Famous Quotations About Literature and Writing

Famous Quotations About Literature and Writing We see, enjoy, and criticize the end result of writers work, but theres so much more to these pieces than what the public consumes. After all, millions of books get published every year, joining the vast libraries that have been built up over time, but we regard few as classics, greats or masterpieces. So what makes the difference between just another piece of writing and a literary success? Often, its the writer. Heres a collection of thoughts from world-famous writers on what literature means to them and why they pursued the written word as a means to express themselves. Quotes About Writing and Literature Henry Miller: Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music-the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls, and interesting people. Forget yourself.Ezra Pound: Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.Joseph Heller: He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.John Steinbeck: I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.Alfred North Whitehead: It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.Henry James: It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.C. S. Lewis: Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.Oscar Wilde: Literature always anticipates life . It does not copy it but molds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac. G. K. Chesterton: Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.Virginia Woolf: Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.Salman Rushdie: Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.William Somerset Maugham: The crown of literature is poetry.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.Robert Louis Stevenson: The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean. Like a Woman Who Gives Herself Without Preference Anatole France: The duty of literature is to note what counts and to light up what is suited to the light. If it ceases to choose and to love, it becomes like a woman who gives herself without preference.E. M. Forster: What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.Samuel Lover: When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can.Cyril Connolly: While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.