purpose of literature quotes

Literature Quotes and Sayings

Love Quotes
Great Lines from Movies and Television
Quotations For Holidays
Best Sellers
Classic Literature
Plays & Drama
Shakespeare
Short Stories
Children's Books
M.A., English Literature, California State University - Sacramento
B.A., English, California State University - Sacramento

We see, enjoy, and criticize the end result of writers' work, but there's so much more to these pieces than what the public consumes. After all, millions of books get published every year, joining the vast libraries that have been built up over time, but we regard few as classics, greats or masterpieces. So what makes the difference between just another piece of writing and a literary success ? Often, it's the writer.

Here's a collection of thoughts from world-famous writers on what literature means to them and why they pursued the written word as a means to express themselves.

Quotes About Writing and Literature

Henry Miller : "Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music-the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls, and interesting people. Forget yourself."
Ezra Pound : "Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree."
Joseph Heller : "He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it."
John Steinbeck : "I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."
Alfred North Whitehead : "It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression."
Henry James : "It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature."
C. S. Lewis : "Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become."
Oscar Wilde : "Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it but molds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac."
G. K. Chesterton : "Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
Virginia Woolf : "Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others."
Salman Rushdie : "Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart."
William Somerset Maugham : "The crown of literature is poetry."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe : "The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation."
Robert Louis Stevenson : "The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean."

Like a Woman Who Gives Herself Without Preference

Anatole France : "The duty of literature is to note what counts and to light up what is suited to the light. If it ceases to choose and to love, it becomes like a woman who gives herself without preference."
E. M. Forster : "What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote."
Samuel Lover : "When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can."
Cyril Connolly : "While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living."
What Literature Can Teach Us
What Is Style in Writing?
A List of Every Nobel Prize Winner in Literature
What E.B. White Has to Say About Writing
American Author Maps: Informational Texts in the English Classroom
Writers on Reading
Handwriting
The Writer's Voice in Literature and Rhetoric
Definition, Examples, and Observations on Writing
Virginia Woolf Quotes
Overview of Baroque Style in English Prose and Poetry
The Basic Characteristics of Effective Writing
What Is the Canon in Literature?
Keeping a Diary
Banned Books: History and Quotes
What Is a Rhetorical Question? Definition and Examples

literature Quotes

Recommended quote pages.

limitations
unimaginative
women's rights
freedom of speech
intellectual freedom
ordinary people
ordinary life
simple pleasures
finding joy
Oliver Twist
understanding
relationships
communication
significance
new generation
Lost Generation
feeling overwhelmed
Cather Avery
imagination
companionship
John Keating
good and evil
surroundings
Underground Man
facing death
unjust system
picturesque
achievements
afflictions
hard to find
ignoring reality
Help Center
Gift a Book Club
Beautiful Collections
Schedule Demo

Book Platform

Find a Book
Motivate Reading
Community Editors

Authors & Illustrators

Get Your Book Reviewed
Submit Original Work

Follow Bookroo

LITERATURE QUOTES

quotations about literature

An interchange of literature is the conversation of nations.

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

attributed, Where Books Fall Open

Tags: Jean Cocteau

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do -- it can make us identify with situations and people far away. If it does that, it's a miracle.

The Altantic Online , Aug. 2, 2000

Tags: Chinua Achebe

The history of literature is the history of the human mind.

"Chateaubriand's English Literature", Critical and Historical Essays

Literature is the garden of wisdom.

attributed, Day's Collacon

Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and little wildflowers.

Tags: Roberto Bolano

Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.

"Literature as Testimony: The Search for Truth", Witness Literature: Proceedings of the Nobel Centennial Symposium

Literature is the expression of the thoughts of society. Books are specimens of the conversations of an age, preserved in the spirit of taste and of genius.

Literature is a great staff, but a very sorry crutch.

Tags: Sir Walter Scott

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress. It deepens our natural sensibilities, and strengthens by exercise our intellectual capacities. It stores up the accumulated experience of the race, connecting Past and Present into a conscious unity; and with this store it feeds successive generations, to be fed in turn by them.

The Principles of Success in Literature

Tags: George Henry Lewes

There is a form of literature that is a deed, and a form that is only talk, and the latter passes away like a conversation.

Keystones of Thought

The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.

The Paris Review , winter-spring 1967

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

The Book of Disquiet

Tags: Fernando Pessoa

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.

speech, Feb. 6, 1990

Tags: Salman Rushdie

For me, the purpose of literature is to preserve the stories of that which disappears easily. That which is long-lasting, like the pharaohs and pyramids, doesn't need literature.

"Georgi Gospodinov: enter the world of the Bulgarian writer taking on empathy, sorrow and stereotypes", The Calvert Journal , August 13, 2018

We think literature is immortal, but even that decays and ultimately turns to dust.

Tags: Mick Farren

Literature: The art of putting old words into new places.

Flights of Fancy

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.

"Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw", Other Inquisitions

Tags: Jorge Luis Borges

All literature is but a word--a thought--a maxim amplified.

Tags: Edward Counsel

While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

The Unquiet Grave

Tags: Cyril Connolly

45 Great Sourced Quotes about Books

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Here is a list of our favourite quotes about books from various writers, some famous, some not so famous. We’ve only included those quotations for which we’ve managed to track down a source, whether in print or online, so you know these are authentic quotes about books, rather than of the amusing-but-apocryphal kind.

When I was a child I read books far too old for me and sometimes far too young for me. Every reading child is different. Introduce them to the love of reading, show them the way to the library and let them get on with it. – Terry Pratchett, No to Age Banding Campaign

Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know. – John Keats, letter of August 28, 1819 to his sister Fanny Keats

If you want to read a perfect book there is only one way: write it. – Ambrose Bierce, A Cynic Looks at Life

The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books. – Katherine Mansfield, letter to Ottoline Morrell, January 1922

The author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children. – Benjamin Disraeli, speech given in Glasgow, 1870

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. – Francis Bacon, ‘Of Studies’

Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum. – Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts. – Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it. – E. M. Forster, Abinger Harvest

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame. – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers. – Hilary Mantel, The Guardian , 28 January 2006

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered. – W. H. Auden, ‘Reading’, in The Dyer’s Hand

Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic. – Carl Sagan, Cosmos

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. – Ray Bradbury, ‘Coda’ (1979) to Fahrenheit 451

When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes. – Erasmus, letter of April 1500

What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee? – Anthony Trollope, The Warden

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Why can’t people just sit and read books and be nice to each other? – David Baldacci, The Camel Club

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home. – Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

Books are still man’s greatest invention, despite the nonsense so often published between their covers. – Martin Arnold, New York Times , 19 October 2000

A book is a device to ignite the imagination. – Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me. – Jonathan Swift, ‘Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting’

To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor’s prohibited list. – John Aikin, Memoir of John Aikin, M. D.

Poetry is not the books in the library. Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book. – Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Poetry’, 1977

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. – Emily Dickinson, letter to Thomas Higginson, c. 1870

As life goes on, don’t you find that all you need is about two real friends, a regular supply of books, and a Peke? – P. G. Wodehouse, letter to William Townend, 28 October 1930

We read many books, because we cannot know enough people. – T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture

I haven’t told why I wrote the book, but I haven’t told why I sneeze, either. A book is a sneeze. – E. B. White, about Charlotte’s Web, in a letter of 29 September 1952

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer. – Ernest Hemingway, A Letter from Cuba , 1934

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. – Middle Eastern saying

There is something awfully nice about reading a book again, with all the half-unconscious memories it brings back. – C. S. Lewis, letter to Arthur Greeves, 16 November 1915

A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. – John Milton, Areopagitica

For books are more than books, they are the life, / The very heart and core of ages past. – Amy Lowell, ‘The Boston Athenaeum’

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. – Charles Francis Richardson, The Choice of Books

What wild desires, what restless torments seize / The hapless man, who feels the book-disease. – John Ferrier, ‘The Bibliomania’

The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. – Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World

Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you. – Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot

I prefer bread and water with books, to the best of eating without them. – Stephen F. Austin, Prison Journal , published 1899

A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement. – Holbrook Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania

Only two classes of books are of universal appeal: the very best and the very worst. – Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad

All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books. – Thomas Carlyle, ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’

Your borrowers of books – those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes. – Charles Lamb, ‘The Two Races of Men’

Books are the mirror of the soul. – Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading. – William Styron, interview in Writers at Work , First Series (1958)

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking. – Christopher Morley, Saturday Review of Literature , 27 December 1924

If you enjoyed this selection of the best quotes about books, check out our inspirational 50 Great Sourced Author Quotes and our interesting facts about literacy and reading .

16 thoughts on “45 Great Sourced Quotes about Books”

Reblogged this on littlegladys and commented: Heyaa lil’pies, I don’t always reblog, but this article has some beautiful quotes I can only but share with you ! Hope you’ll enjoy !

Reblogged this on Clarity .

Enjoyed the list, but I wish you’d captioned your author photos. I don’t recognize many authors by sight.

The image details at the bottom of the post tell you who the authors are (I couldn’t find a way of captioning the photos that didn’t look untidy) :)

Ah, thank you for pointing that out.

Thanks for sharing a great list.

This is a great post. A friend recently told me she hadn’t read a book in years. Years! These quotes remind me that I’m not the only one for whom books are like food and water. Thanks.

Fantastic — quoted and linked to it at http://harrietdevine.typepad.com/harriet_devines_blog/2015/04/great-books-quotes.html

Great post. I’ve quoted and linked to it at http://harrietdevine.typepad.com/harriet_devines_blog/2015/04/great-books-quotes.html

Reblogged this on jelmak1234 .

Great collection of quotes, thanks. I liked the one about reading the best books first, because there really isn’t time to read all the good books in one life.

Pingback: Saturday Miscellany – 4/25/15 | The Irresponsible Reader

Reblogged this on The Rambling Badger and commented: All of these are pretty good.

Reblogged this on ArtFreak .

Pingback: Web Pickings
Pingback: Scurte #356 | Assassin CG

Comments are closed.

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

school Campus Bookshelves
menu_book Bookshelves
perm_media Learning Objects
login Login
how_to_reg Request Instructor Account
hub Instructor Commons
Download Page (PDF)
Download Full Book (PDF)
Periodic Table
Physics Constants
Scientific Calculator
Reference & Cite
Tools expand_more
Readability

selected template will load here

This action is not available.

3.2: The Purpose of Literature

Last updated
Save as PDF
Page ID 86405

What is literature for?

One of the primary goals of this course is to develop an understanding of the importance of literature as a vital source of cultural knowledge in everyday life. Literature is often viewed as a collection of made-up stories, designed to entertain us, to amuse us, or to simply provide us with an escape from the “real” world.

Although literature does serve these purposes, in this course, one of the ways that we will answer the question “What is literature for?” is by showing that literature can provide us with valuable insights about the world in which we live and about our relationships to one another, as well as to ourselves . In this sense, literature may be considered a vehicle for the exploration and discovery of our world and the culture in which we live. It allows us to explore alternative realities, to view things from the perspective of someone completely different to us, and to reflect upon our own intellectual and emotional responses to the complex challenges of everyday life.

By studying literature, it is possible to develop an in-depth understanding of the ways that we use language to make sense of the world. According to the literary scholars, Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, “Stories are everywhere,” and therefore, “Not only do we tell stories, but stories tell us: if stories are everywhere, we are also in stories.” From the moment each one of us is born, we are surrounded by stories — oftentimes these stories are told to us by parents, family members, or our community. Some of these stories are ones that we read for ourselves, and still others are stories that we tell to ourselves about who we are, what we desire, what we fear, and what we value. Not all of these stories are typically considered “literary” ones, but in this course, we will develop a more detailed understanding of how studying literature can enrich our knowledge about ourselves and the world in which we live.

If literature helps us to make sense of, or better yet question, the world and our place in it, then how does it do this? It may seem strange to suggest that literature performs a certain kind of work. However, when we think of other subjects, such as math or science, it is generally understood that the skills obtained from mastering these subjects equips us to solve practical problems. Can the same be said of literature?

To understand the kind of work that literature can do, it is important to understand the kind of knowledge that it provides. This is a very complex and widely debated question among literary scholars. But one way of understanding the kind of knowledge that can be gained from literature is by thinking about how we use language to make sense of the world each day. (1)

What does literature do?

Every day we use metaphors to describe the world. What is a metaphor? According to A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory , a metaphor is “a figure of speech in which one thing is described in terms of another.” You have probably heard the expressions, “Time is money” or “The administration is a train wreck.” These expressions are metaphors because they describe one less clearly defined idea, like time or the administration of an institution, in relation to a concept whose characteristics are easier to imagine.

A metaphor forms an implied comparison between two terms whereas a simile makes an explicit comparison between two terms using the words like or as — for example, in his poem, “A Red, Red Rose,” the Scottish poet Robert Burns famously announces, “O my Luve is like a red, red rose/That’s newly sprung in June.” The association of romantic love with red roses is so firmly established in our culture that one need only look at the imagery associated with Valentine’s Day to find evidence of its persistence. The knowledge we gain from literature can have a profound influence on our patterns of thought and behavior.

In their book Metaphors We Live By , George Lakoff and Mark Johnson outline a number of metaphors used so often in everyday conversation that we have forgotten that they are even metaphors, for example, the understanding that “Happy is up” or that “Sad is down.” Likewise, we might think “Darkness is death” or that “Life is light.” Here we can see that metaphors help us to recognize and make sense of a wide range of very complex ideas and even emotions. Metaphors are powerful, and as a result they can even be problematic.

The author Toni Morrison has argued that throughout history the language used by many white authors to describe black characters often expresses ideas of fear or dread — the color black and black people themselves come to represent feelings of loathing, mystery, or dread. Likewise, James Baldwin has observed that whiteness is often presented as a metaphor for safety. (1)

Figure 1 is taken from a book published in 1857 entitled Indigenous Races of the Earth . It demonstrates how classical ideas of beauty and sophistication were associated with an idealized version of white European society whereas people of African descent were considered to be more closely related to apes. One of Morrison’s tasks as a writer is to rewrite the racist literary language that has been used to describe people of color and their lives.

