#liter

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature. ↗

— Jean Cocteau

#commonplace #did #done #effect #freshness

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order. ↗

— Jean Cocteau

#greatest #literature #masterpiece #only #order

In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life. ↗

— J. M. Coetzee

#authoritative #belongs #conception #could #days

There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind. ↗

— J. M. Coetzee

#case #comes #culture #imitation #immediately

To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature. ↗

— Ernst Fischer

#dreams #duty #literature #moral #moral duty

The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature. ↗

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#being #exquisitely #genius #hence #humour

People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater. ↗

— Minnie Maddern Fiske

#bad #beyond #good #ignorant #literature

When I was at school, I was terrible at algebra and arithmetic, but I was always the best at English and literature. And acting, of course. ↗

— Joan Collins

#algebra #always #arithmetic #best #course

When we're touring America or Europe, we use our own plane and a great advantage of that is it cuts out an awful lot of time checking in. You literally drive up to the plane, get on and then drive off at the other end. ↗

— Phil Collins

#america #awful #checking #cuts #drive

Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration. ↗

— James Connolly

#cannot #conditions #derives #inspiration #just