Noun

Singular literature

Plural literatures

literature (plural literatures)

1. The body of all written works.
2. The collected creative writing of a nation, people, group, or culture.
3. All the papers, treatises, etc. published in academic journals on a particular subject.
4. Written fiction of a high standard.

   SF is rarely literature because the characters are so poorly realised. - Adam Cadre

Related terms

• letter
• literal
• literacy
• literate
• literary

Literature is the art of written works. Literally translated, the word means "acquaintance with letters" (from Latin littera letter), and therefore the academic study of literature is known as Letters (as in the phrase "Arts and Letters"). In Western culture the most basic written literary types include fiction and nonfiction.

Quotes regarding Literature

Contents

• 1 Sourced
• 2 Unsourced
• 3 Misattributed
• 4 External links

Sourced

• That doesn't matter. Don't you give up on this [library] card. Because books can be solid gold. Yeah, the great ones have gotten us through the nights for centuries. Just give a writer an hour to hook you and if he can't wish him the best of luck and find someone else.
  • Anthony Hopkins, Hearts in Atlantis movie

• La literatura es una batalla silenciosa en la que uno ha de ganar, o de perder; palmo a palmo, un territorio quo no es suyo con armas que no le pertenecen.

(Literature is a silent battle in which everyone has to win or lose, a territory that is not yours, not with weapons that belong to him.)

• Juan José Millás

Unsourced

• [Literature is] an organised violence committed on ordinary speech.
  • Roman Jakobson

• From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend to read it.
  • Groucho Marx on Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge by Sidney J. Perelman

• Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
  • Oscar Wilde

• If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come.
  • Raymond Chandler

• It's not that he 'bites off more than he can chew' but he chews more than he bites off.
  • Clover Adams on Henry James

From Wikiquote under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Mon Jul 6 18:27:11 2009