Literature Quotes

‘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.’ – C. S. Lewis

‘Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.’ – Vladimir Nabokov

‘Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.’ – Boris Pasternak

‘Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions of humanity.’ – P. T. Barnum

‘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, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.’ – Christopher Hitchens

‘Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.’ – Barbara W. Tuchman

‘It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.’ – Salman Rushdie

‘It’s in literature that true life can be found. It’s under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.’ – Gao Xingjian

‘Literature allows us to be open, to listen, and to be curious.’ – Tracy K. Smith

‘The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.’ – Robert Louis Stevenson

‘I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.’ – T. S. Eliot

‘Every man’s memory is his private literature.’ – Aldous Huxley

‘The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.’ – Margaret Atwood

‘Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music – the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.’ – Henry Miller

‘A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.’ – Walter Scott

‘Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.’ – Ezra Pound

‘Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.’ – Carlos Fuentes

‘In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.’ – Andre Maurois

‘Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.’ – Virginia Woolf

‘There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.’ – George Washington

‘The crown of literature is poetry.’ – W. Somerset Maugham

‘There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.’ – Mao Zedong

‘Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.’ – Samuel Butler

‘If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.’ – Andrew Denton

‘Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.’ – Thomas Huxley

‘What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.’ – Paulo Coelho

‘My mother is not a woman of ordinary culture. She knows literature and speaks Spanish better than I do. She even corrected my poems and gave me advice when I was studying rhetoric.’ – Jose Rizal

‘The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.’ – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

‘I don’t know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.’ – E. B. White

‘Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.’ – Helen Keller

‘Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.’ – Martin Luther King, Jr.

‘Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.’ – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

‘Graphic novels are not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw, it seems a shame to choose one. I think it’s better to do both.’ – Marjane Satrapi

‘We shall suffer no attachment to literature, no taste for abstract discussion, no love of purely intellectual theories, to seduce us from our devotion to the cause of the oppressed, the down trodden, the insulted and injured masses of our fellow men.’ – George Ripley

‘From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.’ – Jhumpa Lahiri

‘Literature is always about bygone times. It’s always looking back in time with a certain perspective. I look at bygone life which no longer exists, and as I said, I look at it without nostalgia but without anger, either. I look at it with criticism and with compassion. I look at it with curiosity.’ – Amos Oz

‘Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.’ – Oscar Wilde

‘The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.’ – Jim Rohn

‘We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.’ – Seamus Heaney

‘At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.’ – Ruth Bader Ginsburg

‘Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.’ – Cyril Connolly

‘Wherever you look there are inspirations, books, literature, paintings, landscapes, everything. Just living is an inspiration.’ – Gavin Rossdale

‘All literature is gossip.’ – Truman Capote

‘Istanbul is inspiring because it has its own code of architecture, literature, poetry, music.’ – Christian Louboutin

‘The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.’ – Milton Friedman

‘Asian literature is evolving with the people. It’s always a reflection on what’s happening to the culture at large.’ – Kevin Kwan

‘Science fiction and fantasy is a kind of literature that embodies the highest aspirations of the human race.’ – Harlan Ellison

‘Journalism is literature in a hurry.’ – Matthew Arnold

‘I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.’ – John Steinbeck

‘I think myself I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense… But it’s unquestionably good escapist literature, and I think I should rather like it if I were sitting in an air-raid shelter or recovering from flu.’ – Georgette Heyer

‘Literature plays a huge role in examining difficult real-life issues.’ – Angie Thomas

‘If I could have gone on describing to you the beauties of this region, who knows but I might have made a fine addition to the literature of our age?’ – Robert Gould Shaw

‘Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.’ – Anton Chekhov

‘It is not Kafka’s fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.’ – Hermann Hesse

‘When literature exists, perhaps we do not notice how important it is, but when it does not exist, our lives become coarsened and brutal. For this reason, I am proud of my profession, but also aware of its importance.’ – Mo Yan

‘Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.’ – Charles Bukowski

‘The concept of the robot encapsulates both aspects of technology. On one hand it’s cool, it’s fun, it’s healthy, it’s sexy, it’s stylish. On the other hand it’s terrifying, it’s alienating, it’s addictive, and it’s scary. That has been the subject of much science-fiction literature.’ – Thomas Bangalter

‘A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.’ – Dario Fo

‘Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.’ – D. H. Lawrence

‘There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.’ – Lawrence Durrell

‘When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen.’ – Samuel Lover

‘Psychology, unlike chemistry, unlike algebra, unlike literature, is an owner’s manual for your own mind. It’s a guide to life. What could be more important than grounding young people in the scientific information that they need to live happy, healthy, productive lives? To have good relationships?’ – Daniel Goldstein

‘The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible.’ – Washington Irving

‘I tell my students, it’s not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What’s more difficult is to identify with someone you don’t see, who’s very far away, who’s a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.’ – Chinua Achebe

‘I think the more you understand myths, the more you understand the roots of our culture and the more things will resonate. Do you have to know them? No, but certainly it is nice to recognise how deeply these things are embedded in our literature, our art.’ – Rick Riordan

‘American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.’ – Christopher Dawson

‘Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.’ – Toni Morrison

‘For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian.’ – Ama Ata Aidoo

‘He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.’ – Joseph Heller

‘Literature is dangerous: it awakens a rebellious attitude in us.’ – Mario Vargas Llosa

‘When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.’ – James Earl Jones

‘The medical literature tells us that the most effective ways to reduce the risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and many more problems are through healthy diet and exercise. Our bodies have evolved to move, yet we now use the energy in oil instead of muscles to do our work.’ – David Suzuki

‘It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn’t wait to leave.’ – Anatole Broyard

‘I believe that the power of literature is stronger than the power of tyranny.’ – Ma Jian

‘Without literature my life would be miserable.’ – Naguib Mahfouz

‘There is a beauty in nature and culture that we no longer have access to. Those things you can’t forget, you embroider… The further you tell, the further you travel from truth, which means, of course, that literature is a lie.’ – W. G. Sebald

‘Art and literature should help us to get out of our mental cocoons.’ – Elif Safak

‘I lead no party; I follow no leader. I have given the best part of my life to careful study of Islam, its law and polity, its culture, its history and its literature.’ – Muhammad Iqbal

‘A high culture is the self-consciousness of a society. It contains the works of art, literature, scholarship and philosophy that establish a shared frame of reference among educated people.’ – Roger Scruton

‘The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual – when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions – it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.’ – Isaac Bashevis Singer

‘In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.’ – Jorge Luis Borges

‘The history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the irruption of events in favor of stable structures.’ – Michel Foucault

‘Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts.’ – Yahoo Serious

‘The knowledge of languages was very useful. I have a university degree in foreign languages and literature.’ – Emma Bonino

‘Seeds and nuts are indispensable for cardiovascular health. The protective properties of nuts against coronary heart disease were first recognized in the early 1990s, and a strong body of literature has followed, confirming these original findings.’ – Joel Fuhrman

‘Literature is the immortality of speech.’ – August Wilhelm von Schlegel

‘It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.’ – Richard Dawkins

‘The cinema occupies an important place in the overall development of art and literature.’ – Kim Jong Il

‘Science fiction is a unique literature. Science fiction is the first literature that says, ‘Tomorrow is going to be different than yesterday, it’s going to be a lot different.” – David Gerrold

‘It is good to be well connected with English language, literature and history, but the knowledge of our culture and roots is equally important.’ – Gulzar

‘The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.’ – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

‘I think the blues is the best literature that we as blacks have created since we’ve been here. I call it our ‘sacred book.’ What I’ve attempted to do is to mine that field, to mine those cultural ideas and attitudes and give them to my characters.’ – August Wilson

‘Caribbean literature only has to be true to itself. It doesn’t need colonialism or imperialism. It’s always been vibrant.’ – Marlon James

‘At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.’ – Mary Oliver

‘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

‘I recommend for any basic course on the Beat Generation to familiarize yourself with ‘The Idiot,’ Prince Myshkin. He was Dostoyevsky’s idea of the most beautiful human being he could imagine, the creation of a saint in literature.’ – Allen Ginsberg

‘For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are re-tellings of human experience.’ – A. Bartlett Giamatti

‘Readers are hungry to have their stories in the world, to see mirrors of themselves if the stories are about people like them, and to have windows if the stories are about people who have been historically absent in literature.’ – Jacqueline Woodson