By being able to identify and question the metaphors that we live by, it is possible to gain a better understanding of how we view our world, as well as our relationship to others and ourselves. It is important to critically examine these metaphors because they have very real consequences for our lives. (1)

Authored by : Florida State College at Jacksonville. License : CC BY: Attribution
Race and Skulls. Authored by : Nott, Josiah, and George R. Giddon. Provided by : Wikimedia Commons. Located at : https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Races_and_skulls.png . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright

Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

UK Edition Change

UK Politics
News Videos
Paris 2024 Olympics
Rugby Union
Sport Videos
John Rentoul
Mary Dejevsky
Andrew Grice
Sean O’Grady
Photography
Theatre & Dance
Culture Videos
Food & Drink
Health & Families
Royal Family
Electric Vehicles
Lifestyle Videos
UK Hotel Reviews
News & Advice
Simon Calder
Australia & New Zealand
South America
C. America & Caribbean
Middle East
Politics Explained
News Analysis
Today’s Edition
Home & Garden
Fashion & Beauty
Travel & Outdoors
Sports & Fitness
Sustainable Living
Climate Videos
Behind The Headlines
On The Ground
Decomplicated
You Ask The Questions
Binge Watch
Travel Smart
Watch on your TV
Crosswords & Puzzles
Most Commented
Newsletters
Ask Me Anything
Virtual Events
Betting Sites
Online Casinos
Wine Offers

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in Please refresh your browser to be logged in

28 powerful literary quotes to inspire you in 2020

Whether it’s chimamanda ngozi adichie’s observations on race in ‘americanah’ or jules verne on solitude in ‘the mysterious island’ – the best works of fiction contain important and perpetually relevant truths, article bookmarked.

Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails

“The truth isn’t going to bend itself to suit you” – Malorie Blackman

“Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat” – Ralph Ellison

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

As we reach the conclusion of another year – and another decade – many of us take this time to contemplate the past, and think about the future.

And in these tumultuous and fast-moving times, it can be useful to turn to the great writers of history, but also those still with us, for words of wisdom and inspiration.

Whether it’s Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ’s observations on race in Americanah , Fyodor Dostoevsky on truth in The Brothers Karamazov or Jules Verne on solitude in The Mysterious Island – the best works of fiction contain important and perpetually relevant truths.

For 2020 and beyond, here are 28 of the most powerful literary quotes to inspire you:

28 of the most powerful literary quotes

Join our commenting forum.

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.

New to The Independent?

Or if you would prefer:

Want an ad-free experience?

Hi {{indy.fullName}}

My Independent Premium
Account details
Help centre

Looking to publish? Meet your dream editor, designer and marketer on Reedsy.

Find the perfect editor for your next book

1 million authors trust the professionals on Reedsy. Come meet them.

Blog • Perfecting your Craft

Posted on Mar 29, 2019

170 Writing Quotes by Famous Authors for Every Occasion

When you're feeling stuck on your novel, an important thing to remember is that we've all been there in the past. That's right — even the J.K Rowling's and Ernest Hemingway's of this world. Which is why it's always a great idea to turn to your most famous peers (and their writing quotes) for inspiration.

Without further ado, here are 170 writing quotes to guide you through every stage of writing. ( Yes! We've added more since we first published this post! )

The number one piece of advice that most authors have for other authors is to read, read, read. Here’s why.

1. “If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools ) to write. Simple as that.” — Stephen King

2. “You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.” — Annie Proulx

3. “Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.” — Eudora Welty

4. “Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.” — William Faulkner

5. “I kept always two books in my pocket: one to read, one to write in.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

6. “The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.” — Ernest Gaines

7. “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.” — Samuel Johnson

8. “Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.” ― Lisa See

9. “One sure window into a person’s soul is his reading list.” — Mary B. W. Tabor

The well of inspiration, we’re afraid, often does run dry. Here are the writing quotes to replenish it and, hopefully, remind you that there might be a story idea waiting for you just around the corner of life.

NEW REEDSY COURSE

How to Write a Novel

Enroll in our course and become an author in three months.

10. "If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." — Toni Morrison

11. “Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.” — Orson Scott

12. “Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.” — Stephen King

13. “Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.” — Mark Twain

14. “When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” — George Orwell

15. “Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” — Natalie Goldberg

16. “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” — Madeleine L'Engle

17. “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” — Henry David Thoreau

18. “Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.” — William S. Burroughs

19. “Write what should not be forgotten.” — Isabel Allende

20. “The story must strike a nerve in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.” — Susan Sontag

21. “Sometimes the ideas just come to me. Other times I have to sweat and almost bleed to make ideas come. It’s a mysterious process, but I hope I never find out exactly how it works. I like a mystery, as you may have noticed.” — J.K. Rowling

22. “As for ‘Write what you know,’ I was regularly told this as a beginner. I think it’s a very good rule and have always obeyed it. I write about imaginary countries, alien societies on other planets, dragons, wizards, the Napa Valley in 22002. I know these things. I know them better than anybody else possibly could, so it’s my duty to testify about them.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

23. “I’m very lucky in that I don’t understand the world yet. If I understood the world, it would be harder for me to write these books.” — Mo Willems

24. “Ideas are cheap. It’s the execution that is all important.” — George R.R. Martin

25. “If you wait for inspiration to write you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.” — Dan Poynter

Now, finding your "voice" is not as simple as entering a nationally-televised competition on NBC ( nyuk nyuk! ). Yet your voice will define you as a writer, and these famous writers have plenty of tips and writing quotes for you when it comes to finding it.

Which famous author do you write like?

Find out which literary luminary is your stylistic soulmate. Takes one minute!

26. “To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.” — Allen Ginsberg

27. “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” — Jack Kerouac

28. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” —Robert Frost

29. “It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.” — P.D. James

30. “Voice is not just the result of a single sentence or paragraph or page. It’s not even the sum total of a whole story. It’s all your work laid out across the table like the bones and fossils of an unidentified carcass.” — Chuck Wendig

31. “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.” — Elmore Leonard

32. “Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.” — Meg Rosoff

33. “I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

34. “Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.” — Virginia Woolf

35. “Everywhere I go, I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” — Flannery O’Connor

36. “There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn’t because the book is not there and worth being written — it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and, if you fail to find that form, the story will not tell itself.” — Mark Twain

37. “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” — Louis L’Amour

38. “First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.” — Ray Bradbury

39. “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” — Ernest Hemingway

40. “Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself.” — Mark Twain

41. “Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of job: It’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.” — Neil Gaiman

42. “It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.” — Ernest Hemingway

43. “It doesn’t matter how many book ideas you have if you can’t finish writing your book.” — Joe Bunting

44. “If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” — Margaret Atwood

45. “A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.” — Sidney Sheldon

46. “I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on until I am.” — Jane Austen

47. "Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good." — William Faulkner

48. “One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing — writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.” — Lawrence Block

49. “Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.” — John Steinbeck

50. “You can fix anything but a blank page.” — Nora Roberts

51. “I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.” — Pearl S. Buck

52. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed.” — Ernest Hemingway

Don’t get discouraged if you get this far and you’re thinking that your first draft is rather poor. These writing quotes are reminders that it’s just part of the process.

53. “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” — Terry Pratchett

54. “Get through a draft as quickly as possible.” — Joshua Wolf Shenk

55. “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” — Douglas Adams

56. “The first draft of everything is shit.” — Ernest Hemingway

57. “There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” — Frank Herbert

58. “I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them — without a thought about publication — and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.” — Anne Tyler

59. “I just give myself permission to suck. I delete about 90 percent of my first drafts, so it doesn’t really matter much if on a particular day I write beautiful and brilliant prose that will stick in the minds of my readers forever, because there’s a 90 percent chance I’m just going to delete whatever I write anyway. I find this hugely liberating.” — John Green

60. “Be willing to write really badly.” — Jennifer Egan

61. “On first drafts: It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut — it’s the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.” — Stephen King

62. “I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.” — Tom Clancy

63. “Anyone who says writing is easy isn’t doing it right.” — Amy Joy

64. “You fail only if you stop writing.” — Ray Bradbury

65. “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.” — Isaac Asimov

66. “Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.” — Ray Bradbury

67. “You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.” ― Octavia E. Butler

68. “I believe myself that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to keep at it.” — Chinua Achebe

69. “The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It’s not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.” — Augusten Burroughs

70. “It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer.” — Gerald Brenan

71. “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” — James Baldwin

72. “You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless — there is only one thing to do with a novel and that is go straight on through to the end of the damn thing.” — Ernest Hemingway

73. “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” — Kurt Vonnegut

74. “The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-it on the wall in front of my desk saying ‘Faire et se taire’ from Flaubert. Which I translate for myself as ‘Shut up and get on with it.’” — Helen Simpson

75. “I’ve been writing since I was six. It is a compulsion, so I can’t really say where the desire came from; I’ve always had it. My breakthrough with the first book came through persistence, because a lot of publishers turned it down.” — J.K. Rowling

76. “Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as a writer.” — Ray Bradbury

77. “It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.” — Virginia Woolf

78. “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” — Richard Bach

“Write drunk, edit sober” might be one of the most famous writing quotes about editing, but we can’t all outdrink Ernest Hemingway. Which is why these other words of wisdom and writing quotes exist!

79. “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” ― Jodi Picoult

Tell us about your book, and we'll give you a writing playlist

It'll only take a minute!

80. “When your story is ready for a rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.” — Stephen King

81. “The best advice on writing was given to me by my first editor, Michael Korda, of Simon and Schuster, while writing my first book. 'Finish your first draft and then we'll talk,' he said. It took me a long time to realize how good the advice was. Even if you write it wrong, write and finish your first draft. Only then, when you have a flawed whole, do you know what you have to fix.” — Dominick Dunne

82. “Editing might be a bloody trade, but knives aren’t the exclusive property of butchers. Surgeons use them too.” — Blake Morrison

83. “The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.” — E.B. White

84. “You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you, and we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.” — Arthur Plotnik

85. “Half my life is an act of revision.” — John Irving

86. “I'm all for the scissors. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.” — Truman Capote

87. “It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.” — C. J. Cherryh

88. “I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.” ― Don Roff

89. “Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we'.” — Mark Twain

90. “So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.” ― Dr. Seuss

91. “Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” — Henry David Thoreau

92. “I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times — once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say. Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one's fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.” — Bernard Malamud

93. “No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.” — Russell Lynes

94. “Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.” — Annie Dillard

95. “No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.” — H.G. Wells

96. “A writer is a world trapped in a person.” — Victor Hugo

97. “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” — Thomas Mann

98. “People say, ‘What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?’ I say, they don’t really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they’re gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.” — R.L. Stine

99. “As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.” ― Ernest Hemingway

100. “I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.” — Gustave Flaubert

101. “Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.” — Sylvia Plath

102. “I go out to my little office, where I’ve got a manuscript, and the last page I was happy with is on top. I read that, and it’s like getting on a taxiway. I’m able to go through and revise it and put myself — click — back into that world.” — Stephen King

103. “I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.” — William Carlos Williams

104. “Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.” — Gore Vidal

105. “For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.” — Catherine Drinker Bowen

106. “The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.” — Thomas Mann

107. “Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.” — T.S. Eliot

108. “Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.” — Margaret Chittenden

109. “A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.” — Eugene Ionesco

110. “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” — Benjamin Franklin

111. “A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.” — Roald Dahl

112. “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” — Gloria Steinem

From cavemen to our modern day in the 21st-century, we have written our joys and sorrows throughout history. What compels us to write? Here’s what some of the most beloved writers we know have to say.

113. “I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” — Anne Frank

114. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” — Anais Nin

115. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ― Maya Angelou

116. “The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.” — Zadie Smith

117. “The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis.” — William Styron

118. “No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.” — Robin Williams

119. “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.” — Aldous Huxley

120. “You can make anything by writing.” — C.S. Lewis

121. “Writers live twice.” — Natalie Goldberg

122. “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” — Winston Churchill

123. “Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.” — Oscar Wilde

124. “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” — Ray Bradbury

125. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass .” ― Anton Chekhov

126. “My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.” — Anton Chekhov

127. “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” — Somerset Maugham

128. “Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” — Stephen King

129. “Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” — Mark Twain

130. “Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don’t let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won’t matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.” — Esther Freud

131. “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. [...] All they do is show you've been to college.” — Kurt Vonnegut

132. “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” — Herman Melville

133. “Write drunk, edit sober.” — Ernest Hemingway

134. “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” — Mark Twain

135. “The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.” — Neil Gaiman

136. “Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.” — Jane Yolen

137. “Style means the right word. The rest matters little.” — Jules Renard

138. “My aim in constructing sentences is to make the sentence utterly easy to understand, writing what I call transparent prose. I’ve failed dreadfully if you have to read a sentence twice to figure out what I meant.” — Ken Follett

139. “And one of [the things you learn as you get older] is, you really need less… My model for this is late Beethoven. He moves so strangely and quite suddenly sometimes from place to place in his music, in the late quartets. He knows where he’s going and he just doesn’t want to waste all that time getting there… One is aware of this as one gets older. You can’t waste time.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

140. “ Part 1. I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English — it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in . Part 2. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. Part 3. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.” — Mark Twain

“You miss 100% of the shots that you never take — Wayne Gretsky,” as Michael Scott once said. In tribute to this sentiment, these writing quotes help show why it’s important not to let failure or rejection get you down.

141. “You can’t let praise or criticism get to you. It’s a weakness to get caught up in either one.” — John Wooden

142. “Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil — but there is no way around them.” — Isaac Asimov

143. “Was I bitter? Absolutely. Hurt? You bet your sweet ass I was hurt. Who doesn’t feel a part of their heart break at rejection. You ask yourself every question you can think of, what, why, how come, and then your sadness turns to anger. That’s my favorite part. It drives me, feeds me, and makes one hell of a story.” — Jennifer Salaiz

144. “I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.” — Sylvia Plath

145. “I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent, he would be wise to develop a thick hide.” — Harper Lee

147. “I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I’m going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box.” — James Lee Burke

148. “This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don’t consider it rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it ‘to the editor who can appreciate my work’ and it has simply come back stamped ‘Not at this address’. Just keep looking for the right address.” — Barbara Kingsolver

149. “To ward off a feeling of failure, she joked that she could wallpaper her bathroom with rejection slips, which she chose not to see as messages to stop, but rather as tickets to the game.” — Anita Shreve

150. “Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” — Neil Gaiman

151. “The artist doesn’t have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don’t have the time to read reviews.” — William Faulkner

152. “I think that you have to believe in your destiny; that you will succeed, you will meet a lot of rejection and it is not always a straight path, there will be detours — so enjoy the view.” — Michael York

153. “I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.” — Erica Jong

154. “I tell writers to keep reading, reading, reading. Read widely and deeply. And I tell them not to give up even after getting rejection letters. And only write what you love.” — Anita Diamant

155. “I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips, but I fear it would be overly long.” — Louise Brown

156. “I had immediate success in the sense that I sold something right off the bat. I thought it was going to be a piece of cake and it really wasn’t. I have drawers full of — or I did have — drawers full of rejection slips.” — Fred Saberhagen

157. “An absolutely necessary part of a writer’s equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself.” — Irwin Shaw

158. “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.” — C. S. Lewis

Why does writing matter? If there’s anyone who might know the answer, it’s the people who write — and continue to write, despite adverse circumstances. Here are a few pennies for their thoughts.

