#literature

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal. ↗

— Francoise Sagan

#art #believe #close #course #exactly

One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name. ↗

— George Saintsbury

#any #best #call #classical #comparative

When I was young my Father used to tell me that the two most worthwhile pursuits in life were the pursuit of truth and of beauty and I believe that Alfred Nobel must have felt much the same when he gave these prizes for literature and the sciences. ↗

— Frederick Sanger

#beauty #believe #father #felt #gave

Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer. ↗

— Jose Saramago

#decided #devote #faintest #find #finding

Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds. ↗

— Nathalie Sarraute

#discover #endless #i #immense #literature

If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#hour #literature #single #someone #trouble

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another. ↗

— George Saunders

#answers #bad #bet #cruel #declines

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect. ↗

— Walter Scott

#call #himself #history #knowledge #lawyer

Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature. ↗

— Ravi Shankar

#great #great music #like #literature #month

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance. ↗

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

#becomes #begins #between #death #emotion