‘All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.’ – Ernest Hemingway

‘Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.’ – Thomas Bulfinch

‘Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.’ – Phillips Brooks

‘Bad literature is a form of treason.’ – Joseph Brodsky

‘If you read a lot of Chinese literature, there has always been very strong women figures – warriors, swordswomen – who defended honor and loyalty with the men. So, it’s not new to our culture – it’s always been very much a part of it. It’s good that now the Western audience would have a different image of the Chinese women.’ – Michelle Yeoh

‘Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.’ – Herta Muller

‘The best work of literature to represent the American Dream is ‘The Great Gatsby’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It shows us how dreaming can be tainted by reality, and that if you don’t compromise, you may suffer.’ – Azar Nafisi

‘Well, the oil, the oil spot, if you will, is a, is a term in counterinsurgency literature that connotes a peaceful area, secure area. So what you’re trying to do is to always extend that, to push that out.’ – David Petraeus

‘Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.’ – F. Sionil Jose

‘The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.’ – Alfred North Whitehead

‘The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.’ – Willa Cather

‘If we can’t stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.’ – Evelyn Waugh

‘Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.’ – Gilbert K. Chesterton

‘Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature.’ – George Ade

‘The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.’ – George Orwell

‘I’m not a great writer of literature. I’m an entertainer.’ – Clive Cussler

‘Every culture has contributed to maths just as it has contributed to literature. It’s a universal language; numbers belong to everyone.’ – Daniel Tammet

‘I think it is a quest of literature throughout the ages to describe the human condition.’ – Werner Herzog

‘Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.’ – David Lodge

‘Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.’ – Sinclair Lewis

‘I would ask: Given the nature of free-market capitalism – where the rule is to rise to the top at all costs – is it possible to have a financial industry hero? And by the way, this is not a pop-culture trend we’re talking about. There aren’t many financial heroes in literature, theater or cinema.’ – Martin Scorsese

‘My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.’ – Margaret Atwood

‘I’m a professor of comparative literature, among other things, so I’m able to read in a couple of other languages, and I understand that not everyone is, not everyone can, although it is quite stunning how many people do read Spanish in the United States, but moving between languages is also extremely helpful.’ – Judith Butler

‘But I also think all of the great stories in literature deal with loneliness. Sometimes it’s by way of heartbreak, sometimes it’s by way of injustice, sometimes it’s by way of fate. There’s an infinite number of ways to examine it.’ – Tom Hanks

‘I think art, especially literature, has the particular power to immerse the viewer or reader into another world. This is especially powerful in literature, when a reader lives the experience of the characters. So if the characters are human and real enough, then readers will feel empathy for them.’ – Jesmyn Ward

‘I have passed English medical examinations in Hong Kong… In my youth, I experienced overseas studies. The languages of the West, its literature, its political science, its customs, its mathematics, its geography, its physics and chemistry – all these I have had the chance to study.’ – Sun Yat-sen

‘My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection.’ – Ryszard Kapuscinski

‘What hadn’t been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past.’ – Robert Nozick

‘Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.’ – Roland Barthes

‘I never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.’ – Lois Lowry

‘Facts are not science – as the dictionary is not literature.’ – Martin H. Fischer

‘I’ve been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.’ – Dashiell Hammett

‘Postmodernism cost literature its audience.’ – Scott Turow

‘I am a straight, non-alcoholic, non-partying guy who speaks straight. I have no knowledge of literature. This is my language of communication, and what I see, what I observe, I reflect.’ – Yo Yo Honey Singh

‘Plot is to literature what individual holes are to miniature golf.’ – Stanley Elkin

‘Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.’ – William Inge

‘Encourage good music and art and literature in your homes. Homes that have a spirit of refinement and beauty will bless the lives of your children forever.’ – Ezra Taft Benson

‘In literature there was always an epiphany – a tingling moment, sometimes buried – the pearl around which the whole work formed.’ – Lisa Brennan-Jobs

‘Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.’ – Thornton Wilder

‘Remarks are not literature.’ – Gertrude Stein

‘The literature associating inequality with social instability and poor health outcomes is pretty convincing.’ – Jordan Peterson

‘When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man’s name live for thousands of years.’ – Denis Diderot

‘A large body of literature suggests that wellbeing is intimately linked to attachment – not only to other people, but also to the natural world.’ – George Monbiot

‘When I went to college, I majored in American literature, which was unusual then. But it meant that I was broadly exposed to nineteenth-century American literature. I became interested in the way that American writers used metaphoric language, starting with Emerson.’ – Marilynne Robinson

‘A great speech is literature.’ – Peggy Noonan

‘As my grandmother Shamshad Begum was a noted classical singer, who had settled down in London, we used to receive several people from the music, film and literature fraternity at home. People like Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Mehboob Khan, Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, K. Asif etc., used to visit us regularly.’ – Saira Banu

‘I lived in Italy for quite a while and married an Italian woman. While there, I immersed myself in the complete culture: the music, art, literature, film, food, and history. It’s easy to fall in love with. As a country, Italy does a good job of holding onto its rich traditions and culture. There’s a real lack of embracing history in America.’ – Mike Patton

‘I had the impression from reading English literature that British women were great beauties, and I only had seen Julie Christie, and she was gorgeous and sexy. I don’t know whether it was just my taste, but when I got to London, I went two years without seeing a truly attractive woman. A lot of near misses.’ – Walter Kirn

‘Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet’s job. The rest is literature.’ – Jean Cocteau

‘I consider Yoda to be just about the most evil character that I’ve ever seen in the history of literature.’ – David Brin

‘Literature… is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.’ – Thomas Mann

‘I’m a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that’s been with us a long time – and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.’ – John Green

‘A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.’ – Ezra Pound

‘In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this – death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.’ – Terry Pratchett

‘When you read the psychedelic literature, there is a distinction between the so-called natural psychedelics and synthetic psychedelics that are artificially produced.’ – Stanislav Grof

‘Literature offers not just a window into the culture of diverse regions, but also the society, the politics; it’s the only place where we can keep track of ideas.’ – Reza Aslan

‘Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.’ – C. S. Lewis

‘Literature has its own life, even in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.’ – Heinrich Boll

‘I think the genre of comics sometimes overtakes the medium, and people assume that they are kind of frivolous. If you have a good, strong story teller, they can be as affecting as any character in literature. Period.’ – Chip Kidd

‘The sheer diversity of literature in the Bible is one of the secrets of its continuing popularity through the centuries. There is something for all moods and many different cultures. Its message is not buried in religious jargon only accessible to either believers or scholars, but reflects the issues that people struggle with in daily life.’ – John Drane

‘More than art, more than literature, music is universally accessible.’ – Billy Joel

‘There is a tradition that sees journalism as the dark side of literature, with book writing at its zenith. I don’t agree. I think that all written work constitutes literature, even graffiti.’ – Eduardo Galeano

‘It is a law woven into the nature of man, attested by history, by science, by literature and art, and by dally experience, that strength of mind and force of character are the supreme rulers of human affairs.’ – Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II

‘Literature has become my life.’ – Mikhail Bulgakov

‘I do not believe in sex distinction in literature, law, politics, or trade – or that modesty and virtue are more becoming to women than to men, but wish we had more of it everywhere.’ – Belva Lockwood

‘There is only one school of literature – that of talent.’ – Vladimir Nabokov

‘We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.’ – Antonin Artaud

‘I believe economic growth should translate into the happiness and progress of all. Along with it, there should be development of art and culture, literature and education, science and technology. We have to see how to harness the many resources of India for achieving common good and for inclusive growth.’ – Pratibha Patil

‘I left school at sixteen – I was fed up and restless. The only thing that interested me at school was English language and literature, but I didn’t have Latin, and so couldn’t go on to university. So I went to a few drama schools, not studying seriously; I was mostly in love at the time and tied up with that.’ – Harold Pinter

‘The power of literature does not lie in resonance with the particular but the way that the particular speaks to a broader, more universal truth.’ – Clint Smith

‘Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience… from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.’ – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

‘All literature is political.’ – LeVar Burton

‘When they were done downloading all the information off each hard drive, they took all the computers, all the literature, and loaded everything into a big white truck and left.’ – Sherman Austin

‘Being a writer in Iceland, you get rewarded all the time: People really do read our books, and they have opinions; they love them, or they hate them. At the average Christmas party, people push politics and the Kardashians aside and discuss literature.’ – Hallgrimur Helgason

‘I always think of Ireland as a place for complex ideas and prose. I like Irishness. I like Irish culture and Irish literature.’ – David Baddiel

‘Good literature is absolutely necessary for a society that wants to be free.’ – Mario Vargas Llosa