159. “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.” — Virginia Woolf

160. “If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.” — Wally Lamb

161. “A word after a word after a word is power.” — Margaret Atwood

162. “If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.” — Martin Luther

163. “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” — Albert Camus

164. “Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” — David Foster Wallace

165. “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” — Philip Pullman

166. “All stories have to at least try to explain some small portion of the meaning of life.” — Gene Weingarten

167. “If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.” — Peter Handke

168. “The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.” — Tom Clancy

169. “If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.” — Lillian Hellman

170. “Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously.” — Lev Grossman

Of course, writing quotes by themselves won't write the book for you — you alone have that power. However, we hope that this post has helped inspire you in some way! If you're looking for more in-depth resources, you can check out these guides:

FREE COURSE

Author and ghostwriter Tom Bromley will guide you from page 1 to the finish line.

How to Develop a Strong Theme
How to Build a Character Profile
How to Become a Better Writer Today

Have a favorite quote that we missed? If you know of more cool quotes by writers, write them in the comments!

2 responses

Brian Welte says:

08/05/2019 – 12:28

Here's a quote I absolutely adore: "The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere" [Quote from Gustave Flaubert]

Comments are currently closed.

Continue reading

How Many Sentences Are in a Paragraph?

From fiction to nonfiction works, the length of a paragraph varies depending on its purpose. Here's everything you need to know.

Narrative Structure: Definition, Examples, and Writing Tips

What's the difference between story structure and narrative structure? And how do you choose the right narrative structure for you novel?

What is the Proust Questionnaire? 22 Questions to Write Better Characters

Inspired by Marcel Proust, check out the questionnaire that will help your characters remember things past.

What is Pathos? Definition and Examples in Literature

Pathos is a literary device that uses language to evoke an emotional response, typically to connect readers with the characters in a story.

How to Start a Children’s Book: Coming Up with Your Big Idea

If you've ever dreamed of writing a children's book but aren't sure where to start, check out this post to learn more about how you can create the perfect story for kids.

How to Become a Travel Writer in 5 Steps: A Guide for Travel Bugs

If you want to get paid to share your adventures, learn how to become a travel writer with these five tips.

Join a community of over 1 million authors

Reedsy is more than just a blog. Become a member today to discover how we can help you publish a beautiful book.

We made a writing app for you

Yes, you! Write. Format. Export for ebook and print. 100% free, always.

1 million authors trust the professionals on Reedsy. Come meet them.

Enter your email or get started with a social account:

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

2 The Purpose of Literature

What is literature for.

What does literature do?

Share This Book

Using Literary Quotations

Use the guidelines below to learn how to use literary quotations.

Download this Handout PDF

Introduction

When you’re asked to write a paper analyzing a work of literature, your instructor probably expects you to incorporate quotations from that literary text into your analysis. But how do you do this well? What kind of quotations do you use? How do you seamlessly weave together your ideas with someone else’s words?

On this page we clarify the purpose of using literary quotations in literary analysis papers by exploring why quotations are important to use in your writing and then explaining how to do this. We provide general guidelines and specific suggestions about blending your prose and quoted material as well as information about formatting logistics and various rules for handling outside text.

Although this material is focused on integrating your ideas with quotations from novels, poems, and plays into literary analysis papers, in some genres this advice is equally applicable to incorporating quotations from scholarly essays, reports, or even original research into your work.

For further information, check out our Quoting and Paraphrasing resource, or you may wish to see when the Writing Center is offering its next introductory workshop about the genre of literary analysis. Additionally, our Short Guide to Close Reading for Literary Analysis offers wonderful insight into how you can read a piece of literature in order to analyze it.

Why should I use literary quotations?

Within a literary analysis, your purpose is to develop an argument about what the author of the text is doing—how the text “works.” You use quotations to support this argument. This involves selecting, presenting, and discussing material from the text in order to “prove” your point—to make your case—in much the same way a lawyer brings evidence before a jury.

Quoting for any other purpose is counterproductive. Don’t quote to “tell the story” or otherwise convey basic information about the text; most of the time within this genre you can assume your reader knows the text. And don’t quote just for the sake of quoting or to fill up space.

How do I use literary quotations?

General guidelines.

The following paragraph is from a student’s analysis of the relationship between two characters in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse . Notice how statements expressing the writer’s ideas and observations are verified with evidence from the novel in both summarized and quoted form.

We learn about Mrs. Ramsey’s personality by observing her feelings about other characters. For example, Mrs. Ramsey has mixed feelings toward Mr. Tansley, but her feelings seem to grow more positive over time as she comes to know him better. At first Mrs. Ramsey finds Mr. Tansley annoying, as shown especially when he mentions that no one is going to the lighthouse (7). But rather than hating him, she feels pity: “she pitied men always as if they lacked something . . .” (85). Then later, during the gathering, pity turns to empathy as she realizes that Mr. Tansley must feel inferior. He must know, Mrs. Ramsey thinks, that “no woman would look at him with Paul Rayley in the room” (104). Finally, by the end of the dinner scene, she feels some attraction to Mr. Tansley and also a new respect: “She liked his laugh . . . She liked his awkwardness. There was a lot in that man after all” (110). In observing this evolution in her attitude, we learn more about Mrs. Ramsey than we do about Mr. Tansley. The change in Mrs. Ramsey’s attitude is not used by Woolf to show that Mrs. Ramsey is fickle or confused; rather it is used to show her capacity for understanding both the frailty and complexity of human beings. This is a central characteristic of Mrs. Ramsey’s personality.

Your ideas + textual evidence + discussion

Notice that this paragraph includes three basic kinds of materials: (a) statements expressing the student’s own ideas about the relationship Woolf is creating; (b) data or evidence from the text in summarized, paraphrased, and quoted form; and (c) discussion of how the data support the writer’s interpretation. All the quotations are used in accordance with the writer’s purpose, i.e., to show how the development of Mrs. Ramsey’s feelings indicates something about her personality.

Textual evidence options

Quoting is only one of several ways to present textual material as evidence. You can also refer to textual data, summarize, and paraphrase. You will often want merely to refer or point to passages (as in the third sentence in the above example paragraph) that contribute to your argument. In other cases, you will want to paraphrase, i.e., “translate” the original into your own words, again instead of quoting. Summarize or paraphrase when it is not so much the language of the text that justifies your position, but the substance or content.

Quoting selectively

Similarly, after you have decided that you want to quote material, quote only the portions of the text specifically relevant to your point . Think of the text in terms of units—words, phrases, sentences, and groups of sentences (paragraphs, stanzas)—and use only the units you need. If it is particular words or phrases that “prove” your point, you do not need to quote the full sentences they appear in; rather, incorporate the words and phrases into your own sentences that focus on your own ideas.

Blending your prose and quoted material

It is permissible to quote an entire sentence (between two sentences of your own), but in general you should avoid this method of bringing textual material into your discussion. Instead, use one of the following patterns:

An introducing phrase or orienter plus the quotation:

In Blake’s poem “The Tyger,” it is creation, not a hypothetical creator, that is supremely awesome. [ argument sentence ]. The speaker asks, “What immortal hand or eye / Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” [ data sentence; orienter before quote ]
Gatsby is not to be regarded as a personal failure. [ argument sentence ] “Gatsby turned out all right at the end” (2), according to Nick. [ data sentence; orienter after quote ]
“Our baby was a boy,” Shukumar tells his wife in the conclusion of Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter” (22). [ data sentence; orienter after quote ] This admission is a death knell, tolling the end of their failing marriage. [ argument sentence ]

An assertion of your own and a colon plus the quotation:

In the midst of discussing the fate of the Abame tribe, Uchendu presents his own theory: “There is no story that is not true” (141).
Fitzgerald gives Nick a muted tribute to the hero: “Gatsby turned out all right at the end” (2).
Within Othello , Cassio represents not only a political but also a personal threat to Iago: “He hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly . . .” (5.1.19-20).

An assertion of your own with quoted material worked in:

For Nick, who remarks that Gatsby “turned out all right” (2), the hero deserves respect but perhaps does not inspire great admiration.
Satan’s motion is many things; he “strides” through the air (55), arrives like a “rattling” cloud (56), and later explodes—“wandering,” “hovering and blazing” like a fire (270).
Walking through Geraldine’s house, Pecola “wanted to see everything slowly, slowly” in order to fully appreciate its comparative order and opulence (Morrison 89).

Maintaining clarity and readability

Introduce a quotation either by indicating what it is intended to show, by naming its source, or by doing both. For non-narrative poetry, it’s customary to attribute quotations to “the speaker”; for a story with a narrator, to “the narrator.” For plays, novels, and other works with characters, identify characters as you quote them.

Do not use two quotations in a row without intervening text of your own. You should always be contextualizing all of your outside material with your own ideas, and if you let quotes build up without a break, readers will lose track of your argument.

Using the correct verb tense is a tricky issue. It’s customary in literary analysis to use the present tense; this is because it is at the present time that you (and your reader) are looking at the text. But events in a narrative or drama take place in a time sequence. You will often need to use a past tense to refer to events that took place before the moment you are presently discussing. Consider this example:

When he hears Cordelia’s answer, King Lear seems surprised, but not dumbfounded. He advises her to “mend [her] speech a little.” He had expected her to praise him the most; but compared to her sisters’, her remarks seem almost insulting (1.1.95).

Formatting logistics and guidelines

If for the sake of brevity you wish to omit material from a quoted passage, use ellipsis points (three spaced periods) to indicate the omission. Notice how in the paragraph about To the Lighthouse , above, the writer quoted only those portions of the original sentences that related to the point of the analysis.

When quoting, you may alter grammatical forms such as the tense of a verb or the person of a pronoun so that the quotation conforms grammatically to your own prose; indicate these alterations by placing square brackets around the changed form. In the quotation about King Lear at the end of the previous section, “her” replaces the “your” of the original so that the quote fits the point of view of the paper (third person).

Reproduce the spelling, capitalization, and internal punctuation of the original exactly. Of the following sentences presenting D. H. Lawrence’s maxim, “Books are not life,” the first is not acceptable in some style systems.

For Lawrence, “books are not life.” [ UNACCEPTABLE ]
For Lawrence, “[b]ooks are not life.” [ acceptable but awkward ]
Lawrence wrote, “Books are not life.” [ acceptable ]
“Books,” Lawrence wrote, “are not life.” [ acceptable ]
For Lawrence, books “are not life.” [ acceptable ]

Punctuation

You may alter the closing punctuation of a quotation in order to incorporate it into a sentence of your own. For example:

“Books are not life,” Lawrence emphasized.

Commas and periods go inside the closing quotation marks; the other punctuation marks go outside. For example:

Lawrence insisted that books “are not life”; however, he wrote exultantly about the power of the novel.
Why does Lawrence need to point out that “Books are not life”?

When quoting lines of poetry up to three lines long (which are not indented), separate one line of poetry from another with a slash mark with a space on either side (see examples from Blake’s “The Tyger” and Shakespeare’s Othello above).

Indentation

Prose or verse quotations less than four lines long are not indented. For quotations of this length, use the patterns described above.

“Longer” quotations should be formatted according to the expectations of a block quote. This unit of text should be positioned one half inch from the left margin, and opening and closing quotation marks are not used. The MLA Handbook , 8 th edition (2016) recommends that indented quotations be double-spaced, but many instructors prefer them single-spaced. The meaning of “longer” varies slightly from one style system to another, but a general rule is to indent quotations that are more than two (or three) lines of verse or four lines of prose.

If you’re quoting a series of dialogue dialogue between characters in a play, indent these lines and place the speaker’s name before the speech quoted. For example:

CAESAR: Et tu, Brute! Then, fall, Caesar! CINNA: Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead! (3.1.77-78)

Documentation

Follow your course instructor’s guidelines for documenting sources. If your instructor hasn’t told you which system to use to document sources, ask.

The documentation style used in this handout is that presented in the MLA Handbook , 8 th edition (2016), the most common citation style for literary analysis papers. The Writing Center has information about the rules of documentation within the most common systems .

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinau. Things Fall Apart . 1959. Anchor Books, 1994.

Blake, William. “The Tyger.” Poets.org , American Academy of Poets, https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/tyger. Accessed 1 July 2018.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby . 1925. The Scribner Library, 1953.

Lahiri, Jhumpa. “A Temporary Matter.” Interpreter of Maladies , Mariner Books, 1999, pp. 1-22.

Lawrence, David Herbert. “Why the Novel Matters.” Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays , edited by Bruce Steele, Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 191-8.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost . Printed for John Bumpus, 1821. Google Books , https://books.google.com/books?id=pO4MAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false. Accessed 1 July 2018.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye . 1970. Plume, 1993.

Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Wordsworth Editions, pp. 582-610.

–. King Lear. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare . Wordsworth Editions, pp. 885-923.

–. Othello, the Moor of Venice. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare . Wordsworth Editions, pp. 818-57.

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse . 1927. Harcourt, 1981.

Academic and Professional Writing

This is an accordion element with a series of buttons that open and close related content panels.

Analysis Papers

Reading Poetry

A Short Guide to Close Reading for Literary Analysis

Play Reviews

Writing a Rhetorical Précis to Analyze Nonfiction Texts

Incorporating Interview Data

Grant Proposals

Planning and Writing a Grant Proposal: The Basics

Additional Resources for Grants and Proposal Writing

Job Materials and Application Essays

Writing Personal Statements for Ph.D. Programs

Before you begin: useful tips for writing your essay
Guided brainstorming exercises
Get more help with your essay
Frequently Asked Questions

Resume Writing Tips

CV Writing Tips

Cover Letters

Business Letters

Proposals and Dissertations

Resources for Proposal Writers

Resources for Dissertators

Research Papers

Planning and Writing Research Papers

Quoting and Paraphrasing

Writing Annotated Bibliographies

Creating Poster Presentations

Writing an Abstract for Your Research Paper

Thank-You Notes

Advice for Students Writing Thank-You Notes to Donors

Reading for a Review

Critical Reviews

Writing a Review of Literature

Scientific Reports

Scientific Report Format

Sample Lab Assignment

Writing for the Web

Writing an Effective Blog Post

Writing for Social Media: A Guide for Academics

The Writing Center • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

What this handout is about

Used effectively, quotations can provide important pieces of evidence and lend fresh voices and perspectives to your narrative. Used ineffectively, however, quotations can clutter your text and interrupt the flow of your argument. This handout will help you decide when and how to quote like a pro.

When should I quote?

Use quotations at strategically selected moments. You have probably been told by teachers to provide as much evidence as possible in support of your thesis. But packing your paper with quotations will not necessarily strengthen your argument. The majority of your paper should still be your original ideas in your own words (after all, it’s your paper). And quotations are only one type of evidence: well-balanced papers may also make use of paraphrases, data, and statistics. The types of evidence you use will depend in part on the conventions of the discipline or audience for which you are writing. For example, papers analyzing literature may rely heavily on direct quotations of the text, while papers in the social sciences may have more paraphrasing, data, and statistics than quotations.

Discussing specific arguments or ideas

Sometimes, in order to have a clear, accurate discussion of the ideas of others, you need to quote those ideas word for word. Suppose you want to challenge the following statement made by John Doe, a well-known historian:

“At the beginning of World War Two, almost all Americans assumed the war would end quickly.”

