607 quotes found
“Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other”
“I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.”
“The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.”
“All I wanted was to be loved for myself." (Erik)”
“Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?”
“Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.”
“He who does not know how to look back at where he came from will never get to his destination.”
“I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter in all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both.”
“Time is a river...and books are boats. Many volumes start down that stream, only to be wrecked and lost beyond recall in its sands. Only a few, a very few, endure the testings of time and live to b...”
“A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eterna...”
“High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.”
“My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.”
“Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.”
“Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.”
“have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and d...”
“It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream--a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but...”
“Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, ...”
“I do not write with ease, nor am I ever pleased with anything I write. And so I rewrite.”
“If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly in hand before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.”
“Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.”
