Literature Quotes

"It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."

"The moment one learns English, complications set in."

"A writer must possess a deep and inherent understanding of the human spirit."

"To be a writer, one must have the courage to face human nature honestly."

"Our American professors like their literature clear, cold, pure, and very dead."

"The craft or art of writing is the clotting of the chaos of experience into something concrete and shaped."

"In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable."

"In the warp and woof of literature is where people touch the eternal."

"Any writer is a fool who tries to write for a person."

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened."

"The first duty of a writer is to observe carefully and to report truthfully."

"The only reason to write is because you have something to say."

"The heart of a story is always true, even if the facts are invented."

"Literature mirrors the human condition."

"An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever after."

"The Great Gatsby."

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened."

"I've been reading your latest novel, and I want to congratulate you on your honest work."

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies."

"The really great writers are poets who have happened to be born too late for poetry and too early for the cinema."

"I've always believed in the power of putting words on paper."

"Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for superficial people, or it ought to be true."

"It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named that gives high quality to the writing."

"All the intelligence and talent in the world cannot make a writer successful unless he has sympathy and feeling for humanity."

"I like to think of myself as a writer of the land."

"Our American professors like their literature clear, cold, pure and very dead."

"To the general public, a novel is a novel. They do not distinguish between the Iliad and a dime novel."

"Our contemporary writers are mostly concerned with the surface of modern life, not its depths."

"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof crap detector."

"The most important thing is the prose, not the plot."