Literature Quotes

"A Russian soul is vast as its steppes, melancholic as its winters."

"A poet's curse is to feel everything while changing nothing."

"To write is to confess without the mercy of anonymity."

"I write to understand myself and to forget what I understand."

"There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle."

"I write about myself since I am the subject I know best."

"Words are all we have and they are all we need."

"The supreme question about any piece of writing is not how it is done, but whether it is worth doing."

"For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world."

"The note of banishment, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly from The Odyssey of Homerus to the crisis of the intimate soul."

"I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of the words in the sentence."

"Humanity is a literary fiction."

"The written word outlives the living man."

"A literary work is a mirror in the soul of the author."

"Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress."

"Talent alone cannot make a writer; there must be a man behind the book."

"Writers should not be judges of their readers, only their servants."

"The purpose of fiction is not to explain or to instruct, but to picture human life."

"The more a writer strives to be universal, the more he becomes individual."

"One's own painful past is a goldmine for the novelist."

"A writer must be able to stand alone."

"In literature one must have the courage to offend."

"A writer must feel everything intensely."

"We should make poetry out of our daily suffering."

"What else could modern literature be about but the flight from home?"

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

"Language fails us at the most crucial moments."

"The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good."

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."

"The good end happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means."