If it is especially important that you formulate a counterargument to this claim, then you might wish to quote the part of the statement that you find questionable and establish a dialogue between yourself and John Doe:

Historian John Doe has argued that in 1941 “almost all Americans assumed the war would end quickly” (Doe 223). Yet during the first six months of U.S. involvement, the wives and mothers of soldiers often noted in their diaries their fear that the war would drag on for years.

Giving added emphasis to a particularly authoritative source on your topic.

There will be times when you want to highlight the words of a particularly important and authoritative source on your topic. For example, suppose you were writing an essay about the differences between the lives of male and female slaves in the U.S. South. One of your most provocative sources is a narrative written by a former slave, Harriet Jacobs. It would then be appropriate to quote some of Jacobs’s words:

Harriet Jacobs, a former slave from North Carolina, published an autobiographical slave narrative in 1861. She exposed the hardships of both male and female slaves but ultimately concluded that “slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.”

In this particular example, Jacobs is providing a crucial first-hand perspective on slavery. Thus, her words deserve more exposure than a paraphrase could provide.

Jacobs is quoted in Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).

Analyzing how others use language.

This scenario is probably most common in literature and linguistics courses, but you might also find yourself writing about the use of language in history and social science classes. If the use of language is your primary topic, then you will obviously need to quote users of that language.

Examples of topics that might require the frequent use of quotations include:

Southern colloquial expressions in William Faulkner’s Light in August

Ms. and the creation of a language of female empowerment

A comparison of three British poets and their use of rhyme

Spicing up your prose.

In order to lend variety to your prose, you may wish to quote a source with particularly vivid language. All quotations, however, must closely relate to your topic and arguments. Do not insert a quotation solely for its literary merits.

One example of a quotation that adds flair:

President Calvin Coolidge’s tendency to fall asleep became legendary. As H. L. Mencken commented in the American Mercury in 1933, “Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.”

How do I set up and follow up a quotation?

Once you’ve carefully selected the quotations that you want to use, your next job is to weave those quotations into your text. The words that precede and follow a quotation are just as important as the quotation itself. You can think of each quote as the filling in a sandwich: it may be tasty on its own, but it’s messy to eat without some bread on either side of it. Your words can serve as the “bread” that helps readers digest each quote easily. Below are four guidelines for setting up and following up quotations.

In illustrating these four steps, we’ll use as our example, Franklin Roosevelt’s famous quotation, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

1. Provide context for each quotation.

Do not rely on quotations to tell your story for you. It is your responsibility to provide your reader with context for the quotation. The context should set the basic scene for when, possibly where, and under what circumstances the quotation was spoken or written. So, in providing context for our above example, you might write:

When Franklin Roosevelt gave his inaugural speech on March 4, 1933, he addressed a nation weakened and demoralized by economic depression.

2. Attribute each quotation to its source.

Tell your reader who is speaking. Here is a good test: try reading your text aloud. Could your reader determine without looking at your paper where your quotations begin? If not, you need to attribute the quote more noticeably.

Avoid getting into the “they said” attribution rut! There are many other ways to attribute quotes besides this construction. Here are a few alternative verbs, usually followed by “that”:

Different reporting verbs are preferred by different disciplines, so pay special attention to these in your disciplinary reading. If you’re unfamiliar with the meanings of any of these words or others you find in your reading, consult a dictionary before using them.

3. Explain the significance of the quotation.

Once you’ve inserted your quotation, along with its context and attribution, don’t stop! Your reader still needs your assessment of why the quotation holds significance for your paper. Using our Roosevelt example, if you were writing a paper on the first one-hundred days of FDR’s administration, you might follow the quotation by linking it to that topic:

With that message of hope and confidence, the new president set the stage for his next one-hundred days in office and helped restore the faith of the American people in their government.

4. Provide a citation for the quotation.

All quotations, just like all paraphrases, require a formal citation. For more details about particular citation formats, see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . In general, you should remember one rule of thumb: Place the parenthetical reference or footnote/endnote number after—not within—the closed quotation mark.

Roosevelt declared, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” (Roosevelt, Public Papers, 11).

Roosevelt declared, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”1

How do I embed a quotation into a sentence?

In general, avoid leaving quotes as sentences unto themselves. Even if you have provided some context for the quote, a quote standing alone can disrupt your flow. Take a look at this example:

Hamlet denies Rosencrantz’s claim that thwarted ambition caused his depression. “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space” (Hamlet 2.2).

Standing by itself, the quote’s connection to the preceding sentence is unclear. There are several ways to incorporate a quote more smoothly:

Lead into the quote with a colon.

Hamlet denies Rosencrantz’s claim that thwarted ambition caused his depression: “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space” (Hamlet 2.2).

The colon announces that a quote will follow to provide evidence for the sentence’s claim.

Introduce or conclude the quote by attributing it to the speaker. If your attribution precedes the quote, you will need to use a comma after the verb.

Hamlet denies Rosencrantz’s claim that thwarted ambition caused his depression. He states, “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space” (Hamlet 2.2).

When faced with a twelve-foot mountain troll, Ron gathers his courage, shouting, “Wingardium Leviosa!” (Rowling, p. 176).

The Pirate King sees an element of regality in their impoverished and dishonest life. “It is, it is a glorious thing/To be a pirate king,” he declares (Pirates of Penzance, 1983).

Interrupt the quote with an attribution to the speaker. Again, you will need to use a comma after the verb, as well as a comma leading into the attribution.

“There is nothing either good or bad,” Hamlet argues, “but thinking makes it so” (Hamlet 2.2).

“And death shall be no more,” Donne writes, “Death thou shalt die” (“Death, Be Not Proud,” l. 14).

Dividing the quote may highlight a particular nuance of the quote’s meaning. In the first example, the division calls attention to the two parts of Hamlet’s claim. The first phrase states that nothing is inherently good or bad; the second phrase suggests that our perspective causes things to become good or bad. In the second example, the isolation of “Death thou shalt die” at the end of the sentence draws a reader’s attention to that phrase in particular. As you decide whether or not you want to break up a quote, you should consider the shift in emphasis that the division might create.

Use the words of the quote grammatically within your own sentence.

When Hamlet tells Rosencrantz that he “could be bounded in a nutshell and count [him]self a king of infinite space” (Hamlet 2.2), he implies that thwarted ambition did not cause his depression.

Ultimately, death holds no power over Donne since in the afterlife, “death shall be no more” (“Death, Be Not Proud,” l. 14).

Note that when you use “that” after the verb that introduces the quote, you no longer need a comma.

The Pirate King argues that “it is, it is a glorious thing/to be a pirate king” (Pirates of Penzance, 1983).

How much should I quote?

As few words as possible. Remember, your paper should primarily contain your own words, so quote only the most pithy and memorable parts of sources. Here are guidelines for selecting quoted material judiciously:

Excerpt fragments.

Sometimes, you should quote short fragments, rather than whole sentences. Suppose you interviewed Jane Doe about her reaction to John F. Kennedy’s assassination. She commented:

“I couldn’t believe it. It was just unreal and so sad. It was just unbelievable. I had never experienced such denial. I don’t know why I felt so strongly. Perhaps it was because JFK was more to me than a president. He represented the hopes of young people everywhere.”

You could quote all of Jane’s comments, but her first three sentences are fairly redundant. You might instead want to quote Jane when she arrives at the ultimate reason for her strong emotions:

Jane Doe grappled with grief and disbelief. She had viewed JFK, not just as a national figurehead, but as someone who “represented the hopes of young people everywhere.”

Excerpt those fragments carefully!

Quoting the words of others carries a big responsibility. Misquoting misrepresents the ideas of others. Here’s a classic example of a misquote:

John Adams has often been quoted as having said: “This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.”

John Adams did, in fact, write the above words. But if you see those words in context, the meaning changes entirely. Here’s the rest of the quotation:

Twenty times, in the course of my late reading, have I been on the point of breaking out, ‘this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!!’ But in this exclamation, I should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in public company—I mean hell.

As you can see from this example, context matters!

This example is from Paul F. Boller, Jr. and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions (Oxford University Press, 1989).

Use block quotations sparingly.

There may be times when you need to quote long passages. However, you should use block quotations only when you fear that omitting any words will destroy the integrity of the passage. If that passage exceeds four lines (some sources say five), then set it off as a block quotation.

Be sure you are handling block quotes correctly in papers for different academic disciplines–check the index of the citation style guide you are using. Here are a few general tips for setting off your block quotations:

Set up a block quotation with your own words followed by a colon.
Indent. You normally indent 4-5 spaces for the start of a paragraph. When setting up a block quotation, indent the entire paragraph once from the left-hand margin.
Single space or double space within the block quotation, depending on the style guidelines of your discipline (MLA, CSE, APA, Chicago, etc.).
Do not use quotation marks at the beginning or end of the block quote—the indentation is what indicates that it’s a quote.
Place parenthetical citation according to your style guide (usually after the period following the last sentence of the quote).
Follow up a block quotation with your own words.

So, using the above example from John Adams, here’s how you might include a block quotation:

After reading several doctrinally rigid tracts, John Adams recalled the zealous ranting of his former teacher, Joseph Cleverly, and minister, Lemuel Bryant. He expressed his ambivalence toward religion in an 1817 letter to Thomas Jefferson:

Adams clearly appreciated religion, even if he often questioned its promotion.

How do I combine quotation marks with other punctuation marks?

It can be confusing when you start combining quotation marks with other punctuation marks. You should consult a style manual for complicated situations, but the following two rules apply to most cases:

Keep periods and commas within quotation marks.

So, for example:

According to Professor Poe, werewolves “represent anxiety about the separation between human and animal,” and werewolf movies often “interrogate those boundaries.”

In the above example, both the comma and period were enclosed in the quotation marks. The main exception to this rule involves the use of internal citations, which always precede the last period of the sentence. For example:

According to Professor Poe, werewolves “represent anxiety about the separation between human and animal,” and werewolf movies often “interrogate those boundaries” (Poe 167).

Note, however, that the period remains inside the quotation marks when your citation style involves superscript footnotes or endnotes. For example:

According to Professor Poe, werewolves “represent anxiety about the separation between human and animal,” and werewolf movies often “interrogate those boundaries.” 2

Place all other punctuation marks (colons, semicolons, exclamation marks, question marks) outside the quotation marks, except when they were part of the original quotation.

Take a look at the following examples:

I couldn’t believe it when my friend passed me a note in the cafe saying the management “started charging $15 per hour for parking”!

The coach yelled, “Run!”

In the first example, the author placed the exclamation point outside the quotation mark because she added it herself to emphasize the outrageous nature of the parking price change. The original note had not included an exclamation mark. In the second example, the exclamation mark remains within the quotation mark because it is indicating the excited tone in which the coach yelled the command. Thus, the exclamation mark is considered to be part of the original quotation.

How do I indicate quotations within quotations?

If you are quoting a passage that contains a quotation, then you use single quotation marks for the internal quotation. Quite rarely, you quote a passage that has a quotation within a quotation. In that rare instance, you would use double quotation marks for the second internal quotation.

Here’s an example of a quotation within a quotation:

In “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Hans Christian Andersen wrote, “‘But the Emperor has nothing on at all!’ cried a little child.”

Remember to consult your style guide to determine how to properly cite a quote within a quote.

When do I use those three dots ( . . . )?

Whenever you want to leave out material from within a quotation, you need to use an ellipsis, which is a series of three periods, each of which should be preceded and followed by a space. So, an ellipsis in this sentence would look like . . . this. There are a few rules to follow when using ellipses:

Be sure that you don’t fundamentally change the meaning of the quotation by omitting material.

Take a look at the following example:

“The Writing Center is located on the UNC campus and serves the entire UNC community.”

“The Writing Center . . . serves the entire UNC community.”

The reader’s understanding of the Writing Center’s mission to serve the UNC community is not affected by omitting the information about its location.

Do not use ellipses at the beginning or ending of quotations, unless it’s important for the reader to know that the quotation was truncated.

For example, using the above example, you would NOT need an ellipsis in either of these situations:

“The Writing Center is located on the UNC campus . . .”

The Writing Center ” . . . serves the entire UNC community.”

Use punctuation marks in combination with ellipses when removing material from the end of sentences or clauses.

For example, if you take material from the end of a sentence, keep the period in as usual.

“The boys ran to school, forgetting their lunches and books. Even though they were out of breath, they made it on time.”

“The boys ran to school. . . . Even though they were out of breath, they made it on time.”

Likewise, if you excerpt material at the end of clause that ends in a comma, retain the comma.

“The red car came to a screeching halt that was heard by nearby pedestrians, but no one was hurt.”

“The red car came to a screeching halt . . . , but no one was hurt.”

Is it ever okay to insert my own words or change words in a quotation?

Sometimes it is necessary for clarity and flow to alter a word or words within a quotation. You should make such changes rarely. In order to alert your reader to the changes you’ve made, you should always bracket the altered words. Here are a few examples of situations when you might need brackets:

Changing verb tense or pronouns in order to be consistent with the rest of the sentence.

Suppose you were quoting a woman who, when asked about her experiences immigrating to the United States, commented “nobody understood me.” You might write:

Esther Hansen felt that when she came to the United States “nobody understood [her].”

In the above example, you’ve changed “me” to “her” in order to keep the entire passage in third person. However, you could avoid the need for this change by simply rephrasing:

“Nobody understood me,” recalled Danish immigrant Esther Hansen.

Including supplemental information that your reader needs in order to understand the quotation.

For example, if you were quoting someone’s nickname, you might want to let your reader know the full name of that person in brackets.

“The principal of the school told Billy [William Smith] that his contract would be terminated.”

Similarly, if a quotation referenced an event with which the reader might be unfamiliar, you could identify that event in brackets.

“We completely revised our political strategies after the strike [of 1934].”

Indicating the use of nonstandard grammar or spelling.

In rare situations, you may quote from a text that has nonstandard grammar, spelling, or word choice. In such cases, you may want to insert [sic], which means “thus” or “so” in Latin. Using [sic] alerts your reader to the fact that this nonstandard language is not the result of a typo on your part. Always italicize “sic” and enclose it in brackets. There is no need to put a period at the end. Here’s an example of when you might use [sic]:

Twelve-year-old Betsy Smith wrote in her diary, “Father is afraid that he will be guilty of beach [sic] of contract.”

Here [sic] indicates that the original author wrote “beach of contract,” not breach of contract, which is the accepted terminology.

Do not overuse brackets!

For example, it is not necessary to bracket capitalization changes that you make at the beginning of sentences. For example, suppose you were going to use part of this quotation:

“The colors scintillated curiously over a hard carapace, and the beetle’s tiny antennae made gentle waving motions as though saying hello.”

If you wanted to begin a sentence with an excerpt from the middle of this quotation, there would be no need to bracket your capitalization changes.

“The beetle’s tiny antennae made gentle waving motions as though saying hello,” said Dr. Grace Farley, remembering a defining moment on her journey to becoming an entomologist.