‘In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.’ – Charles Baudelaire

‘I write speculative fiction, and in my view, speculative fiction is really just a very intense version of the work of literature in general.’ – Ken Liu

‘I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly – poetry, literature – this speculative attitude toward life.’ – Rafael Moneo

‘I love literature deeply. I view books as sacred things, and in writing my story, I’m going to do my best to honor the form that has played such a huge part in shaping who I am.’ – Flea

‘I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn’t simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.’ – Margaret Atwood

‘There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.’ – Benjamin N. Cardozo

‘I’m not into high literature, but I think all my books are literate.’ – James Herbert

‘Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.’ – Steven Pinker

‘Polish literature can be interesting to the world. I’m happy to be the trailblazer.’ – Olga Tokarczuk

‘The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.’ – Oscar Wilde

‘If the future, as imagined in literature, is really the present taken to extremes, then the past is also the present, but boiled down.’ – Walter Kirn

‘In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.’ – Northrop Frye

‘I like literature, not opinions. I hate opinions.’ – Peter Handke

‘I’m into fashion because it contains the mood of the day, of the moment – like music, literature, and art.’ – Zaha Hadid

‘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.’ – Henry Miller

‘I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.’ – Jonathan Frakes

‘It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found – indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.’ – Lafcadio Hearn

‘It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.’ – Virginia Woolf

‘One of the biggest problems in literature is the lack of subtlety.’ – Mo Yan

‘Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There’s an objective and a subjective camera, like there’s a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.’ – Manuel Puig

‘We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.’ – T. S. Eliot

‘Hemingway’s remarks are not literature.’ – Gertrude Stein

‘Literature – novels, plays, and poems – can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.’ – Jane Smiley

‘Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don’t think so… I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games.’ – Haruki Murakami

‘I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we’re living in a story.’ – Naomi Shihab Nye

‘I just walk how I walk. But I am also really inspired by the physical drama in silent films from the beginning of the 20th century – it’s ice cold and unreachable, like the stare of a sniper! I guess this look is something new that I brought into the world of fashion: a dark and dramatic, 19th century Russian literature and drama inspired look.’ – Sasha Pivovarova

‘I was a chemistry major, but I’m always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I’ve brought scientific thinking to literature. There’s been very little gratitude for this.’ – Kurt Vonnegut

‘If you read Islamic creationist literature, it’s pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.’ – Richard Dawkins

‘I knew I had to write about Canada. I just could not find in literature any examples of the immigrant experience that I’ve had.’ – Shyam Selvadurai

‘England opened up the world of literature for me. Not really having a world of my own, I made up for my disinheritance by absorbing the world of others… I loved them: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens… I adopted them passionately.’ – Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

‘For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.’ – Matthew Arnold

‘One of the great themes in American literature is the individual’s confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.’ – Justin Cronin

‘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.’ – Chinua Achebe

‘American literature has always been immigrant.’ – Salman Rushdie

‘What society doesn’t realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don’t now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.’ – Doris Lessing

‘Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.’ – Wole Soyinka

‘I have taught Philosophy, Religious Studies, English Literature, Cultural Studies, Writing and Publishing Studies, Critical Thinking.’ – Mark Fisher

‘It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.’ – Alfred North Whitehead

‘Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.’ – George Saunders

‘What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.’ – E. M. Forster

‘We seem to live a culture that doesn’t want blemishes. The vision of most beautiful models… airbrushed in order to be seen as perfect, infects our notion of how literature should be written.’ – Alberto Manguel

‘There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature.’ – Stephen Stills

‘Literature is news that stays news.’ – Ezra Pound

‘What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.’ – John Cheever

‘Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.’ – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

‘Even in the most peaceful communities, an appetite for violence shows up in dreams, fantasies, sports, play, literature, movies and television. And, so long as we don’t transform into angels, violence and the threat of violence – as in punishment and deterrence – is needed to rein in our worst instincts.’ – Paul Bloom

‘Literature is the question minus the answer.’ – Roland Barthes

‘I was already devouring literature and I was the ripe old age of 15 when I decided to be an actor. I just thought plays were the most fantastic way of expressing life. I thought I’d discovered Shakespeare – ‘hey, there’s a new guy in town, don’t know if anyone’s read him.’ I was just excited about the whole thing, from day one.’ – Chiwetel Ejiofor

‘I want to knock on people’s doors and preach. But I also meet a lot of people on planes and in restaurants, and you can preach with them or place some literature with them.’ – Serena Williams

‘Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.’ – A. E. Housman

‘Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.’ – Paul Valery

‘Magic Realism is not new. The label’s new, the specific Latin American form of it is new, its modern popularity is new, but it’s been around as long as literature has been around.’ – Terri Windling

‘Although there is a very large literature, still growing almost daily, on the Chinese calendar, its interest is, we suggest, much more archaeological and historical than scientific.’ – Joseph Needham

‘But picketing – picketing for or against something, and handing out literature – these are conspicuously formal actions. They have to be understood as indirect communication.’ – Tony Conrad

‘Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature.’ – Ravi Shankar

‘Chinatown is tremendously interesting… It’s a part of the city that hasn’t really been explored in crime literature or in any general literature. It’s as though Chinatown didn’t exist. People write about New York without mentioning Chinatown at all.’ – S. J. Rozan

‘Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.’ – Ellen Glasgow

‘No matter what is happening in life or in the world – war, natural disaster, poor health, pain, the death of loved ones – if existence is filled with art, music and literature, life will be fulfilling, a joy.’ – Karen DeCrow

‘I was always drawn to teachers who made class interesting. In high school, I enjoyed my American and English literature classes because my teachers, Jeanne Dorsey and Dani Barton, created an environment where interaction was important.’ – Ellen Ochoa

‘I was editing Canadian Literature. I didn’t want to let Canadian Literature go, so they reached a nice compromise by which I received half a professor’s salary.’ – George Woodcock

‘I wanted the press to become something of a movement. Not a movement committed to a particular ‘ism’, but a gathering together of writers with an aesthetic approach to literature and with a lust for excellence.’ – John Metcalf

‘I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in south Louisiana. I went to a state university. I taught literature, wrote a novel that was the novel I wanted to write, and got a couple of good reviews but no real traction. I had no idea how to get a job in TV.’ – Nic Pizzolatto

‘I’d probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I’ve always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing.’ – Stephen Fry

‘I went to University College London and read English literature, then realised if you were interested in story and narrative, film was the way to go.’ – Alison Owen

‘South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less-than-fully-human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison.’ – J. M. Coetzee

‘The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper – whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.’ – Sarah Orne Jewett

‘In college, I started to get soaked in the materials. Subsequently, I worked with R.W.B. Lewis, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks on a history of American literature – I did that for seven or eight years. In the course of that work, my interest in Faulkner deepened and has been sustained ever since.’ – David Milch

‘Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.’ – Gore Vidal

‘The stories of the first refugees that I ever came across in literature – that lots of people ever came across – were in ‘The Iliad’: the escape of Aeneas with his father on his back, the Trojans, from their burning city, and the defeat of their kingdom and what they had to do to try and find safety.’ – Vanessa Redgrave

‘I have concluded that Literature is no proper pursuit for a gentleman and that Writing ought never to be consider’d but as an elegant Accomplishment to be indulg’d in with infrequency and Discrimination.’ – H. P. Lovecraft

‘Size has nothing to do with literature. All legs are long enough to touch the ground, and all books are big enough to fill their covers.’ – Walter Kirn

‘Virginia Woolf’s literature really transformed my own ideas about how to formally represent the passage of time and how time affects us. Specifically, the benchmarks are ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ ‘To the Lighthouse’ and ‘Orlando,’ all of which have time as a central conceit.’ – David Lowery

‘The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.’ – Vaclav Havel

‘Maud Gonne was – excuse me, Maud Gonne was central to the Gaelic literature revival. She wrote plays, and she sang.’ – Derrick Jensen

‘I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.’ – Marguerite Duras

‘What women represent to the male is, historically, a big burden. It’s a lovely dream, but it’s the stuff of literature, art, and everything. Living up to what the male psyche projects onto the female is the stuff of books. You’d need a lot more than an interview to go into it!’ – Diane Lane

‘The literature of menopause is the saddest, the most awful, and the most medical of all genres. You’re sleepless, you’re anxious, you’re fat, you’re depressed – and the advice is always the same: take more walks, eat some kale, and drink lots of water. It didn’t help.’ – Sandra Tsing Loh

‘Art should walk a tightrope. That’s what art should be. Art should be dangerous. You can’t be scared to say something with it. People love to talk about how comics are real art and real literature, so why not use these characters to talk about real things, even if it is dangerous?’ – Jeff Lemire

