problem on stage, head-on, without evasion.

What lasts is what is written. We look to literature to find the essence of an age.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemmingway and not seen the joke?

What played to what had been a relative weakness for us-this was exploding overseas as well, and we had to scramble to mount some reach and get into places and be competitive on the ground.

What's breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank?

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

What some people interpret as brooding melancholy is serenity. I don't feel required to grasp all the time.

What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

What's invisible to us is also crucial for our own well-being.

What’s strange is how many beginning writers seem to think that grammar is irrelevant, or that they are somehow above or beyond this subject more fit for a schoolchild than the future author of great literature.

What's vice today may be virtue, tomorrow.

What the mind cannot retain, the body will have to endure.

What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.

What was funny if you were there is that we were all immensely sophisticated people who knew exactly what she was going to say and we're chatting away, nice to see you.

What we do as a society is seek simple answers.

What we prefer to read is sort of like sexual preference, you like what you like. Most of the time you have no clue why.

What we value about music and literature are the moments that they create in our minds when we encounter them.

What wild imaginations one forms where dear self is concerned! How sure to be mistaken!

What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.

What you risk reveals what you value.

When a human being becomes so still that they begin to lose awareness of their gender, and they are simply looking into that abyss where there is no notion of self whatsoever, the world disappears. And that's really the only place to go. It's the only place to remain.

When a culture is being dumbed down as effectively as ours is, its narrative arts (literature, film, theatre) seem to vacillate between the brutal and the bland, sometimes in the same work.

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.

When a man makes a woman his wife it's the highest compliment he can pay her – and usually it's the last.

When an actor has money he doesn't send letters, he sends telegrams.

When a man is treated like a beast, he says, 'After all, I'm human.' When he behaves like a beast, he says 'After all, I'm only human.

When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans.

When death has you by the throat, you don't mince words.

When an Englishman has professed his belief in the supremacy of Shakespeare amongst all poets, he feels himself excused from the general study of literature. He also feels himself excused from the particular study of Shakespeare.

Whenever a liberal begins a statement with 'I don't know which is more frightening,' you know the answer is going to be pretty clear.

When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?

Whenever a man encounters a woman in a mood he doesn't understand, he wants to know if she's tired.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader.

When I got to 40 or so... I had the sense when I looked back over my life I would actually see a mess of decisions, a few of which I had thought about, some of which I had sort of stumbled on, and many that I had no control over whatsoever.

When evil acts in the world it always manages to find instruments who believe that what they do is not evil but honorable.

When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.

When I look at something, it is certain that for an instant I am one with what I see.

When I came overseas, I realized that there are many ideologies and many trends, and it's also very hard to produce honest art and honest literature. I decided that I didn't want to follow any of these ideologies or trends, because that's also a kind of pressure that doesn't allow absolute freedom. So I decided that I was only going to produce works that were satisfactory to me, and that meant not following any trends and being anti-ideological.

When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.

When I talk of hearing a poet's voice speaking, I always think of it as in the presence of the man.

When I read it ["Tough Guys Don't Dance"], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.

When I use the term "complex realism", what I'm suggesting is that the writer must be realist, always realist, but not realist in the sense we have usually used the term in literature. If reality today is different from the reality of 30 years ago, we can't keep describing reality in the same way as we did 30 years ago.

When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.