Not: “[T]he beetle’s tiny antennae made gentle waving motions as though saying hello,” said Dr. Grace Farley, remembering a defining moment on her journey to becoming an entomologist.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Barzun, Jacques, and Henry F. Graff. 2012. The Modern Researcher , 6th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

Booth, Wayne C., Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams, Joseph Bizup, and William T. FitzGerald. 2016. The Craft of Research , 4th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gibaldi, Joseph. 2009. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers , 7th ed. New York: The Modern Language Association of America.

Turabian, Kate. 2018. A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, Dissertations , 9th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Make a Gift

45+ Quotes About Writing from Famous Writers

Whether seasoned and published or just starting out, any writer will appreciate these quotes about writing from celebrated authors who know their craft and its challenges.

No matter how passionate you are about it, writing can be difficult. Whenever you’re struggling with writer’s block, rejection, competition, insecurity, or any of the countless obstacles that wordsmiths encounter daily, it can help to get encouragement from those who have successfully overcome the very same challenges.

So, whether you’re up against a creative wall or just looking for some inspiration to start your next project, these quotes about writing from writers themselves are sure to be welcome reading!

Inspirational Quotes from Writers

Trying to get psyched up to sit down and write? It can be reassuring to hear the words of literary greats celebrating a few of the very best parts of being a writer.

1. “And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” — Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

2. “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” — Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

3. “Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.” — Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

4. “What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.” — Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing

5. “Stories aren't made of language: they're made of something else... perhaps they're made of life.” — Philip Pullman, Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling

6. “There is no greater power on this earth than story.” — Libba Bray, The Diviners

7. “You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.” — Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

8. “We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are, and what our relationship is to life and death, what is essential, and what, despite the arbitrariness of falling beams, will not burn.” — Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet

9. “Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.” — Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

10. “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” — Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

11. “First, you write for yourself... always, to make sense of experience and the world around you. It’s one of the ways I stay sane. Our stories, our books, our films are how we cope with the random trauma-inducing chaos of life as it plays.” — Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run

Encouraging Quotes for Writers

Some of the most famous quotes from writers are about how ridiculously hard writing can be—and why you should rise to the challenge and do it anyway.

12. “The scariest moment is always just before you start.” — Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

13. “And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.” — Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

14. “If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.” — Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

15. “The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.” — Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

16. “The mind has plenty of ways of preventing you from writing, and paralysing self-consciousness is a good one. The only thing to do is ignore it, and remember what Vincent van Gogh said in one of his letters about the painter's fear of the blank canvas—the canvas, he said, is far more afraid of the painter.” — Philip Pullman, Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling

17. “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” — Sol Stein, Stein on Writing: A Master Editor Shares His Craft, Techniques, and Strategies

18. “Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?” — Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing

19. “Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.” — Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

Quotes About the Writing Process

From writers who know the drill, these quotes offer valuable insights and practical advice on the craft of writing, and the discipline and rigor it requires.

20. “Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose.” — William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Audio Collection

21. “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” — William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, The Elements of Style

22. “The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.” — Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

23. “People who think that grammar is just a collection of rules and restrictions are wrong. If you get to like it, grammar reveals the hidden meaning of history, hides disorder and abandonment, links things and brings opposites together. Grammar is a wonderful way of organising the world how you'd like it to be.” — Delphine de Vigan, No and Me

24. “Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.” — Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

25. “Whenever I'm asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you're being told.” — John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

26. “A great novel, rather than discouraging me, simply makes me want to write.” — Madeleine L’Engle, A

27. “I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself.” — Patti Smith, M Train

28. “Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.” — Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

29. “If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you.” — Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

30. “The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.” — William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Audio Collection

31. “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.” — Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

32. “One writes out of one thing only—one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.” — James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

33. “We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.” — Chris Cleave, Little Bee

34. “A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.” — John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

Funny Quotes About Writing

Sometimes, when you’re in the thick of a third, fourth, or fifth edit and ready to throw in the towel, what you need most is a good laugh, courtesy of someone who understands your plight.

35. “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” — Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

36. “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons… All they do is show you've been to college.” — Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

37. “Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn't work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right just before they go on to the next one. When they're done, they're done." — Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

38. “I’m sure I could write endlessly about nothing. If only I had nothing to say.” — Patti Smith, M Train

39. “You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits. Gross, right? A bloody pulpy liquid mess. Look at it, try to make sense of it. Realize you can't. Because there is no sense.” — Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

40. “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” — Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Quotes About Writers

Many artists draw much of their inspiration from introspection, and writers are no different. These quotes feature sayings about writers from the ultimate authority: writers themselves.

41. “If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.” — Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm

42. “Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon

43. “A storyteller makes up things to help other people; a liar makes up things to help himself.” — Daniel Wallace, The Kings and Queens of Roam

44. “The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.” — Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

45. “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.” — E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web

46. “A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.” — Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

47. “We never sit anything out. We are cups, quietly and constantly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.” — Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

Becoming a writer is especially difficult if you don’t know where to start. To help, we’ve rounded up advice from several authors on starting out as a writer. Take a look at our infographic below to learn what these wordsmiths think you should do to kick off your writing career.

Click to view a full sized writing quotes graphic .

35+ Inspirational Quotes About Hope

Whether you’re up against a challenge or just looking for a little inspiration, these quotes about hope can help you find your faith.

95+ C.S. Lewis Quotes About Love, Life, Faith, Bravery, and Friendship

From The Chronicles of Narnia, The Four Loves, and more, here are 99 of the best C.S. Lewis quotes that capture the magic of childhood and reflect on life’s mysteries.

55+ Audre Lorde quotes every activist should know

Get inspired to speak your mind and step into your power with our collection of quotes from poet and warrior Audre Lorde.

70+ Memorable Sylvia Plath Quotes About Life and Love

Find your memorable Sylvia Plath quote from this collection of selected works and passages from one of the 20th century’s most tragic and brilliant writers.

Fortune & Frame

Built with love in NYC

NEW ARRIVALS
Necklaces & Pendants
Letter Necklaces

Fortune Cookies

Fortune Lockets
Anniversary
Our Story Fortunes Press Blog Contact Us FAQs Log in

Your Fortune Pack

Add fortune or leave blank…

Save Your Fortunes

Create an account to save your favorite fortunes and build your own personal collection. Access them any time and add them to your orders.

Have an Account?

Your own private fortunes.

× -->

Save your Fortunes

Save the fortunes you love! Just click on the heart icon ❤ and it will show up here. You can then add the fortune to your order.

Your Favorite Fortunes

Best Sellers
Necklaces (All)

By Collection

Zodiac Signs

Fortune Lockets + Frames

Book Jewelry

Anniversary Gifts

Gifts for Her

Gifts for Significant Others

Gifts for Mom

Gifts for Friends

40+ Life-Changing Famous Literary Quotes

We believe that words have the power to alter the course of your personal story. Here are 40 life-changing messages in the form of famous literary quotes.

by Julia Mazzella

Words. Some prefer to write and some prefer to read, but the commonality between words is that they hold power. A few simple phrases could alter your mindset, turn your life around, or even motivate you to do that one thing you have been pushing off.

In every story, words give us the ability to view the picture within our minds. These stories, whether they are about a princess, pirate, madman, or monster, possess a greater moral behind the words.

Usually, there’s always that one altering quote, the small phrase that a character says when the hero is just about to give up. I call this famous literary quote : ‘the turning point’.

These are words that take the story in a whole new direction and shed light on its true purpose. The most important part is the greater lesson they express to the reader. Reading between the lines allows us to gain a new perspective or strengthen the values we already held. The knowledge we gain from books can be truly empowering.

The stories we read and the words we hold have the power to impact our own personal stories. We are the authors of our own lives, but maybe we could consider your favorite famous literary quotes ‘contributing writers’ in your story. They are your favorites for some reason—perhaps because it resonates with you because it’s relatable in your life.

Long story short: literature has the ability to change lives.

In an effort to inspire liberating, new adventures in your own life stories, we have collected our favorite famous literary quotes …

Quotes from Classic Literature

Authors have this fantastic ability to not only entertain us, but open our minds to a wider perspective and really make us think at the same time.

Classic literature, though on the surface may seem boring, are filled with magical and whimsical ideals that all evoke a bigger idea. These stories are an escape from reality, and yet so easily relatable to our own lives. Authors like Charles Dickens and Mark Twain have carved the model for novels and created this structure for stories to come.

The most important piece of this puzzle is of course the memorable literary quotes that have come out of these timeless tales. Many of these books are old, I’m not going to lie, but the great part about them is that the stories themselves never seem to age. Their impact on those who flip through the pages is never-ending. After all, these are called classics for a reason.

Dive deeper into the lessons of the stories you may have been forced to read in your high school english class and appreciate their famous literary quotes that could very well change your life…

“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
“I have been bent and broken, but— I hope— into a better shape.” —Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
“Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.” —Truman Capote, Breakfast At Tiffany’s
“The thing is—fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream.” —William Golding, Lord of the Flies
“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” —Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
“Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.” —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.” —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
"It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present" —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
"It's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it." —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
“If you tell the truth you do not need a good memory.” —Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” —Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
"Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs." —Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Quotes from Poetry

Poetry is a special kind of literature, and like any other type of writing, can display a deeper message. Though it may take an extra step to write, the impact of the story seems so much deeper.

Poems are composed of mostly symbolism, which allows each reader to interpret the underlying message in a different way. As for myself, I enjoy reading poems (especially ones that rhyme) because the story feels like it moves along a bit quicker and the short verses are easier to grasp, compared to a dense paragraph. Poetry is a beautiful art that has the ability to evoke new points of view, giving you the opportunity to evolve your mindset.

Enjoy these little snippets from some of these well-known poets and open your mind to new perspectives as you read these famous literary quotes from poems…

“Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning.” —Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

“To be or not to be: that is the question” —William Shakespeare, Hamlet
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the road less traveled by” —Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
“Every time I travel I meet myself a little more.” —Yrsa Daley-Ward, Coordinates
“Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul And sings the tune without words And never stops at all.” —Emily Dickinson, Hope is the Thing With Feathers
“You can trodme in the very dirt, but still like dust, I rise.” —Maya Angelou, Still I Rise
“Be an outcast, Be pleased to walk alone.” —Alice Walker, Be Nobody’s Darling
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” —Walt Whitman , Song of Myself
“To live a little better and always be forgiving, to add a little sunshine to the world in which we are living.” —Helen Steiner Rice, A New Beginning
“Life’s battles don’t always go To the stronger or faster man,But soon or late the man who wins Is the man WHO THINKS HE CAN!” —Walter D. Wintle, The Man Who Thinks He Can

Quotes from Romantic Literature

What is life without love? According to romantic literature, love is what makes the world go round.

The ‘L word’ is one that can mean so many different things. I believe that everything we do in life should be led by love, whether that is the love we have for our family and friends, a significant other, or for ourselves. Of course, romance novels can give us those fairy tale, perfect love stories we crave in reality, but what I value from romantic literature most is the literary quotes that teach us how to love.

Love is an instinct, we know how to love before we learn how to read. It’s an intense feeling and literature can act as a guide on how to express those feelings, as well as differentiate different types of love.

If you are still navigating how to show others love or are a hopeless romantic like myself, I know you will enjoy the famous literary quotes we have collected on love…

“He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” —Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.” —George Orwell, 1984
“Who, being loved, is poor?” —Oscar Wilde, A Woman Of Importance
“To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further.” —Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
“All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.” —Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” ―Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.” —Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
“We love the things we love for what they are.” —Robert Frost, Hyla Brook
“How you love yourself is how you teach others to love you.” ―Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey
“I am beginning to measure myself in strength, not pounds. Sometimes in smiles.” ―Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

Quotes from Children’s Literature

Who says you are too old to enjoy the books you grew up with?

Maybe your favorite children’s book is a classic fairy tale or the book your mom used to read to you before tucking you in. Since these stories are based around life lessons, it makes it all the more important to read them at such a young age.

Though you may not have picked up one of these stories for decades, consider reading them again with an adult’s perspective and think about how these words can be applied to your life today. Whether it’s the important lesson of The Tortoise and the Hair or a special reminder that there is “no place like home” in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , children’s books and the words within them continue to resonate with many generations, no matter how many years of your life have gone by.

Excite the child within you, and reminisce with these famous literary quotes from children’s literature…

“Promise me you’ll be braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, smarter than you think.” —A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh
“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” —Aesop, The Lion and the Mouse
"Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow." —Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“The true courage is in facing danger when you are afraid.” —L. Frank Braum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
“The flower that blooms in adversity is the rarest and most beautiful of all.” —Shiamin Kwa, Mulan
“The more he gave away, the more delighted he became.” —Marcus Pfister, The Rainbow Fish
“But all the magic I have known. I’ve had to make myself.” —Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends
“Real isn’t how you are made, It’s a thing that happens to you.” —Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit
“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.” —Dr. Seuss, Happy Birthday to You!
“Never hurry and never worry!” —E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
“Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?” —Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

The simplicity of children’s book quotes make them the perfect daily reminders to hold close. Conveniently, our new selection of book jewelry makes this easy, especially our book bracelet . Whether it’s a gift for a loved one or a special something for yourself, these meaningful pieces help keep your life story on course…

For more blog posts for book lovers, check out the below…

50 Inspiring Book Quotes For Book Lovers
Heartfelt Messages to Write in a Book Gift
Unique Gift Ideas for Book Lovers

Julia Mazzella

Within Every Chapter

On the outside, this book bracelet serves as an accessory, and on the inside, it provides deeper meaning. Open it up and store a message—you can switch it out to align with every chapter of your life.

From the Blog

These pieces are a great start for creating your own capsule jewelry collection to compliment your capsule wardrobe. Minimal, versatile, and it makes choosing your outfit for the day an actual breeze. Perfect pieces for any day to go anywhere.

Quote of the Day
Picture Quotes

Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes About Literature

Standart top banner.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

The present condition of fame is merely fashion.

Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.

Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.

If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.

What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.

The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.

The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms.

Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. but the artists find it harder.

The beautification of the world is not a work of nature, but a work of art, then it involves an artist.

last adds STANDART BOTTOM BANNER

Send report.

The author didn't say that
There is a mistake in the text of this quote
The quote belongs to another author
Other error

Related Authors

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Born: May 29, 1874
Died: June 14, 1936
Occupation: Writer
Cite this Page: Citation

Get Social with AzQuotes

Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends

SIDE STANDART BANNER

Appreciation
Architecture
Being Thankful
Big Business
Catholicism
Christianity
Coincidence
Common Sense
Consumerism
Contentment
Drunkenness
Encouragement
Environment
Fairy Tales
Grandmothers
Human Dignity
Human Nature
Imagination
Independence
Inspiration
Materialism
Mathematics
Personality
Politicians
Private Property
Spirituality
Ten Commandments
Thankfulness
Thanksgiving
Understanding
Javascript and RSS feeds
WordPress plugin
ES Version AZQuotes.ES
Submit Quotes
Privacy Policy

Login with your account

Create account, find your account.

