Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

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.

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

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

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

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 let my digust with teaching ruin my love of literature.

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

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

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

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

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

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.

I hate everything which is not in myself.

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

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 been a gigantic Rolling Stones fan since approximately the Spanish-American War.

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.

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

I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.

I have a very ecumenical faith. I have a very inclusive faith. There's a quote I love from recovery literature that says, "The realm of the spirit is roomy and broad. It is open to all." I've absolutely staked my life on that.

I have avoided becoming stale by putting a little water on the plate, lying on the plate, and having myself refreshed in a toaster oven for 23 minutes once every month.

I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks.

I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.

I have found people don't want to be told. That they can figure it out.

I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.

I have great faith in the intelligence of the American viewer and reader to put two and two together and come up with four.

I have always been fascinated by the supernatural elements in stories, whether fairy tales, myths, film or literature.

I have become infected, now that I see how beautifully a book is coming out of all this.

I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

I have declared that patience is never more than patient. I too have declared, that I who am not patient am patient.

I have friends who are writers, but we don't tend to talk about literature very much. It's just not part of my process; I tend to be pretty secretive about what I'm working on.

I have found that hollow, which even I had relied on for solid.