‘The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.’ – W. G. Sebald

‘The Russian yearning for the meaning of life is the major theme of our literature, and this is the real point of our intelligentsia’s existence.’ – Nikolai Berdyaev

‘Milan Kundera was my literature professor. He’s a Francophile, so he made us read French novels like ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses,’ which I made a version of many years later as ‘Valmont.” – Milos Forman

‘Sometimes I want to have a mental book burning that would scour my mind clean of all the filthy visions literature has conjured there. But how to do without ‘The Illiad?’ How to do without ‘Macbeth?” – Geraldine Brooks

‘I feel that good fantasy will always be in demand. I think children especially need literature that helps them escape from the real world, which is very scary to them right now.’ – R. L. Stine

‘Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: ‘The poem’s sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.” – Terry Eagleton

‘Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory.’ – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

‘Not a word that I have written about Yugoslavia is denounceable, not a single one. It is literature.’ – Peter Handke

‘I read a couple of books a week. About 80 percent of what I read is contemporary literature for adults. The other 20 percent is made up of non-fiction and children’s books.’ – Kate DiCamillo

‘In Britain, the great hidden secret of talking animals and children’s literature is how political it was in its bones, beneath the obvious cuteness.’ – Andrew O’Hagan

‘The two genres that probably take the most flack in literature – they are young adult and romance right now. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these are genres that provide places for women to express desire and love for adventure, for the opportunity to be placed to heroic roles.’ – Leigh Bardugo

‘No one bothered reading the books and understanding – and again, I’m not being high-falutin’ about it – but I think our books are great literature with great metaphors of real life dealing with fears and hopes.’ – Avi Arad

‘If you read some of the recent literature, there is no such thing as whiteness. But we made it up. Not my original thought, but it’s true. Because you were born white, you have advantages systemically, culturally, psychology there. They have been built up for hundreds of years. Many people can’t look at it.’ – Gregg Popovich

‘Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer.’ – Jose Saramago

‘The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.’ – Lionel Trilling

‘England gave me a language and literature, the basis of what I am as a writer, but when I started writing more directly about my own experience, it wasn’t England so much as what went before.’ – Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

‘I think if you’re impregnated with good literature, with good culture, you’re much more difficult to manipulate, and you’re much more aware of the dangers that powers represent.’ – Mario Vargas Llosa

‘This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.’ – Virginia Woolf

‘All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.’ – Charles J. Shields

‘I wanted to be a poet. I fell in love with poetry around eight years old, but not through literature. Instead, it came through hip-hop lyrics and my obsession with reading liner notes. Queen Latifah’s ‘Black Reign’ is the album that stands out the most.’ – Jason Reynolds

‘The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.’ – Richard Dawkins

‘Literature for me isn’t a workaday job, but something which involves desires, dreams and fantasy.’ – Antonio Tabucchi

‘When I come to England, I don’t claim England; I don’t own it. I feel a great kinship because of the literature and the landscape. I have great affection for Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin, but there’s still this distance: looking on at what I’m admiring, separate from what I am. And that’s OK.’ – Derek Walcott

‘I first came to Russia because of the culture, literature and music… and my interest in the 19th-century revolutionary spirit of Herzen, Bakunin and Kropotkin. Russia is a wonderful place to bring new clowns because Russians give back a wonderful response.’ – Patch Adams

‘Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.’ – Octavio Paz

‘In literature, the ghost is almost always a metaphor for the weight of the past. I don’t believe in them in the traditional sense.’ – Tabitha King

‘I grew up loving computers and math, actually. I also loved English literature and French, but I became obsessed with computers when the Apple II was coming out.’ – Parker Harris

‘Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.’ – T. S. Eliot

‘Some things in literature are inexplicable.’ – Halldor Laxness

‘In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern.’ – Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

‘Literature isn’t a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.’ – Philip Roth

‘We really didn’t have any literature telling us it was a good thing to be a woman artist. When I was trained, there were no precedents, and that was something to get really angry about.’ – Miriam Schapiro

‘Representative institutions are as much a part of the true Briton as his language and his literature.’ – Annie Besant

‘Malaria was one of the epidemic diseases with the most comprehensive records in traditional Chinese medical literature.’ – Tu Youyou

‘Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.’ – John Cheever

‘A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.’ – John Henry Newman

‘What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.’ – Henry Miller

‘What good is a writer if he can’t destroy literature? And us… what good are we if we don’t help as much as we can in that destruction?’ – Julio Cortazar

‘I’d somehow always thought of the classics of literature as something apart from me, something to do with academic life and not something you enjoyed.’ – Alan Bennett

‘Our most fundamental social need, it turns out, to my amazement, is love. Now, I’m not a hippie-dippie whatever. If you look at the literature, our most fundamental need for children is an environment of maximum love, and that they can be hugged, kissed, and loved. That’s what humanises us and allows us to realise our whole dimension.’ – David Suzuki

‘I have a vision of artists putting into film, drama, literature, music, and paintings great themes and great characters from the Book of Mormon.’ – Ezra Taft Benson

‘I’m not a good writer, and I don’t care. Unfortunately, after I left college, I didn’t have time much for literature. I wish I did. Most of the time I read documents, and that’s not going to help your writing. But I’m a very logical writer, and you can’t get out of me. Once I’ve nailed you, you’re finished.’ – Norman Finkelstein

‘I wrote about my journey through the country of Serbia exactly as I have always written my books, my literature.’ – Peter Handke

‘Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.’ – Juan Ramon Jimenez

‘If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.’ – Ezra Pound

”The Lady’s World’ should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women’s opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.’ – Oscar Wilde

‘I was hugely formed by stories I was told as a child whether that was in a book, the cinema, theatre or television and probably television more than any medium is what influenced me as a child and formed my response to literature, story-telling and, therefore, the world around me.’ – David Tennant

‘Literature is air, and I’m suffocating in mediocrity.’ – Armand Assante

‘I take a certain pride in having maintained a reputation for fast copy throughout my newspaper career. Fast-breaking stories left my typewriter in a hurry. Not great literature, perhaps, but fast, and usually accurate.’ – Walter Cronkite

‘I think all literature should be read as comparative literature. And I think we should write out of what we know, but in the expectation that we can be changed at any moment by something we have yet to discover.’ – Margo Jefferson

‘Being working class, my parents thought, ‘Ian’s going to uni, the first in the family,’ and I’d do dentistry or accountancy. I was going to do accountancy; then I got a C in Economics and thought, ‘Why am I doing this?’ The only thing I was interested in was books and literature.’ – Ian Rankin

‘I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever.’ – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

‘And Marx spoke of the fact that socialism will be the kingdom of freedom, where man realizes himself in a way that humankind has never seen before. This was an inspiring body of literature to read.’ – Albert Maltz

‘I am happy that I could contribute my bit and enable the use of colloquial Telugu words in mainstream films and literature.’ – Tanikella Bharani

‘Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.’ – Hermann Hesse

‘When I came to America, I was already a writer, already published in Bosnia. I was planning to go back, but I had no choice but to stay here after the civil war, so I enrolled at Northwestern in a master’s program and studied American literature.’ – Aleksandar Hemon

‘The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.’ – Terry Eagleton

‘Language as a communication tool is the primary element from which literature is created. Even in pre-literate societies, it exists as songs, riddles, or epics that are chanted.’ – F. Sionil Jose

‘It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author’s experience worked out literally.’ – Gore Vidal

‘Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.’ – Ezra Pound

‘I was going to be a writer, and that turned into journalist. And then that turned into a career in children’s literature, which turned into early childhood education, which turned into psychology, which turned into premed, which turned into nursing school, which turned into communication, which turned into marketing and advertising.’ – Damaris Phillips

‘Every generation looks at literature through the lens of their own experience, but with the Bible, everyone gets apprehensive and thinks it’ll be too stuffy.’ – Walter Kirn

‘The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.’ – Elizabeth Drew

‘The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.’ – Daniel J. Boorstin

‘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.’ – Samuel Lover

‘The Bible is literature, not dogma.’ – George Santayana

‘The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.’ – Robert Louis Stevenson

‘I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.’ – Harold Bloom

‘Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.’ – Herbert Gold

‘Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.’ – William Kennedy

‘Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism.’ – Josef Skvorecky

‘In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.’ – Amy Lowell

‘To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.’ – Lawrence Clark Powell

‘When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush were scratching around in caves.’ – Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf

‘The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one’s family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.’ – Nathaniel Hawthorne