Tone Definition

What is tone? Here’s a quick and simple definition:

The tone of a piece of writing is its general character or attitude, which might be cheerful or depressive, sarcastic or sincere, comical or mournful, praising or critical, and so on. For instance, an editorial in a newspaper that described its subject as "not even having the guts to do the job himself," has a tone that is both informal and critical.

Some additional key details about tone:

All pieces of writing, even letters and official documents, have a tone. A neutral, official tone is still a tone.
The tone of a piece of writing may change over the course of a text to produce different effects.
Tone and mood are not the same. Tone has to do with the attitude of the author or the person speaking, whereas mood is how the work makes the reader feel.
The author's intentions, emotions, and personal ideas about the theme or subject matter often reveal themselves in the piece's tone.

How to Pronounce Tone

Here's how to pronounce tone: tohn

Tone Explained

It is always possible to describe the way that a writer uses language. Therefore, every piece of writing has a tone. Even when a writer's aim is to use completely neutral language—as is often the case in scientific papers or investigative journalism—the language still sounds a certain way, whether it's "scientific," "journalistic," "formal," "professional," or even "mechanical." The way a writer makes use of tone can tell you a lot about the writer's attitude or relationship toward their subject matter and what they are trying to say about it, as well as the effect they are trying to create for their reader.

Here's just a partial list of words that are commonly used to talk about tone, with examples of the types of writing they might be used to describe:

A particularly stirring campaign speech
The Declaration of Independence
Maya Angelou's famous poem, "Still I Rise"
A sappy love poem
An over-the-top television sermon
A wordy letter of apology
A know-it-all at a cocktail party
The comments section of almost any YouTube video
A speech made by a boastful or proud character
A speech at a funeral
A murder mystery
A novel about someone's struggles with depression
An article in the newspaper The Onion
A work of parody like Don Quixote
A satire , like many skits on SNL
A stand-up comedy routine
A play like Shakespeare's As You Like It
A TV show like Seinfeld or Friends
A Dr. Seuss Book
A wedding speech
A friendly joke
An essay you'd write for school
A dense work of political theory
An article analyzing a political event
A letter from the IRS
A scientific paper
Instructions on how to assemble furniture

The tone of a piece of writing depends on a confluence of different factors, including:

The connotation of the words used: Are they positive or negative? What associations do the words bring to mind?
The diction , or word choice: Are there lots of thou's and thine's? Does the writer use slang? Are the words long and technical, or short and childish?
The use of figurative language : Is there a lot of metaphor, hyperbole, or alliteration? Does the language sound lofty and poetic?
The mood : How does the language make you feel as the reader? This can reveal a lot about the tone of the piece.

All of these things work together to determine the tone of a piece of writing.

The Difference Between Tone and Mood

The words "tone" and " mood " are often used interchangeably, but the two terms actually have different meanings.

Tone is the attitude or general character of a piece of writing and is often related to the attitude of the writer or speaker.
Mood refers specifically to the effect a piece of writing has on the reader . Mood is how a piece of writing makes you feel.

While tone and mood are distinct literary devices, they are often closely related. For example, it wouldn't be unusual for a poem with a somber tone to also have a somber mood—i.e., to make the reader feel somber as well. And as we explained above, a journalist who makes a jab at a politician might be conveying how they feel about their subject (using a critical tone) while also trying to influence their readers to feel similarly—i.e., to create a mood of anger or outrage.

Tone Examples

Since every text has a tone, there are essentially endless examples of tone. The examples below illustrate different types of tone.

Tone in U.A. Fanthorpe's "Not my Best Side"

The poem "Not my Best Side" by U.A. Fanthorpe has a lighthearted and ironic tone. The poem concerns the painting Saint George and the Dragon by Paolo Uccello, and pokes fun at the way the various characters are portrayed in the painting—the dragon, the maiden, and the knight who is supposedly rescuing her. Fanthorpe creates a contrast between her modern, colloquial way of speaking and the medieval subject matter of her poem. Using colloquial words like "sexy" and phrases like "if you know what I mean," Fanthorpe creates a lighthearted, conversational tone. But this conversational tone also has the effect of imbuing the poem with a tone of irony because it is used to describe the unlikely scenario of a maiden falling in love with a dragon.

It's hard for a girl to be sure if She wants to be rescued. I mean, I quite Took to the dragon. It's nice to be Liked, if you know what I mean. He was So nicely physical, with his claws And lovely green skin, and that sexy tail

Tone in Milton's "Lycidas"

The poem "Lycidas" by John Milton has a mournful tone. The poem was inspired by the untimely death of Milton's friend, who drowned. To express his grief, and set the sorrowful and mournful tone, Milton uses words and phrases with negative connotations , like, "watery bier" (or "tomb"), "parching wind" and "melodious tear."

For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young lycidas, and hath not left his peer. Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme He must not float upon his watery bier Unwept, and welter to the parching wind, Without the meed of some melodious tear.

Tone in Flaubert's Madame Bovary

In many passages in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary , Flaubert's own cynicism about romance shines through the third-person narration to imbue the work with a tone of cynicism. Bored by her husband and desperate for a passionate love affair like the sort she reads about in romance novels, Emma Bovary gets involved with a notorious womanizer. Flaubert highlights Emma's foolishness for falling for such an obvious hack, who sees her as no different from any other mistress:

Emma was just like any other mistress; and the charm of novelty, falling down slowly like a dress, exposed only the eternal monotony of passion, always the same forms and the same language. He did not distinguish, this man of such great expertise, the differences of sentiment beneath the sameness of their expression.

Flaubert sets the cynical tone in part by describing, using figurative language , how the charm of novelty, for Madame Bovary's lover, fell down "slowly like a dress," suggesting that what she experiences as romance, her lover experiences only as an extended prelude to sex.

What's the Function of Tone in Literature?

First and foremost, tone clues readers into the essence and the purpose of what they're reading. It wouldn't make sense to use a wordy, poetic tone to write a simple set of directions, just like it wouldn't make sense to use a dry, unfeeling tone when writing a love poem. Rather, writers set the tone of their work to match not only the content of their writing, but also to suit the purpose they intend for it to serve, whether that is to convey information clearly, to make people laugh, to lavish praises on someone, or something else. Additionally, tone can serve the following purposes:

For example, a biography of Bill Clinton might have a critical tone if the author has critical views of the former president and what he stood for, or it might have an admiring tone if the author was a staunch Clinton supporter.
If a writer wants their readers to feel upset, he or she might use words with certain connotations to create a gloomy tone.
Likewise, if a writer wants to create an informal tone, he or she might make use of colloquialisms , slang terms, and everyday language to make the reader feel like their familiar or their equal.

Simply put, establishing the tone of a work is important because it helps writers show readers what the work is trying to accomplish, and what attitude the work takes toward its own subject matter.

Other Helpful Tone Resources

Wikipedia Page on Tone in Literature : A helpful overview of tone and its usage.
A Definition of Tone : A definition of tone that includes a short overview of the difference between tone and mood.
List of Poetic Tones : A handy chart listing a slew of tones commonly found in poetry, and all other types of literature.

The printed PDF version of the LitCharts literary term guide on Tone

PDFs for all 136 Lit Terms we cover
Downloads of 1895 LitCharts Lit Guides
Teacher Editions for every Lit Guide
Explanations and citation info for 39,904 quotes across 1895 books
Downloadable (PDF) line-by-line translations of every Shakespeare play
Colloquialism
Connotation
Figurative Language
Slant Rhyme
Anachronism
Stream of Consciousness
Dramatic Irony
Personification

Find a Lawyer
Ask a Lawyer
Research the Law
Law Schools
Laws & Regs
Newsletters
Justia Connect
Pro Membership
Basic Membership
Justia Lawyer Directory
Platinum Placements
Gold Placements
Justia Elevate
Justia Amplify
PPC Management
Google Business Profile
Social Media
Justia Onward Blog

Q: Are quotes from books copyright infringement?

I am in the process of developing a content series for TikTok, focusing on the literary world. The essence of my project involves creating videos that feature narrations of quotes from various books, accompanied by original artwork inspired by the narratives.The videos are intended to be commercial, part of a monetized channel aimed at celebrating and promoting the works of various authors, including Steven Erikson among others. My objective is to engage a wider audience with these authors' works in a way that supports their market presence positively.In light of this, I seek expert advice on a few critical points to ensure my project aligns with U.S. copyright laws:Would the use of literary quotes in such a manner typically fall under fair use, considering the commercial nature of the videos yet their promotional intent?What proactive measures can I take to mitigate the risk of infringing on copyright, especially given the project's scope involving multiple works and authors?

Sacramento, CA
(916) 704-3009
Email Lawyer
View Website

A: When it comes to using literary quotes in videos, especially in a commercial context, navigating copyright laws can indeed be complex. The concept of "fair use" is particularly relevant here. While fair use might cover the use of quotes to a certain extent, the commercial nature of your project, combined with the intent to promote these works, does not automatically exempt you from copyright concerns. The key factors in determining fair use include the purpose and character of your use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion used, and the effect of the use on the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. To mitigate the risk of copyright infringement, consider a few proactive steps. First, limit the length of the quotes you use to ensure they fall within what might be considered fair use – shorter excerpts are generally safer. Additionally, providing critical commentary or educational insights about the quotes or the works they come from can further align your use with fair use principles. It's also beneficial to attribute the quotes accurately to their authors and works, showing respect for the original creations. Finally, seeking permission from the copyright holders (authors or their publishers) can be a definitive way to avoid infringement issues. This approach not only respects the rights of the creators but also potentially opens doors to collaborations that could enhance the value of your content. Remember, every case is unique, and if in doubt, consulting with a legal professional familiar with copyright law can provide guidance tailored to your specific situation and goals.

Justia Ask a Lawyer is a forum for consumers to get answers to basic legal questions. Any information sent through Justia Ask a Lawyer is not secure and is done so on a non-confidential basis only.

The use of this website to ask questions or receive answers does not create an attorney–client relationship between you and Justia, or between you and any attorney who receives your information or responds to your questions, nor is it intended to create such a relationship. Additionally, no responses on this forum constitute legal advice, which must be tailored to the specific circumstances of each case. You should not act upon information provided in Justia Ask a Lawyer without seeking professional counsel from an attorney admitted or authorized to practice in your jurisdiction. Justia assumes no responsibility to any person who relies on information contained on or received through this site and disclaims all liability in respect to such information.

Justia cannot guarantee that the information on this website (including any legal information provided by an attorney through this service) is accurate, complete, or up-to-date. While we intend to make every attempt to keep the information on this site current, the owners of and contributors to this site make no claims, promises or guarantees about the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of the information contained in or linked to from this site.

Bankruptcy Lawyers
Business Lawyers
Criminal Lawyers
Employment Lawyers
Estate Planning Lawyers
Family Lawyers
Personal Injury Lawyers
Estate Planning
Personal Injury
Business Formation
Business Operations
Intellectual Property
International Trade
Real Estate
Financial Aid
Course Outlines
Law Journals
US Constitution
Regulations
Supreme Court
Circuit Courts
District Courts
Dockets & Filings
State Constitutions
State Codes
State Case Law
Legal Blogs
Business Forms
Product Recalls
Justia Connect Membership
Justia Premium Placements
Justia Elevate (SEO, Websites)
Justia Amplify (PPC, GBP)
Testimonials

Soup to nuts

Chicken Soup for the Soul was almost as big as the Bible. Then it lost its way.

Even after everything I'd learned about Chicken Soup for the Soul, I still ended up ugly-crying in a hotel ballroom alongside 206 other sniffling adults, my mind a mess of guilt and shame, contemplating how I and I alone was to blame for every problem I've ever had.

"Everything in your life you created, promoted, or allowed," the man on stage was saying. "Everything that happens to you is for a reason. It's a gift."

Gooey bands of mucus stained my T-shirt. Everything was all my fault, I saw now. Even the drunken driver who'd left me with a brain injury I'd spent the past five years recovering from. It must have been a Lesson From The Universe, an experience I deserved.

I'd come to the John Wayne Airport Hyatt Regency in Newport Beach, California, for a "Breakthrough to Success" weekend last fall with Jack Canfield, the spiritual teacher and mastermind behind the best-selling nonfiction book series of all time: "Chicken Soup for the Soul." Back in the early 1990s, Canfield told us, he meditated for several days to conjure a title for an anthology of short, feel-good tales he hoped would improve readers' lives by demonstrating how our thoughts create our circumstances. The original collection of 101 stories, interspersed with motivational quotes, poems, proverbs, and cartoons, would go on to sell 11 million copies and become a cultural touchstone, read by everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Tony Soprano's mistress.

What followed was hundreds of sequels and spinoffs, everything from "Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover's Soul" to "Chicken Soup for the Canadian Soul" to the bestseller I read cover to cover, several times, in sixth grade: "Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul." By 2003, research found that more young readers seeking solace turned to the Chicken Soup series than to the Bible.

Like most self-help books, "Chicken Soup" offers the reassuring message that anyone is capable of anything — that with the right attitude, you can heal yourself, find love, and, as the translated Indonesian title promises, "Become Rich and Happy." Each book brims with advice that Russ Kamalski, Chicken Soup's former chief operating officer, told me appealed to "moms that were working and picking up their kids in the carpool line and wanted to read an inspiring story to make their life feel a little bit better."

But this emphasis on individual agency comes with a dark side. If you are the author of your own fate, you are also to blame for your own suffering — no matter how far beyond your control it may seem. Canfield calls it taking 100% responsibility. "A lot of people get cancer," he says. "But I always ask them: Did you eat an organic diet? Did you drink filtered water? You're responsible for maintaining your ignorance. You're responsible for not making enough money to be able to afford the stuff you need to be able to buy."

For millions of readers, myself included, these aspects of Canfield's ethos amounted to a subliminal message, filtered through anecdotes about overcoming obstacles and telling your children you love them. "Chicken Soup" remained remarkably popular for years, coasting along on an upbeat, family-friendly image. But then the company began to pivot, stretching and twisting a lucrative brand to the point of absurdity. What began as Chicken Soup for the Soul board games and calendars turned into Chicken Soup for the Soul chocolates and Chicken Soup for the Soul pet food. After Canfield and his cofounder sold the company in 2008, the new owners experimented with Chicken Soup for the Soul barbecue sauce and even, briefly, Chicken Soup for the Soul soups. Then they ventured even further afield, spinning off Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, going public on the Nasdaq , and buying up film distributors and streaming services like Redbox and Crackle. Today, Chicken Soup for the Soul somehow owns the North American rights to classic Laurel and Hardy films and the original "Little Rascals" shorts.

Even to experts in corporate branding, Chicken Soup for the Soul's trajectory has been baffling. "The whole point of having a brand is that it's kind of a consistent signal of something," says Americus Reed, a marketing professor at Wharton. "This is so wildly different from what it started as. It just creates this very cognitively dissonant idea in your mind, that your mind naturally wants to solve. Like, why are they doing this? What's going on here?"

