Literature

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Literature is the art of written works. Literally translated, the word means "acquaintance with letters" (from Latin littera letter). In Western culture the most basic written literary types include fiction and non-fiction. The word "literature" has different meanings depending on who is using it. It could be applied broadly to mean any symbolic record, encompassing everything from images and sculpture to letters. In a more narrow sense the term could mean only text composed of letters, or... full article at wikipedia

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One of the proud joys of the man of letters --if that man of letters is an artist is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory.
A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.	Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.	Seneca the Younger
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.	Ernest Hemingway
Remarks are not literature.	Gertrude Stein
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.	Jorge Luis Borges
Literature flourishes best when it is half trade and half an art.	William Ralph Inge
By and large the literature of a democracy will never exhibit the order, regularity, skill, and art characteristic of aristocratic literature; formal qualities will be neglected or actually despised. The style will often be strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, and almost always strong and bold. Writers will be more anxious to work quickly than to perfect details. Short works will be commoner than long books, wit than erudition, imagination than depth. There will be a rude and untutored vigor of thought with great variety and singular fecundity. Authors will strive to astonish more than to please, and to stir passions rather than to charm taste.	Alexis de Tocqueville
As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.	Wallace Stevens
How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.	Ernest Hemingway
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