‘Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.’ – J. G. Ballard

‘The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.’ – Stephen Leacock

‘A people’s literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.’ – Edith Hamilton

‘A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug.’ – George Borrow

‘A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.’ – Christopher Hampton

‘Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.’ – Francoise Sagan

‘The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn’t make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.’ – Gertrude Stein

‘There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.’ – Thomas Carlyle

‘The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.’ – Jean Cocteau

‘Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.’ – John Morley

‘What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably… have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.’ – W. Somerset Maugham

‘Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.’ – Nelson Algren

‘To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.’ – Ernst Fischer

‘If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.’ – Don DeLillo

‘The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.’ – Tristan Tzara

‘What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.’ – Harold Bloom

‘Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.’ – Thomas Huxley

‘In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.’ – S. I. Hayakawa

‘Literature is the denunciation of the times in which one lives.’ – Camilo Jose Cela

‘Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.’ – William O. Douglas

‘Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.’ – Gao Xingjian

‘In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write?’ – Gao Xingjian

‘I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.’ – Ben Okri

‘Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration.’ – James Connolly

‘Here, you can walk into a bookstore and pick up a Bible or Christian literature and learn. Over there, they are lucky if they have one Bible for a whole village.’ – Michael Scott

‘Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.’ – Paul de Man

‘Literature is my calling To hold up the mirror to my countrymen comes natural to me; and in the open field of invention I am not without hopes of giving them pleasure.’ – Thomas Edward Brown

‘Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas! – D. H. Lawrence’ – D. H. Lawrence

‘I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe.’ – Elizabeth George

‘One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer.’ – Caroline Kennedy

‘The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.’ – Hugh Blair

‘In America, the only truly popular art form is the movies. Most people consider painting a hobby and literature, schoolwork.’ – Brad Holland

‘The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature.’ – George Pierce Baker

‘When the drama attains a characterization which makes the play a revelation of human conduct and a dialogue which characterizes yet pleases for itself, we reach dramatic literature.’ – George Pierce Baker

‘The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn… tired of common sense and civilization.’ – F. L. Lucas

‘Bobby Fischer has an enormous knowledge of chess and his familiarity with the chess literature of the USSR is immense.’ – Boris Spassky

‘I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother’s side of the family in general were interested in literature.’ – Kenneth Koch

‘All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what’s cool.’ – Steven Brust

‘The concept of industry domination of regulatory agencies was well known and documented in the literature by the 1960s.’ – Nick Johnson

‘What we value about music and literature are the moments that they create in our minds when we encounter them.’ – Stephan Jenkins

‘The elegance and the quality – the talent is always in the literature. I start with the word and I base everything on that. It doesn’t make any difference to me.’ – Kate Mulgrew

‘As society diversifies, the number of people who read literature is decreasing. It will be difficult for readers to digest my ideas through literature.’ – Cao Yu

‘It was a combination of an intense interest in children’s literature, which I’ve always had, and the feeling that I’d just have a go and see if I could do it.’ – Penelope Lively

‘It has always seemed to me a pity that the young people of our generation should grow up with such scant knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, its wealth and variety, its freshness and its imperishable quality.’ – James Loeb

‘The day is past when schools could afford to give sufficient time and attention to the teaching of the ancient languages to enable the student to get that enjoyment out of classical literature that made the lives of our grandfathers so rich.’ – James Loeb

‘Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.’ – Joan D. Vinge

‘I’ve always said that music is like literature.’ – Jose Carreras

‘There is grand romance in The Lord of the Rings. It’s an important part of epic literature.’ – Kevin J. Anderson

‘The Arab world also won the Nobel with me. I believe that international doors have opened, and that from now on, literate people will consider Arab literature also. We deserve that recognition.’ – Naguib Mahfouz

‘A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he is stupid; particularly deep philosophers are usually shallow thinkers; in literature, talents not much above the average are usually regarded by their contemporaries as geniuses.’ – Robert Musil

‘There have been a number of us working very, very hard to bring myth and fairy tales into public consciousness, through fantasy literature and other media. I hope we’re succeeding in some small way.’ – Terri Windling

‘When you kill somebody in the movies, it matters, whereas in literature it can be allegorical.’ – Barbet Schroeder

‘As it was, I realized choosing the study of Chinese literature as my life’s work was probably a mistake.’ – Eric Allin Cornell

‘When I was young my Father used to tell me that the two most worthwhile pursuits in life were the pursuit of truth and of beauty and I believe that Alfred Nobel must have felt much the same when he gave these prizes for literature and the sciences.’ – Frederick Sanger

‘Journalism students need to understand it and need a solid background in the liberal arts, in sociology, economics, literature and language, because they won’t get it later on.’ – Harrison Salisbury

‘Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.’ – Michael N. Castle

‘I’ve been missing Japanese literature so much of late.’ – Utada Hikaru

‘Literature precedes genre.’ – Rick Moody

‘My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature – science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.’ – Frederik Pohl

‘I get up at an unholy hour in the morning my work day is completed by the time the sun rises. I have a slightly bad back which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.’ – David Eddings

‘Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.’ – Marilyn Hacker

‘I wish to share and pass down some of my generation’s traits, and encourage young people to create their own art, music, and literature.’ – David Amram

‘Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics.’ – David Amram

‘Our literature is in great shape.’ – James Welch

‘Like most kids growing up, I had a very wide interest. I was interested in everything. I tried to take advantage of everything, from the sciences to music to writing to literature.’ – Michael P. Anderson

‘Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.’ – Walter Jon Williams

‘As I grew up, I was interested in other areas, too, especially literature. It became a major love of mine. Later, it became a difficult choice for me as to whether to major in music or literature. It wasn’t until my 30s that I began a profession in music.’ – Tom Glazer

‘I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren’t really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening.’ – Ken Thompson

‘Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.’ – Paul Ricoeur

‘I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they’d never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!’ – Philip Pullman

‘Examples one finds in the philosophical literature are somebody who’s seen the trial of a child of theirs, where they’re being proved guilty of some crime that would drive the parent into a depression, maybe a suicidal depression.’ – Robert Nozick

‘I’ve always loved films, always. I studied literature and I went to Columbia in New York and I went to Paris for part of one year and ended up staying there.’ – Jim Jarmusch

‘At this point we’ve answered about every question you could possibly imagine about Deep Space Nine, so we do this thing called Theatrical Jazz, where we do a show of bits and pieces of things from plays and literature, poetry… stuff that we like. It’s fun.’ – Rene Auberjonois

‘I began as a boy with artistic talent… as a visual artist… I thought that was what I’d become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature.’ – Russell Banks

‘Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.’ – Barry Commoner

‘There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.’ – Gyorgy Ligeti

‘In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King’s, especially the discovery of French and German literature.’ – Patrick White

‘Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face – for me that would be deserving of an award.’ – Elfriede Jelinek

‘Well, you sort of get out of the pool room, you get out of the Marine Corps, you get out and read some literature, you become involved with people who also want to know and are ready to share some ideas about literature and thoughts, and it becomes nourished that way.’ – Harvey Keitel

‘What fascinated me mostly about Mickey Cohen was that he, in his later years, hired someone to help him to comprehend literature, to help him to read better, to understand words better.’ – Harvey Keitel

‘He taught me literature, and he actually taught me how to read. He was my personal mentor.’ – Shimon Peres

‘I think I was a good student, because I jumped over a school. My main interest was basically history and literature. Sports were basically basketball and swimming at a pool. I was so happy.’ – Shimon Peres

‘For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.’ – Guillermo Cabrera Infante

‘American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.’ – Guillermo Cabrera Infante

‘Gossip is more popular than literature.’ – Hugh Leonard

‘I studied English literature; I took 2 independent religion classes, but I wasn’t a religion major really.’ – Maggie Gyllenhaal

‘My family pleaded with me to forget literature and do something sensible, such as find some sort of useful work.’ – Lloyd Alexander

‘Take the time to discover how African-Americans have had a great impact on this country. In science, education, literature, art, and politics.’ – Lynn Swann

‘When I entered college, it was to study liberal arts. At the University of Pennsylvania, I studied English literature, but I fell in love with broadcasting, with telling stories about other people’s exploits.’ – Andrea Mitchell

‘I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art.’ – Anne Stevenson

‘I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.’ – Anne Stevenson

‘That helped me to keep in touch with myself and to keep in touch with this really quite extraordinary language and literature into which I had pushed a little way.’ – Robert Fitzgerald

‘The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.’ – Ryszard Kapuscinski

‘This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession.’ – Ryszard Kapuscinski