I first searched the internet for Chicken Soup for the Soul late one night, while a bit stoned. It was like checking up on a middle-school classmate I hadn't thought of in years. Imagine my surprise upon discovering that Chicken Soup is not only a publicly traded company, but one that's buying up the DVD kiosks outside convenience stores, charging $2.25 for rentals of "Shazam! Fury of the Gods." What happened to the guilty-pleasure read I'd devoured in sixth grade? I had to learn more, to understand what was going on with the company and how it might have influenced younger me. I didn't consider how Chicken Soup for the Soul might influence the current me, but maybe I should have.

At 79, Jack Canfield is a paunchy boomer with an unnervingly calm, approachable energy. At his Breakthrough to Success event, I thought I might see glimpses of the man his son describes in his memoir as "the lying, cheating, conniving, manipulative, inhuman son of a bitch who had left my mom when I was one and she was six months pregnant." Instead I was quickly ensconced in the warmth emanating from Canfield, his eight employees, and his 20 volunteer assistants — what some in attendance called "the Canfield family."

It was a family that cost $997 to join for a long weekend, or $1,497 if you wanted VIP status. At one point I heard a woman say, "She was getting the technology through her prayer work," and that about sums up the crowd: New Age and entrepreneurial. One couple came on their honeymoon; folks flew in from Nigeria, Japan , and France; some guy brought his 12-year-old, a boy I overheard telling an adult he'd just met, "Yeah, that's a great market."

Every day from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., we gathered in the John Wayne Airport Hyatt Regency ballroom to listen to Canfield. We reflected on our careers, our health, our relationships, our finances. We set goals. We turned to strangers and said: Who are you? Who do you pretend to be? What is missing in your life? We held hands and made sustained eye contact. We went back to our rooms each night, looked into the mirror, gave ourselves a high five, and said, "I love you." We held a vision-board party. We watched a video about a guy who said he was told by doctors he'd never walk again and then, of course, walked again.

Canfield learned persistence early. He grew up poor in Ohio and West Virginia, with a violent father and a religious stepfather, and went on to attend Harvard. After teaching for a year at a predominantly Black high school, he went to work for the insurance magnate W. Clement Stone, who began each day by saying: "I feel happy! I feel healthy! I feel terrific!" Stone taught Canfield about the Law of Attraction, a 19th-century jumble of mysticism, individualism, and pseudoscience. The Law of Attraction basically asserts that anything you concentrate on or wish for will become reality. Today we might call it "manifesting." As Canfield told us, "Everything you think about and feel strongly about, you're going to bring about." Every decade or so, someone repackages this idea and makes a ton of money, from Napoleon Hill 's "Think and Grow Rich" (1937) to Norman Vincent Peale 's "The Power of Positive Thinking" (1952) to "Chicken Soup for the Soul."

It's a seductive mindset. I've spent years ranting about how cars and roads should be safer. But once I was in Canfield's presence, his logic seemed infallible: I was the person who had capsized my life in the wake of my head injury, not the drunken driver who hit me. Over three days in the John Wayne Airport Hyatt Regency ballroom, I cried 11 times. The Law of Attraction stirs up all your insecurities, and just when you take a nosedive into feeling worthless, it scoops you up and tells you that you are in total control of what happens next.

Canfield began running seminars like the one I attended long before Chicken Soup for the Soul existed. He always longed to reach more people. The path that led him there began in 1980, when he attended a session at a holistic health conference called "How to Triple Your Income and Double Your Time Off in Two Years or Less." It was run by someone just as obsessed with the Law of Attraction as Canfield was, a guy named Mark Victor Hansen.

Hansen is like a terrifyingly peppy windup toy, the kind of indefatigable salesman you might end up buying something from just to make him go away. "He would come in like a cyclone," recalls Kamalski, Chicken Soup's former chief operating officer, while Canfield would remain even-keeled: "They're yin and yang." Canfield is more "analytical," Hansen more "creative." Canfield is suspicious of organized religion, preferring occult traditions like Kabbalah, while Hansen practices a nondenominational, prosperity-gospel-adjacent Christianity. Despite their temperamental differences, the two men became good friends and began having lunch every Tuesday at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

When we speak on the phone, Hansen bombards me with factoids and anecdotes, most of which — like the woman who helped 12 million children "get out of abuse" — seem exaggerated at best. Now 76, Hansen describes himself as a "visionary" who has "studied everything" and is working with "all the top AI guys in the world." At one point he mentions a recent interaction with "the king of Mali" and says, "Remember, there are no bookstores in Mali." (There is not currently a monarchy in Mali, and the country has plenty of bookstores.)

Canfield tells me he considers Hansen's hyperbole the product of a bad memory and too much enthusiasm: "Detail was not his strength, let's put it that way." When I mention Canfield's assessment to Hansen, he compares himself to Mark Twain. "I'm a provocateur," he says. "Some people go, 'He's full of crap.'"

After years on the motivational-speaking circuit, Canfield decided he wanted to compile the most-affecting stories he'd heard into a book, without saying directly what you were supposed to learn from them. "For me, when a story has a lesson and you don't beat people over the head with it, they remember it," he says. Hansen loved the idea. They asked many of the motivational speakers they knew to contribute their best story, and in 1991 they set off for New York to make their fortune.

The tale that Hansen and Canfield tell about their success follows the same structure as a "Chicken Soup for the Soul" story. Two outsiders have a brilliant idea (heart-warming stories that illustrate the Law of Attraction). All the so-called experts (the publishing companies in New York) look down on them. They're rejected over and over (33 times, if you asked in 1998 ; "nearly 100" times, if you asked in 2014 ; 144 times, if you ask today). And yet, through tremendous will and perseverance, they somehow manage to bring their little book to the public, not only reaping acclaim and huge financial rewards but validating their unshakable belief in themselves.

Another way of telling the story is that Canfield and Hansen went booth to booth at a publishing convention in Anaheim until they found a Florida-based press they paid to print the first 20,000 copies of "Chicken Soup for the Soul" at $6 a copy. Then they turned around and sold the shit out of those copies, using all the sales techniques they'd learned as motivational speakers: requiring each audience member to buy multiple copies, say, or selling copies at bakeries and mortuaries. In 1994, a little over a year after the book came out, it became a bestseller.

Subsequent installments practically wrote themselves. Thousands of readers mailed in their own inspirational stories, hoping to be included in "A 2nd Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul," then "A 3rd Serving," "A 4th Course," "A 5th Portion," and "A 6th Bowl." "We had a user-generated machine before user-generated content was really in existence," Kamalski says. Reader panels evaluated the stories, selecting 101 per book, and then Hansen and Canfield would read and arrange them. Soon they were putting out four books a month, with each "Chicken Soup for the ___ Soul" title zeroing in on an aspect of their target demographic: Girl's, Preteen's, Teenage, Sister's, Woman's, Christian Woman's, Working Woman's, African American Woman's, Girlfriend's, Bride's, Expectant Mother's, Mother's, Mother & Daughter, Mother and Son, New Mom's, Every Mom's, Nurse's, Teacher's, Military Wife's, Caregiver's, Breast Cancer Survivor's, Grandma's.

"Even the books that were for men — Golfer's Soul, Fisherman's Soul," Kamalski told me, were being bought by women, as "gifts for men."

The literary establishment responded with disdain. Wayne Booth, a literature professor at the University of Chicago, wrote that he felt "arrogantly envious of the fame and mildly contemptuous of the work." Booth was disturbed to see "Chicken Soup for the Soul" implying that a single person's feelings could bring about world peace; the series also emphasized, per the Law of Attraction, that systemic forces do not disadvantage certain lives more than others. The first story in the original book recounts how a teacher in "the Baltimore slums" loved her students so much that 176 of 180 went on to achieve "more than ordinary success as lawyers, doctors, and businessmen." Was this even true? Hard to say. After settling a plagiarism lawsuit over an essay in a 1997 book for what Canfield describes as "some minor amount of money," he and Hansen began asking contributors to sign a pledge affirming that the stories they had submitted were true. They did no further checking.

After some 315 million copies circulated in China, "chicken soup" became Chinese slang for uplifting stories with no substance.

In her book "Smile or Die," Barbara Ehrenreich argues that the "mandatory optimism" pushed by "Chicken Soup for the Soul" actually makes people feel more lonely, miserable, and apathetic. Research suggests that daydreaming about success is less likely to lead to action and that increased self-esteem typically leads only to "enhanced initiative and pleasant feelings," not to better grades or happier relationships. David Gray, a historian at Oklahoma State, told me he sees "Chicken Soup for the Soul" as part of a rise in motivational rhetoric and "neoliberal mysticism" that dovetailed with a decline in job security, medical benefits, and wages for American workers . It's not hard to see how the Chicken Soup mindset benefits employers. According to Canfield's philosophy, anything you don't get in your career is your own failure to manifest what you want — not the product of larger economic forces outside your control.

Still, the money kept coming in, and Canfield and Hansen kept hustling new products, the most successful of which was Chicken Soup for the Soul pet food, capitalizing on the deluge of "Chicken Soup" stories about various furry friends. The company also secured a record-setting book-licensing deal to export "Chicken Soup" to China. But the books were not as well received in the new market. After what Canfield said was some 315 million copies circulated in China, including many in schools, "chicken soup" became Chinese slang for uplifting stories with no substance, or advice that makes you feel better but doesn't solve your problems.

Then, in 2005, Canfield allowed an Australian film crew to attend a conference he'd organized for motivational speakers. The footage was featured in "The Secret," a documentary that jump-started a global phenomenon, once again selling audiences on the Law of Attraction and the promise of wealth. A book version of "The Secret" went on to sell more copies than the original "Chicken Soup" — and sparked far more controversy. On "Saturday Night Live," Amy Poehler portrayed the book's author as callously telling Kenan Thompson's character, a refugee fleeing the Darfur genocide, "I know this is hard for you to hear, but your outlook is what's hurting you."

"Chicken Soup" evaded this kind of criticism — a crucial advantage once Canfield and Hansen decided to sell the business, in 2007. "It's hard to let go of something that's producing a lot of money," Canfield says, but "I woke up one morning and it wasn't doing it for me anymore." Hansen, who was going through an expensive divorce, says God told him to sell. Canfield says they wound up getting $63 million for Chicken Soup for the Soul. "He sold his baby," says Patty Aubery, Canfield's business partner. "And he got a good ransom."

The best part of being in the John Wayne Airport Hyatt Regency ballroom was the hugs. Every day we did dozens and dozens of full-body hugs, based on detailed instructions from Canfield: press inward from shoulders to hips, left ear to left ear, heart against heart, no back-patting, no picking up and twirling. Some hugs were long and fragrant, some were short and distant, but the cumulative effect of embrace after embrace felt amazing, like a sober Burning Man. We were safe in Canfield's glow, safe to reveal our deepest hopes and vulnerabilities and expect to be met with love and understanding.

This compassion was intoxicating. Anything felt possible. We learned about his past students who doubled their income in two years, who quadrupled their income, who became billionaires, who went from being homeless to being worth $3 million and owning three Rolexes. "It's not about money. It's about finding your life's purpose," he told us. "I'm not saying you have to 10x your income," he said — though that's what he did, in his own life. The more I heard him and his volunteer assistants use the phrase "double your income," the more I began to think I'd be so much happier if I could just ... double my income.

I felt so supported and electrified by my new community that I was vehemently taken aback when I encountered someone hostile, someone who listened with obvious boredom as I talked about my brain injury, then changed the subject to ask, "What do you think about feminism?" I decided I hated this person for puncturing the beautiful bubble we had created, and I'd hate him for the rest of my life.

Except! Then Canfield explained that resentment causes cancer. Something about the alkaline state of the body and raising your vibration and — well, things were getting a little weird now, but I really didn't want cancer! So I tried to forgive this man, even as he stood up two days in a row to thank Canfield for blurbing his book and to say, by the way, had we heard about his book? But then we were chanting at our fingers "Grow longer!" and marveling when they seemingly did, and then we were visualizing ourselves on a magic carpet going up a mountain to a temple where we met a guardian angel, and then we were all hugging again, and then we were listening to two hours of testimonials from the volunteer assistants about why we should sign up for the next level of training, which cost $14,997, or for two smaller retreats and monthly Zoom workshops, which cost $24,997.

"Don't let any of that negative internal self-talk stop you," Canfield told us. "Most of us are living in a cell we created, and the key is right there." These prices were a special deal, we learned, and would rise as soon as the weekend ended.

At lunch on the last day, I ran into a stylish woman in the hotel lobby. She asked if I was signing up for more training.

"No," I told her. "I can't afford it."

"Oh yeah, me neither," she said, though I could tell she was thinking about it. Signing up for more training would put her into debt. "I've got two cents," she said, "and I'm spending five." But the weekend had filled her with a sense of belonging and friendship, and she wanted to keep that feeling going.

We went in after lunch and saw that everyone who had signed up for the advanced programs was on stage taking a photo: 20 people committing to $14,997 and another 21 committing to $24,997. The stylish woman was not among them, but I noticed a kind middle-aged man I'd spoken to at length during an earlier activity. I knew this man was already in significant credit-card debt and didn't have an income. I looked up at him standing on stage, smiling, arms around his new family, and I felt very, very sad.

Canfield and Hansen sold Chicken Soup for the Soul to Bill Rouhana and Amy Newmark, a married couple. The new owners shifted the company both physically and ideologically, from Southern California to Greenwich, Connecticut — from kooky self-realization to shiny financial maneuvering.

Rouhana and Newmark met in the 1990s . At the time, Newmark was managing a hedge fund that invested in a telecommunications company Rouhana had started called Winstar. Winstar raised billions of dollars on the stock market before going bankrupt in 2001. The man who bought it out of bankruptcy later called the purchase one of the worst business mistakes he'd ever made, and told the Washington Post that Winstar had continued to charge customers after they canceled their service, apparently to convince Wall Street investors the company was growing faster than it really was. Rouhana and Winstar's leadership later settled a class-action lawsuit and a related case for $25 million that alleged they had "engaged in covert practices designed to benefit themselves at the expense of the Company and its investors" and "routinely encouraged or tacitly allowed sales personnel to engage in overt sales falsification, in a deliberate effort to overstate sales."

The new owners shifted Chicken Soup both physically and ideologically, from Southern California to Connecticut — from kooky self-realization to shiny financial maneuvering.

With Chicken Soup, Rouhana saw an opportunity. "Chicken Soup for the Soul is just thought of as a positive brand," he later explained. "Of all the things I've seen, it probably had the most positive reaction from people, and no negative reaction." Over the years the company had partnered with major brands, like "American Idol" and NASCAR, and branched out into a wide range of licensed products. Rouhana was particularly struck by the popularity of Chicken Soup for the Soul pet food. "Pet food, books — there is a lot of room between those two things that you could fill in with branding that might be successful," he said. (Rouhana declined to be interviewed for this story.)

