Code error - why?

["Balakrishnan Ananthanarayanan" <balakris_ananth@email.com>]

I wrote a SAMPLE CODE - Hello.S to work for a cross-assembler mips-linux-as - 
but this is giving me an error message:
   ".data 
         quest: .asciiz "Hello World!"
    .text
    _start:
         la $a0, quest
         li $v0, 4
         syscall   "
       
The error messages are:
  " Hello.S line 5: illegal operands 'la' 
    Hello.S line 6: illegal operands 'li'"

Can anyone help? What is wrong?

-- 
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