Literature Quotes

"I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offense."

"I believe it would be better to keep literature out of criticism and criticism out of literature."

"The business of the poet and novelist is to show the sorrows underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things."

"The poetry of a people is the ultimate expression of their civilization."

"A poet's business is not to teach but to reveal."

"There is one thing that matters—to set a chime of words tingling in the minds of men."

"Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad."

"Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love."

"The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means."

"The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good—far better than at all likely."

"To create a character in literature one must have the utmost sincerity."

"The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is fiction."

"The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works."

"One great writer is worth a thousand mediocrities."

"The eternal note of sadness rings through his verses."

"Every detail of life is significant, worthy of examination and description."

"Literature is the only honest record of human experience."

"Truth in fiction often speaks louder than truth in fact."

"Literature is the most direct and immediate approach to truth."

"The written word captures what the voice cannot convey."

"Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry."

"To have great poetry we must have great audiences too."

"The poet ever mediates between divine and human powers."

"The page that has been thought upon is the page that lives."

"The written word is immortal."

"The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time."

"I had the honor to know and be intimate with that splendid man, Galsworthy."

"The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good—in spite of all the people who say he is very good."

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

"A novel that does not end in matrimony is a tragedy."