Literature

Sourced

• That doesn't matter. Don't you give up on this [library] card. Because books can be solid gold. Yeah, the great ones have gotten us through the nights for centuries. Just give a writer an hour to hook you and if he can't wish him the best of luck and find someone else.
  • Anthony Hopkins, Hearts in Atlantis movie

• La literatura es una batalla silenciosa en la que uno ha de ganar, o de perder; palmo a palmo, un territorio quo no es suyo con armas que no le pertenecen.
• Juan José Millás

• When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.
  • George Saintsbury, A Last Vintage, p. 172

Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

• A beautiful literature springs from the depth and fullness of intellectual and moral life, from an energy of thought and feeling, to which nothing, as we believe, ministers so largely as enlightened religion.
  • William Ellery Channing, p. 385.

• God be thanked for books! they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levelers. They give to all who will faithfully use them the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race,
  • William Ellery Channing, p. 385.

• From the hour of the invention of printing, books, and not kings, were to rule the world. Weapons forged in the mind, keen-edged, and brighter than a sunbeam, were to supplant the sword and battle-axe. Books! lighthouses built on the sea of time! Books! by whose sorcery the whole pageantry of the world's history moves in solemn procession before our eyes. From their pages great souls look down in all their grandeur, undimmed by the faults and follies of earthly existence, consecrated by time.
  • Edwin Percy Whipple, p. 386.

• Be less concerned about the number of books you read, and more about the good use you make of them. The best of books is the Bible.
  • Christian Scriver, p. 386.

• The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.
  • Hugh Blair, p. 386.

• Thou mayest as well expect to grow stronger by always eating, as wiser by always reading.
  • Thomas Fuller, p. 386.

• It is right for you, young men, to enrich yourselves with the spoils of all pure literature; but he who would make a favorite of a bad book, simply because it contains a few beautiful passages, might as well caress the hand of an assassin because of the jewelry which sparkles on his fingers.
  • Joseph Parker, p. 386.

Unsourced

• [Literature is] an organised violence committed on ordinary speech.
  • Roman Jakobson

• From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend to read it.
  • Groucho Marx on Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge by Sidney J. Perelman

• Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
  • Oscar Wilde

• If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come.
  • Raymond Chandler

• It's not that he 'bites off more than he can chew' but he chews more than he bites off.
  • Clover Adams on Henry James

• The covers of this book are too far apart.
  • Ambrose Bierce

• We have met too late. You are too old for me to have any effect on you.
  • James Joyce to William Butler Yeats

• Where were you fellows when the paper was blank?
  • Fred Allen, after writers had heavily edited his script

• Why don't you write books people can read?
  • Mrs. Nora Joyce to her husband, James Joyce

Misattributed

• Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
  • commonly attributed to Samuel Johnson, not found in his writings or contemporary writings about him; see details