Sartre Literature Quotes & Sayings

If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Literature for me ... tries to heal the harm done by stories. (How much harm? Most of the atrocities of history have been created by stories, e.g., the Jews killed Jesus.) I follow Sartre that the freedom the author claims for herself must be shared with the reader. So that would mean that literature is stories that put themselves at the disposal of readers who want to heal themselves. Their healing power lies in their honesty, the freshness of their vision, the new and unexpected things they show, the increase in power and responsibility they give the reader. — Geoff Ryman

They tore out my heart and stomped that sucker flat. — Lewis Grizzard

Truth may sometimes hurt, but delusion harms. — Vanna Bonta

The function of a writer is to call a spade a spade. If words are sick, it is up to us to cure them. Instead of that, many writers live off this sickness. In many cases modern literature is a cancer of words ... There is nothing more deplorable than the literary practice which, I believe, is called poetic prose and which consists of using words for the obscure harmonics which reosund about them and which are made up of vague meanings which are in contradiction with the clear meaning ... That is not all: we are living in an age of mystifications. Some are fundamental ones which are due to the structure of society; some are secondary. At any rate, the social order today rests upon the mystification of consciousness, as does disorder as well. — Jean-Paul Sartre

If [literature] should turn into pure propaganda or pure entertainment, society will slip back into the sty of the immediate
which is to say, the memoryless existence of hymenoptera and gastropods. None of this is so important, to be sure. The world can get by nicely without literature. But without human beings it can get by better yet. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Our job as a writer is to represent the world and to bear witness to it. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I have a sack of hate mail that I want to respond to. One day, when I'm tired or tipsy, I will respond and tell them what I think. — Chris Colfer

In the nineteenth century one had to give all sorts of guarantees and lead an exemplary life in order to cleanse oneself in the eyes of the bourgeois of the sin of writing, for literature is, in essence, heresy. The situation has not changed except that it is now the Communists, that is, the qualified representatives of the proletariat, who as a matter of principle regard the writer as suspect. — Jean-Paul Sartre

The world would get along very well without literature. It would get along even better without man. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I love the communication aspect with my athletes. I like the one on one time with my athletes but really its about making them better athletes and finding out what makes them tick. — Robin Farina

Who can think of Larkin now without considering his fondness for the buttocks of schoolgirls and paranoid hatred of blacks ... Or Eric Gill's copulations with more or less every member of his family, including the dog? Proust had rats tortured, and donated his family furniture to brothels; Dickens walled up his wife and kept her from her children; Lillian Hellman lied. While Sartre lived with his mother, Simone de Beauvoir pimped babes for him; he envied Camus, before trashing him. John Cheever loitered in toilets, nostrils aflare, before returning to his wife. P.G. Wodehouse made broadcasts for the Nazis; Mailer stabbed his second wife. Two of Ted Hughes's lovers had killed themselves. And as for Styron, Salinger, Saroyan ... Literature was a killing field; no decent person had ever picked up a pen. — Hanif Kureishi

The absence of fatherhood implies the impossibility of brotherhood. It is no accident that Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Sartre, in addition to Freud, all struggled with the notion of fatherlessness. Its exalted, but unrealistic, implication is godlessness and self-deification. But its more immediate, existential implication, as we have seen, is being orphaned and abandoned. It is curious that Freud, despite his extensive knowledge of classic literature, either ignored or repressed its most trenchant moral, namely, that by equating oneself with the gods, one invokes their anger and punishment. The gods will not be mocked, and they are intolerant of hubris. — Donald DeMarco

A new State of Israel with broad frontiers, strong and solid, with the authority of the Israel Government extending from the Jordan to the Suez Canal. — Moshe Dayan

I haven't ever had any ambition in my life. I just drift from day to day with a stupid grin on my face. — Ian Gillan