The company continued to compile new books, churning out another 200 titles. But with the publishing industry in decline, Rouhana turned his attention to producing uplifting content for Hollywood. Working out of the company's headquarters, which he moved to a suburban office above a CVS, he finagled a partnership with Ashton Kutcher. But over several years, through 2016, he wound up releasing only two shows; one, called "Hidden Heroes," secretly taped people performing acts of kindness, like a wholesome version of Kutcher's notorious prank show "Punk'd."

Then Rouhana hit on a way to bring Chicken Soup to the next level. He took advantage of a new securities provision called Regulation A+ that allowed small companies to bypass the stringent reviews associated with an initial public offering and sell shares to pretty much anyone. The goal was to enable average folks to share in the early-stage profits typically reserved for large banks and the wealthy. But the Consumer Federation of America later called Regulation A+ "an experimental online marketplace" that brought together "inexperienced issuers with unsophisticated investors" who harnessed "the power of the Internet to hype stocks." Other companies that went public under Regulation A+ involved UFOs and flying cars.

To a certain extent, selling stock felt like the same old Chicken Soup for the Soul promise: Buy these shares that might help you become rich because this reminds you of this brand that made you feel like you could become rich. With Kutcher's name attached, Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment raised $30 million in 2017, in what was described as the biggest crowdsourced IPO of all time. Shares of CSSE opened at $9.25.

With the cash infusion, Rouhana took the company in a new direction. As Hindenburg Research, a forensic financial analysis firm, explained : "Rouhana has voting control over the public company and similarly has control over the ultimate parent, thereby giving him virtually unmitigated control of the entire corporate structure." He began buying up free, ad-supported streaming services, envisioning a future when customers would grow tired of paying for so many subscriptions and go back to watching TV with commercials. His biggest move came in 2019, when he initiated a two-part deal to buy Crackle from Sony Pictures Television. When the deal was complete, shares of CSSE spiked to $42.39.

Rouhana took advantage of the moment. The company sold $75 million worth of stock, causing the share price to tumble. That same month, according to Zillow and Connecticut public filings, Rouhana spent $3.4 million on a lakefront home, which had 10 bathrooms, a wine cellar, a fountain, a free form pool, and a spa with a footbridge to a "private island."

All these years later, Chicken Soup for the Soul still had the power to make its owners lots of money. Then someone crashed the party.

In May 2022, a Canadian day trader named Kevin saw a post on social media about how Chicken Soup was about to acquire Redbox, the DVD-rental-kiosk company. Reddit reacted with incredulity. "Huh," one person wrote. "Apparently both of these companies still exist." Kevin, however, saw a perfect opportunity for people to get together and screw over some Wall Street bigwigs.

Kevin, who had worked in Wells Fargo's lending department, saw himself as smarter than the masses on Reddit. A year earlier he'd watched with derision as a loose confederation of online traders became fixated on boosting the video-game retailer GameStop, crusading to bring down a multibillion-dollar hedge fund. "All they knew how to do was hold one stock 'to da moon,'" he messaged me. (He spoke on the condition I not use his last name, to protect his privacy.) But when he looked into the details behind Chicken Soup's pending deal with Redbox, Kevin got so excited that he started his own YouTube channel. "You've never seen anything like this, in the history of the market," he wrote below his first video.

When Chicken Soup announced the merger, Redbox shares were trading at about $6. But the fine print specified that once the deal went through, Redbox shares would convert to Chicken Soup shares, making them worth about $1 . Institutional investors had decided to short Redbox stock, betting that the merger would happen and the share value would go down. But Kevin and his online compatriots wanted to push Redbox stock as high as possible, creating a "short squeeze" that would undercut the plutocrats who predicted the price would fall, causing them to lose money. "Take the box to the moon and make the soup Pay!" one Reddit user wrote.

Kevin began posting three videos a day about Chicken Soup and Redbox. He put together a spreadsheet tracking who said they owned Redbox shares, to calculate their leverage against the ruling class. "They want you to have two and three jobs," he told his followers. "They want you to struggle in life."

Since last summer, shares of Chicken Soup have stayed below $1, dipping to as low as 15 cents.

As more people jumped in, Redbox's share price rose from $10 to over $18. In response to the volatility, all the major brokerages took away the ability to buy options in Redbox. "We're getting duped!" Kevin fumed on YouTube. But it was too late. Within a month, shares were down to $4.37. Chicken Soup's acquisition of Redbox closed on August 11, 2022. The populist uprising had failed.

"So basically we lose our money 😞" wrote MangoSea2615.

"It's possible we're in a completely fraudulent system," posted Reddit user ItsAllJustASickGame.

Rouhana was thrilled that the deal closed, saying in a statement, "I've been looking forward to the day Redbox would become part of the Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment family — and today is that day." A few months after the merger, shares of CSSE surpassed $12, and the company sold off another $10.3 million worth of stock . Then the share price began to fall. This past January, with the streaming services it had hoped to dethrone still going strong, the company temporarily suspended dividend payments to its shareholders. Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment is no longer a company trying to help moms in the carpool line feel better about themselves. It's a zombie brand, staggering ever forward.

"When a company goes public, part of the value is the brand," says Reed, the Wharton professor. "You're hoping that the brand value is going to synergistically correspond to increasing trajectories of upward stock prices." Since last summer, shares of CSSE have stayed below $1, dipping to as low as $0.15. On March 25, 2024, according to SEC filings, Nasdaq notified the company that it was delisting Chicken Soup from the stock market.

After I got my head injury, I stumbled through those first blurry years in survival mode. I messed up relationships, missed opportunities, and was generally miserable for other people to be around, demanding we turn off the music or weeping unexpectedly about Meghan Markle. I learned, above all, not to push myself. If I needed to sleep late and stare into space all afternoon in order to get an hour of writing done, then that was that. Forcing myself to concentrate or be in noisy places when I wasn't feeling well would just cause my symptoms to escalate.

But when I got home from the John Wayne Airport Hyatt Regency ballroom and looked through my notes and my workbook and my vision board, I realized that Canfield's entire point is to push yourself. I had written detailed timelines for everything from going camping more to deciding whether I want to have children to, yes, doubling my income. I really wanted to be this confident and more productive version of myself. I really did feel invigorated by the experience. But I still have headache days. And now, instead of accepting that I wasn't feeling well and giving myself time to rest, I was freaking out. I couldn't stop equating being sick with being lazy.

When I got Canfield on the phone, I asked him about the idea that there's always a reason or a lesson for illness, for acts of violence, or even for the deaths of young children. Does he ever struggle with this part of the Law of Attraction?

"I used to," he tells me. "I don't anymore." When someone has cancer at six and dies, he explains, it might be because their "mother's going to need to learn how to let go and not be attached." It's something he's come to accept. "Sometimes people come in and they have a short life and they're teaching us unconditional love."

He said it in such a serene tone, and it sounded so reasonable. But after I hung up, the trance broke. Sometimes kids need to die to teach their parents a lesson? What? I felt scrambled. I needed a reality check from my real family, not the one I had forged in the John Wayne Airport Hyatt Regency ballroom. So I called my dad.

As soon as I mentioned Chicken Soup for the Soul, he had a lot to say. Iconic brands of the 1990s happen to be his specialty. For many years he was worldwide managing director for Absolut Vodka at a leading ad agency, and he went on to teach branding at New York University. He pointed out that the cover of the original Chicken Soup book "ripped off" Campbell's Soup, to trigger "nourishing and comforting and warming" feelings. "That 'C'! That script!" When I told him Chicken Soup for the Soul now means pet food and streaming services and Redbox, he laughed. "This is like the dying-out company saying: How can we squeeze another twenty million dollars out of this brand?" he said. "Most companies are very careful. Pepsi doesn't get into this kind of stuff because they have a lot more to risk. These guys, they just want to keep using it as a springboard to some other business."

He started suggesting outrageous directions Chicken Soup could go in next: "The Chicken Soup pistol! It shoots noodles!" Then he confessed that he had only skimmed the original book, "just to see what the deal was." So I explained the Law of Attraction, and his tone changed.

"I suspect most people don't get that message," my dad said. "You're responsible for your own cancer? It's your fault?" He sounded stunned. A year earlier, he had radiation for prostate cancer. There was a pause.

"Some things are just bad luck!" he said finally, his voice rising. "You accidentally pick up a copy of 'Chicken Soup for the Soul,' and you get messed up for the rest of your life."

In his memoir, Canfield's son recalls telling his father something similar: "You know that this stuff doesn't actually help anyone, right?" He was 16 and had just attended one of his dad's seminars for the first time. "For twenty-five hundred dollars, you provide these people with a temporary escape from the pain of being human," he went on. "But once they leave this hotel, it's not like that. It's back to their bosses yelling at them, their wives nagging them, until they can't take it anymore and it's time for another seminar. I don't see how that's any different from being a drug dealer."

I'd already been feeling that pull, a deranged desire for more hugs and pep talks and grandiose plans. But I resisted the urge. This Chicken Soup for the Soul self-esteem comes with too much self-loathing. It proved to be a lucrative business model, preying on that need, that confidence mixed with fear. Today, though, Canfield's original idea seems like a distant memory, with so many spinoffs and products and unrelated enterprises piled on. Perhaps the only thing that has remained constant is the friction between brand and reality. Perhaps, as a meme stock, the company achieved its final form. Perhaps, for all this talk about success, Chicken Soup has manifested its own demise.

Amanda Chicago Lewis has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, WIRED, and Rolling Stone.

About Discourse Stories

Through our Discourse journalism, Business Insider seeks to explore and illuminate the day’s most fascinating issues and ideas. Our writers provide thought-provoking perspectives, informed by analysis, reporting, and expertise. Read more Discourse stories here .

Most popular

Main content

COMMENTS

Famous Quotations About Literature and Writing
Quotes About Writing and Literature. Henry Miller: "Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music-the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls, and interesting people. Forget yourself." Ezra Pound: "Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible ...
Literature Quotes (4111 quotes)
Literature Quotes. Quotes tagged as "literature" Showing 1-30 of 4,111. "What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.".
The 29 Best Quotes about literature
ignoring reality. morals. limits. View All Quotes. #2: "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." #3: "Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass.
The 45 most powerful literary quotes of all time
The most powerful literary quotes from famous books, poems and plays have the ability to stop you in your tracks. Whether you're hunting for the perfect sentiment to use in a speech or hoping to discover a bit of inspiration to get you through a difficult time, we highly recommend leafing through some of the greatest creative works of art.
Literature Quotes
Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Barbara W. Tuchman. Every man's memory is his private literature. Aldous Huxley. Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts ...
Literature Quotes
Tags: Fernando Pessoa. Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way. SALMAN RUSHDIE. Source. Tags: Salman Rushdie. For me, the purpose of literature is to preserve the stories of that which disappears easily.
45 Great Sourced Quotes about Books
The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking. - Christopher Morley, Saturday Review of Literature, 27 December 1924. If you enjoyed this selection of the best quotes about books, check out our inspirational 50 Great Sourced Author Quotes and our interesting facts about literacy and reading.
3.2: The Purpose of Literature
One of the primary goals of this course is to develop an understanding of the importance of literature as a vital source of cultural knowledge in everyday life. Literature is often viewed as a collection of made-up stories, designed to entertain us, to amuse us, or to simply provide us with an escape from the "real" world.
28 powerful literary quotes to inspire you in 2020
Charles Dickens. (Getty) "The truth isn't going to bend itself to suit you" - Malorie Blackman. "Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of ...
Quotes about Purpose of literature (27 quotes)
10 Written Quotes. It is not the purpose of literature to purvey news. For news consult the Almanac de Gotha. Votes: 4. Herman Melville. The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink. Votes: 3.
170 Writing Quotes by Famous Authors for Every Occasion
1. "If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.". — Stephen King. 2. "You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.".
The Purpose of Literature
Literature is often viewed as a collection of made-up stories, designed to entertain us, to amuse us, or to simply provide us with an escape from the "real" world. Although literature does serve these purposes, in this course, one of the ways that we will answer the question "What is literature for?" is by showing that literature can ...
Using Literary Quotations
Within a literary analysis, your purpose is to develop an argument about what the author of the text is doing—how the text "works.". You use quotations to support this argument. This involves selecting, presenting, and discussing material from the text in order to "prove" your point—to make your case—in much the same way a lawyer ...
Quotations
What this handout is about. Used effectively, quotations can provide important pieces of evidence and lend fresh voices and perspectives to your narrative. Used ineffectively, however, quotations can clutter your text and interrupt the flow of your argument. This handout will help you decide when and how to quote like a pro.
45+ Quotes About Writing from Famous Writers
Quotes About the Writing Process. From writers who know the drill, these quotes offer valuable insights and practical advice on the craft of writing, and the discipline and rigor it requires. 20. "Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose."
40+ Life-Changing Famous Literary Quotes • Fortune & Frame
When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too." —Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist. "We love the things we love for what they are." —Robert Frost, Hyla Brook. "How you love yourself is how you teach others to love you." ―Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey.
Purpose Quotes (7212 quotes)
Quotes tagged as "purpose" Showing 1-30 of 7,217. "Live the Life of Your Dreams: Be brave enough to live the life of your dreams according to your vision and purpose instead of the expectations and opinions of others.". ― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart. tags: brave , courage , dreams , inspiration , inspirational , inspirational ...
Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes About Literature
Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised. Gilbert K. Chesterton. Happiness, Literature, Mystery. Gilbert K. Chesterton (1909). "Heretics". If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not. Gilbert K. Chesterton.
Purpose Of Life Quotes (901 quotes)
Quotes tagged as "purpose-of-life" Showing 1-30 of 901. "The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.". ― Ralph Waldo Emerson. tags: helping-others , make-a-difference , purpose , purpose-of-life.
Tone
Tone is the attitude or general character of a piece of writing and is often related to the attitude of the writer or speaker. Mood refers specifically to the effect a piece of writing has on the reader . Mood is how a piece of writing makes you feel. While tone and mood are distinct literary devices, they are often closely related.
59 Inspirational Quotes About Purpose and Finding Meaning In Life
4. "The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.". - Ralph Waldo Emerson. 5. "If you have a strong purpose in life, you don't have to be pushed. Your passion will drive you there.".
"The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink."
The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink. ... Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. "The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink." ― T.S. Eliot tags: blood, ink, inspirational, literature. Read more quotes from T.S. Eliot. Share this quote: ...
Are quotes from books copyright infringement?
A: When it comes to using literary quotes in videos, especially in a commercial context, navigating copyright laws can indeed be complex. The concept of "fair use" is particularly relevant here. While fair use might cover the use of quotes to a certain extent, the commercial nature of your project, combined with the intent to promote these ...
The Long, Strange Decline of Iconic Chicken Soup for the Soul Brand
The original collection of 101 stories, interspersed with motivational quotes, poems, proverbs, and cartoons, would go on to sell 11 million copies and become a cultural touchstone, read by ...