‘Underground literature only began in the ’70s, when technical developments made it possible. Before that, we were involved in a game with the censors. That was our struggle.’ – Ryszard Kapuscinski

‘Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.’ – George Henry Lewes

‘The object of Literature is to instruct, to animate, or to amuse.’ – George Henry Lewes

‘All good Literature rests primarily on insight.’ – George Henry Lewes

‘All bad Literature rests upon imperfect insight, or upon imitation, which may be defined as seeing at second-hand.’ – George Henry Lewes

‘Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without.’ – George Henry Lewes

‘Personal experience is the basis of all real Literature.’ – George Henry Lewes

‘It is unhappily true that much insincere Literature and Art, executed solely with a view to effect, does succeed by deceiving the public.’ – George Henry Lewes

‘I gradually became persuaded that the subjects, without intending to, had revealed to me a basic truth about markets that was foreign to the literature of economics.’ – Vernon L. Smith

‘Comics? Honestly, that’s more a matter of nostalgia for me. I think most of that energy has gone to my love of literature and my love of film.’ – Jonathan Lethem

‘With Dick Smith there, and the words of Peter Shaffer… they’ve got to be the most beautiful descriptions in music ever written on film or in literature. And we could hear the music accompanying the words… What more can you ask for?’ – F. Murray Abraham

‘Because I don’t have to be careful of people’s feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I’m teaching writing.’ – Tobias Wolff

‘In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.’ – Jacques Derrida

‘Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.’ – Mark Haddon

‘Jesus claimed He had the power to raise himself from the dead and His followers would be raised from the dead. That’s a unique claim in the literature of religion.’ – Josh McDowell

‘There are even more statues of Robert Burns than of any other figure in world literature. Indeed if we discount figures of religion, then only Christopher Columbus has more statues than he worldwide.’ – Len G. Murray

‘I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart.’ – Douglas Sirk

‘If you say city to people, people have no problem thinking of the city as rife with problematic, screwed-up people, but if you say suburbs – and I’m not the first person to say this, it’s been said over and over again in literature – there’s a sense of normalcy.’ – Eric Bogosian

‘I don’t think any novelist should be concerned with literature.’ – Jacqueline Susann

‘It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature.’ – John Drinkwater

‘I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don’t get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists.’ – Kathy Acker

‘For Mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.’ – Thomas Bulfinch

‘There are two methods for the literary study of any book – the first being the study of its thought and emotion; the second only that of its workmanship. A student of literature should study some of the Bible from both points of view.’ – Lafcadio Hearn

‘The proverbial philosophy of a people helps us to understand more about them than any other kind of literature.’ – Lafcadio Hearn

‘It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.’ – Lafcadio Hearn

‘I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.’ – Lafcadio Hearn

‘For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one’s literary education very incomplete.’ – Lafcadio Hearn

‘Contemporary literature in the West has shown some signs of ethical change.’ – Lafcadio Hearn

‘And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s.’ – Thomas Keneally

‘You get below the Mason-Dixon line and you have some of the best music, culture, the two races, the literature, and it’s so rich.’ – Robert Duvall

‘Literature is about as unnecessarily necessarily as tableware or ironed shirts.’ – Peter Bichsel

‘I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies.’ – Francis Ford Coppola

‘When we have spiritual reading at meals, when we have the rosary at night, when we have study groups, forums, when we go out to distribute literature at meetings, or sell it on the street corners, Christ is there with us.’ – Dorothy Day

‘And literature frequently rises to heights that make it international.’ – Irving Langmuir

‘Were I more conversant with literature and its great names, I could go on quoting them ad infinitum and acknowledge my debt for the merit you have been generous enough to find in my work.’ – Knut Hamsun

‘You know, 20 years… the films of television when it started, the literature, radio in communist countries, they’re clean as a whistle; there was no violence, no sex, no drugs, nothing.’ – Milos Forman

‘The study of social progress is today not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.’ – Alfred de Vigny

‘During half a century of literary work, I have endeavoured to introduce the philosophy of evolution into the sphere of literature, and to inspire my readers to think in evolutionary terms.’ – Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

‘I had all the normal interests – I played basketball and I headed the school paper. But I also developed very early a great love for music and literature and the theater.’ – Carlisle Floyd

‘I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large.’ – Kenzaburo Oe

‘Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher.’ – Antonio Tabucchi

‘Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience.’ – Carl Clinton Van Doren

‘Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel.’ – Carl Clinton Van Doren

‘Indeed; peace literature is almost exclusively read, though to good effect, by pacifists, while what is needed is the canvassing of those who have not so far been won to the cause.’ – Fredrik Bajer

‘There are those who believe we have need of more literature, of a large international publishing house, of a great peace newspaper, or the like. I am rather skeptical about this idea.’ – Fredrik Bajer

‘And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature.’ – Jerry Pournelle

‘I just happen to like the work. I like preparing for a role. I like reading. I like analyzing. I like literature. I like emotions. I like working with other actors.’ – Elle Macpherson

‘Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.’ – David Brin

‘Even before Europe was united in an economic level or was conceived at the level of economic interests and trade, it was culture that united all the countries of Europe. The arts, literature, music are the connecting link of Europe.’ – Dario Fo

‘How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world’s main religions?’ – Polly Toynbee

‘I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.’ – Stephen Greenblatt

‘A lot of performing instincts are involved in the business of direction, but so is analysis and having a sense of literature.’ – Trevor Nunn

‘I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.’ – Leslie Fiedler

‘In my teens, I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more, so I thought I should be some sort of a scholar.’ – Trevor Nunn

‘To those of you who study history, economics, sociology, literature and language I present the challenge of the utilization of the enormous resources in our grasp to the problem of creating a genuinely good life for yourselves and your children.’ – Polykarp Kusch

‘Few are there that will leave the secure seclusion of the scholar’s life, the peaceful walks of literature and learning, to stand out a target for the criticism of unkind and hostile minds.’ – Felix Adler

‘Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.’ – Andrzej Wajda

‘In the same period, Polish literature also underwent some significant changes. From social-political literature, which had a great tradition and strong motivation to be that way, Polish literature changed its focus to a psychological rather than a social one.’ – Andrzej Wajda

‘I think Maus I is better than Maus II. The standard here is whether or not it’s as good as a great book of prose literature and by that standard, no, it’s not that great.’ – Ted Rall

‘The amateur is very rare in French literature – as rare as he is common in our own.’ – Lytton Strachey

‘In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national – it is universal.’ – Lytton Strachey

‘In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought.’ – Lytton Strachey

‘How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question.’ – Lytton Strachey

‘English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind.’ – Lytton Strachey

‘Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.’ – Rita Dove

‘For years, I had heard about the lack of interest in literature in the U.S. and I had complained about it. I failed to understand how people could fail to be moved by art.’ – Rita Dove

‘The genre has moved into this commercial aspect of itself, and ignored this extraordinarily rich literature that’s filed everywhere else except under travel.’ – Robyn Davidson

‘To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn’t just part of our civic responsibility. To me it’s an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.’ – David McCullough

‘There are, it is true, at present no great prizes in literature such as are offered by the learned professions, but there are quite as many small ones – competences; while, on the other hand, it is not so much of a lottery.’ – James Payn

‘The idea of bringing young people up to Literature is doubtless calculated to raise the eyebrows almost as much as the suggestion of bringing them up to the Stage.’ – James Payn

‘In all highly civilised communities Pretence is prominent, and sooner or later invades the regions of Literature.’ – James Payn

‘Cultivating literature as I do upon a little oatmeal, and driving, when in a position to be driven at all, in that humble vehicle, the ‘bus, I have had, perhaps, exceptional opportunities for observing their mutual position and behaviour; and it is very peculiar.’ – James Payn

‘There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.’ – J. M. Coetzee

‘In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life.’ – J. M. Coetzee

‘I didn’t choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place.’ – Helen Dunmore

‘I studied literature design and fashion design.’ – Danielle Steel

‘Tardiness in literature can make me nervous.’ – Manuel Puig

‘I didn’t choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.’ – Manuel Puig

‘The narrative of serial art works more like music than like literature.’ – Sol LeWitt

‘Film is our literature, so we should tell stories that are apropos of our culture, in that we can learn something about ourselves.’ – David Strathairn

‘Internationalism on the other hand admits that spiritual achievements have their roots deep in national life; from this national consciousness art and literature derive their character and strength and on it even many of the humanistic sciences are firmly based.’ – Christian Lous Lange

‘That a literature in our time is living is shown in that way that it debates problems.’ – Georg Brandes

