Literature Quotes

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.

It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.

Literature is indispensable to the world.

Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.

On reaching the place where the Indians had surprised us, we found the bodies of the three men whom they had killed and scalped, and literally cut into pieces.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

Somehow it’s O.K. for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet if I said, ‘I never learned to read,’ they’d say I was an illiterate dolt.

It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.

The ultimate function of literature is to appreciate the world, sometimes indignantly, sometimes sorrowfully, but best of all to praise when it is luckily possible.