Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

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

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

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 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 going to binge, literature is definitely the way to do it.

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

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

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.

I gained direct knowledge of the life of the poor in big towns: I have lived the narrowing mechanism of its conditioning and feared it.

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.

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.

Ignorance of one's misfortunes is clear gain.

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.

I got the Weary Blues And I can't be satisfied.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

I grew up in a place where everybody was a storyteller, but nobody wrote. It was that kind of Celtic, storytelling tradition: everybody would have a story at the pub or at parties, even at the clubs and raves.

I grew up in Mississippi being told it was a great place, but not feeling that. When I finally began reading seriously, literature showed me something about where I was from which was worthwhile.

I had a lot of classical influences. I had classical music and opera and literature, but I also liked sleaze. And putting it together, sleaze and glamour, it just made sense to me.

I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.

I had a minor in Russian history, and this was at the time when the big Cold War was going on.

I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.

I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.

I had huge ambition for literature. I don't see the point of doing anything if you don't have ambition for it.

I had let my digust with teaching ruin my love of literature.

I hadn't planned on going to law school. I wanted to study 19th-century Russian literature.

I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn't learned a thing I didn't know before about morals and what is right or wrong in human conduct.

I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.

I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.

I hate brandy...it stinks of modern literature.

I hate everything which is not in myself.

I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind.

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.

I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis.

I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.

I have always believed that all things depended upon Fortune, and nothing upon ourselves.

I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.