‘The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective.’ – Harold Bloom

‘The establishment, the newspapers, they try to create something called Scottish literature, but when people are actually going to write, they are not going to necessarily prescribe to that, they’ll write what they feel.’ – Irvine Welsh

‘There’s all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it’s a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society.’ – Irvine Welsh

‘SF is the literature of the theoretically possible, and F is the literature of the impossible.’ – Piers Anthony

‘It’s different in Scotland. People who come to readings are more interested in literature as such, but the readership in general is really quite diverse. It’s a cliche, but it’s said that people who read my books don’t read any other books, and you do get that element.’ – Irvine Welsh

‘Just why I sent it to the publishers would be hard to say, but when I had finished it I felt that it was literature, because it is real and because it was well written. And I know that the world wants such things.’ – Mary MacLane

‘Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There’s been an extraordinary advance.’ – Clifford Geertz

‘I was trained in the ’50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley’s soul and such things.’ – Clifford Geertz

‘I’ve often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.’ – Clifford Geertz

‘We’re not in love with Literature all the time – especially when you have to teach it every day.’ – Howard Nemerov

‘I didn’t make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature.’ – Naguib Mahfouz

‘The Nobel Prize has given me, for the first time in my life, the feeling that my literature could be appreciated on an international level.’ – Naguib Mahfouz

‘Judaism has always been a strong interest of mine. My two sons speak Hebrew and are familiar with the scriptures and with rabbinic literature. This is the way we live.’ – Herman Wouk

‘Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it’s still coming to computer science.’ – Larry Wall

‘It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein.’ – Raymond Queneau

‘I think it is a mistake to identify a movie according to its language, as if movies were literature.’ – Jean-Jacques Annaud

‘There is a broad cultural current that conveys the idea that a film is like a football team, it represents a nation, it is illustrated literature, filmed radio. These are outdated concepts, totally out of touch with today’s realities.’ – Jean-Jacques Annaud

‘During our stay in London for the first time I was able to establish personal contact with some of the organic chemists, whose work I knew and admired from the literature. I found them most gracious and helpful.’ – George Andrew Olah

‘Time the great destroyer of other men’s happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor.’ – Isaac D’Israeli

‘Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of wealth.’ – Isaac D’Israeli

‘One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.’ – George Saintsbury

‘I never wanted to become an actress because I’d read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like, why they said all the strange things they did.’ – Julie Walters

‘Literature is analysis after the event.’ – Doris Lessing

‘Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.’ – Gilbert Murray

‘It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.’ – Henry James

‘Don’t ask to live in tranquil times. Literature doesn’t grow there.’ – Rita Mae Brown

‘Literature – creative literature – unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.’ – Gertrude Stein

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

‘Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.’ – Iris Murdoch

‘Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive.’ – Charlotte Perkins Gilman

‘In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.’ – S. I. Hayakawa

‘On almost anything someone does in the computer business, you can go back in the literature and prove someone had done it earlier.’ – Ken Olsen

‘Intimate relationships are a gold mine for literature to explore, to understand, to describe.’ – A. B. Yehoshua

‘Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo clinic.’ – Roy Blount, Jr.

‘Again, both literature and philosophy work by appealing to certain reigning idols.’ – Morris Raphael Cohen

‘Let philosophy resolutely aim to be as scientific as possible, but let her not forget her strong kinship with literature.’ – Morris Raphael Cohen

‘Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.’ – Wallace Stevens

‘In thus pointing out certain respects in which philosophy resembles literature more than science, I do not mean, of course, to imply that it would be well for philosophy if it ceased to aim at scientific rigor.’ – Morris Raphael Cohen

‘Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life’s true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.’ – Franz Grillparzer

‘Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature.’ – Rita Dove

‘Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.’ – Edward Dahlberg

‘It is doubtless one of Aristotle’s great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.’ – Gilbert Murray

‘Literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist.’ – Morris Raphael Cohen

‘I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature.’ – Sidney Hook

‘Lastly, literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist.’ – Morris Raphael Cohen

‘Acquiring a repertoire in these days, when the vocal literature is so immense, so overwhelming, that the student with sense will devote all his energies to work and not imagine himself a martyr to art.’ – Alma Gluck

‘Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author’s soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.’ – Robert Benchley

‘First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.’ – Mason Cooley

‘Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It’s endless. I’m sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds.’ – Nathalie Sarraute

‘Practically every movie that shows the pope or even a bishop as a character, and in much of western literature of the last 300 or 400 years, these are portrayed as awful figures.’ – Michael Novak

‘In French literature, you can choose a la carte; in Spanish literature, there is only the set meal.’ – Jose Bergamin

‘An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.’ – Raymond Chandler

‘Reverence is fatal to literature.’ – E. M. Forster

‘As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.’ – Wallace Stevens

‘The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.’ – Samuel Butler

‘The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature.’ – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

‘What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That’s what their substance is.’ – Jonathan Miller

‘I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.’ – Henry Adams

‘The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.’ – Charles Horton Cooley

‘The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.’ – Annie Dillard

‘It’s interesting to note that all revolutionary literature was written by pastors. These guys were involved in a revolution against the mightiest power that the world had ever seen.’ – Randall Terry

‘Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.’ – Robert Staughton Lynd

‘Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics.’ – Yevgeny Yevtushenko

‘Naturally I drew register a little exaggerated, in order to create something new in the sense of a sublime literature that sings of despair only in order to oppress the reader, and make him desire the good as the remedy.’ – Comte de Lautreamont

‘There’s a wealth of literature out there which, hopefully, will be, you know, exploded in the future, and I personally find it very rewarding to be involved with classic storytelling, and sort of legendary characters.’ – Sean Bean

‘I never appreciated ‘positive heroes’ in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more ‘productive’ literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.’ – Jose Saramago

‘Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn’t primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.’ – Stieg Larsson

‘I also really liked playing Mr. Tumnus in ‘Narnia’. I got to play my favorite character in children’s literature, which I loved. You don’t get the chance to do that in other jobs.’ – James McAvoy

‘Music enriches people’s lives in the same way paintings and literature do. Everybody deserves that.’ – Victoria Wood

‘With literature, sometimes a book is presented in the media as being say, a Muslim story or an African story, when essentially it’s a universal story which we can all relate to it, no matter what race or social background we come from.’ – Shawn Johnson

‘I think any good literature, whether it’s for children or for adults, will appeal to everybody. As far as children’s literature goes, adults should be able to read it and enjoy it as much as a child would.’ – Amber Benson

‘Tower Records was a place to meet your friends, your co-workers or a place to meet new friends who shared a common love of music, literature and all things cultural.’ – Colin Hanks

‘I think it’s a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it’s literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it’s romance, or a beach book – in short, it’s something unworthy of a serious critic’s attention.’ – Jennifer Weiner

‘I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.’ – Robert Caro

‘Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they’re constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human.’ – Keira Knightley

‘People have different views of how you deal with different issues in literature, and, frankly, long may it last that there is a range of views.’ – Kate Mosse

‘All prizes have a role, if they are run with integrity and with a clear focus on reading and quality writing. I don’t think any of them is necessary, but they all play an incredibly important role in building a body of literature, in introducing new authors to new readers, and extending reading.’ – Kate Mosse

‘I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.’ – Jeffrey Eugenides

‘Children’s books are often seen as the poor relation of literature. But children are just as demanding as adult readers, if not more so. I should know. I’m a children’s writer myself.’ – David Walliams

‘Romeo is the most misunderstood character in literature, I think. He’s hardcore to play because he’s displaying the characteristics of Hamlet at the beginning, and, well, then everything else happens.’ – Alan Cumming

‘I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years in the Islamic republic.’ – Azar Nafisi

‘My passion has always been books and literature, and teaching.’ – Azar Nafisi

‘My mother’s father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay’s ‘Lays of Ancient Rome.’ While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I’d be Horatius keeping the bridge.’ – Bernie Taupin

‘My books are shelved in different places, depending on the bookstore. Sometimes they can be found in the Mystery section, sometimes in the Humor department, and occasionally even in the Literature aisle, which is somewhat astounding.’ – Carl Hiaasen

‘Literature gives us a window into other people’s experiences in other places, in other times, so I thought it would be really interesting to investigate how different people had written about motherhood, and childhood.’ – Natalie Merchant

‘There’s a whole form of literature in India which talks about the quest for the perfect man by a woman, where every woman looks for a perfect man but only ends up with half that.’ – Shah Rukh Khan

‘The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.’ – Adam Johnson

‘I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.’ – Carlos Fuentes

‘There isn’t a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don’t know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap.’ – Sherman Alexie

‘I don’t think there’s a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don’t think of it as being class literature.’ – Sherman Alexie

‘A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature.’ – Sherman Alexie

‘I thought I’d been condescended to as an Indian – that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing young adult literature.’ – Sherman Alexie

‘There’s a long history of anthropomorphic animals in Japanese literature. The so-called ‘funny animal scrolls’ were the first narratives in Japanese history, and the heroes of many folk tales have animals as their companions.’ – Stan Sakai

‘A lot of my stories are inspired by Japanese folklore or literature or movies: I’ve done stories based on Kabuki and Noh plays, and on Kurosawa’s ‘Yojimbo’ movies.’ – Stan Sakai

‘The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it’s a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.’ – Jeffrey Eugenides

‘When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.’ – Joseph Gordon-Levitt

‘As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.’ – David Eagleman

‘The causes of crime are very complicated. But there is a very big literature, as you know, about single parenthood in crime, about race in crime, and about poverty in crime.’ – Bill Bennett

‘I think enough cannot be said for what you can discover through literature. So I think that was probably my most valued characteristic as a teenager.’ – Julia Roberts

‘The most watched programme on the BBC, after the news, is probably ‘Doctor Who.’ What has happened is that science fiction has been subsumed into modern literature. There are grandparents out there who speak Klingon, who are quite capable of holding down a job. No one would think twice now about a parallel universe.’ – Terry Pratchett

‘As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both ‘Moby Dick’ and ‘The Great Gatsby’ were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared.’ – Michael Cunningham

‘A script is not a piece of literature it’s a process.’ – Abel Ferrara

‘I was really exposed to great old-time literature – the classics, the poetic realists like Strindberg and Ibsen and all those guys. I was really inspired by all those guys. That’s when writing became a primary focus.’ – Kurt Sutter

‘So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.’ – E. O. Wilson

‘I am interested in things happening around me, and I need to understand what’s going on in other artistic sectors like music and literature.’ – Tadao Ando

‘Remember, I have a Ph.D. in English literature.’ – Henry Louis Gates

‘My dad’s side of the family had lots of artists and musicians. There’s an emotional, quite sentimental quality to Slavic culture. It’s very open, it loves art, it loves music, it loves literature. It’s very warm, it’s very up, it’s very down. I would celebrate that.’ – Nick Clegg

‘Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you’ll behave to other people.’ – Barbara Kingsolver

‘I didn’t read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.’ – Haruki Murakami

‘I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.’ – Haruki Murakami

‘I graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with an English literature degree and travelled for a year before going to work.’ – Natalie Massenet

‘The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.’ – Chinua Achebe

‘I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.’ – Tom Wolfe

‘The world of science and the world of literature have much in common. Each is an international club, helping to tie mankind together across barriers of nationality, race and language. I have been doubly lucky, being accepted as a member of both.’ – Freeman Dyson

‘Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.’ – Russell Baker

‘There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism’s problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance.’ – Russell Baker

‘The writer studies literature, not the world.’ – Annie Dillard

‘The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation.’ – James Buchan

‘To make a love story, you need a couple of young people, but to reflect on the nature of love, you’re better off with old ones. That is a fact of life and literature – and of the novel ever since it fell in love with love in the 18th century.’ – James Buchan

‘What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of ‘The Naked and the Dead’ and American literature’s leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of ‘The Village Voice.” – James Wolcott

‘When I was at school, I was terrible at algebra and arithmetic, but I was always the best at English and literature. And acting, of course.’ – Joan Collins

‘You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art, we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich, when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war, literature was careful not to do the same, which is why writers began to reflect on the stories they told and to make readers part of their texts. I do the same.’ – Michael Haneke

‘Films for TV have to be much closer to the book, mainly because the objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience, after seeing this version, to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is that TV can never really be any form of art, because it serves audience expectations.’ – Michael Haneke

‘My works are Chinese literature, which is part of world literature. They show the life of Chinese people as well as the country’s unique culture and folk customs.’ – Mo Yan

‘I am also well aware that literature only has a minimal influence on political disputes or economic crises in the world, but its significance to human beings is ancient.’ – Mo Yan

‘I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.’ – John le Carre

‘More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.’ – John le Carre

‘I think you can find all the elements that you can find in great literature in mundane experiences.’ – Harvey Pekar

‘Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.’ – Christopher Hitchens

‘There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don’t.’ – Doris Lessing

‘Holden Caulfield is the best character in literature, period.’ – Josh Hutcherson

‘My master’s degree was in English literature.’ – Sylvia Browne

‘I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming – but he had no literary judgment.’ – V. S. Naipaul

‘When I began I thought that literature was contained within a bubble that somehow floated above the world commented upon by newspapers. But I became more and more interested in trying to include some of that world within my work.’ – Ian Mcewan

‘The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There’s a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject.’ – Ian Mcewan

‘Believe it or not, my introduction to scary literature was ‘Pinocchio.’ My mother read it to me every day before naptime when I was three or four. The original ‘Pinocchio’ is terrifying.’ – R. L. Stine

‘I love to read different books on completely different subjects at the same time. I cannot focus on one. I read a few pages of literature, then I jump to philosophy and at the same time I’m reading biographies of Mahler.’ – Gustavo Dudamel

‘I read Russian literature a lot.’ – Mikhail Baryshnikov

‘Literature is an easier way to study acting, because then you can take any kind of spin.’ – Shia LaBeouf

‘It’s funny, in literature no one ever goes to the lavatory.’ – Tom Baker

‘I took two fiction-writing courses in college and majored in literature. I felt that I had a knack though I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a talent. But it scared me. I felt it was a childish thing wanting to write and that I would forget about it eventually.’ – Ben Fountain

‘Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?’ – Karen Thompson Walker

‘A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That’s what literature is: a story that does more than tell a story, a story that manages to reflect in some way the multilayered texture of life itself.’ – Karen Thompson Walker

‘Explain to me, please, why in our literature and art so often people absolutely incompetent in this field have the final word.’ – Mstislav Rostropovich

‘The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That’s why so many bad novels can become good movies, like ‘Jaws’ or ‘The Godfather.” – Alexander Payne

‘Until I read Anne Frank’s diary, I had found books a literal escape from what could be the harsh reality around me. After I read the diary, I had a fresh way of viewing the both literature and the world. From then on, I found I was impatient with books that were not honest or that were trivial and frivolous.’ – Alexandra Fuller

‘I’m not writing great literature. I’m writing commercial fiction for people to enjoy the stories and to like the characters.’ – Kathy Reichs

‘I wish I had read more and majored in literature rather than theatre. I think I would have been a better artist for it. I am trying to play catch-up now.’ – Idina Menzel

‘Literature has drawn a funny perimeter that other art forms haven’t.’ – Jonathan Safran Foer

‘It is, of course, traditional in children’s literature to get rid of the parents.’ – Anthony Horowitz

‘There’s certainly a large literature around baseball in the U.S.’ – Chad Harbach

‘I left school at 16 but I wish I’d gone to university – I think I would have studied English literature. I had a knack for that. But I don’t think you have the kind of wisdom at 16 to make that decision.’ – Brendan Coyle

‘Secret families are really the bedrock issue of Western literature.’ – Tayari Jones

‘The adolescent protagonist is one of the hallmarks of American literature.’ – Tayari Jones

‘I ought to at least be able to read literature in French. I went to an enlightened grade school that started us on French in fifth grade, which meant that by the time I graduated high school I had been at it for eight years.’ – Lev Grossman

‘When I got to college I simply decided that I could speak French, because I just could not spend any more time in French classes. I went ahead and took courses on French literature, some of them even taught in French.’ – Lev Grossman

‘It’s a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.’ – Lev Grossman

‘I got my first whiff of what big-time adult literature was all about when I was in 8th grade. I got it from Mark Linn-Baker. You know – the guy from ‘Perfect Strangers.” – Lev Grossman

‘I went to college at Harvard, then did three years of graduate school at Yale. At both places I studied comparative literature. People find it odd that I went to both Harvard and Yale, and I guess it is odd, but that’s just what people did where I grew up.’ – Lev Grossman

‘One of the great joys of my job is that you spend a huge amount of time investigating different areas of literature.’ – Stephen Daldry

‘I know not everyone starts out reading high literature. If you read enough you might be drawn to some other things, so maybe those vampire books are what they call ‘gateway books.’ I just coined that term. I don’t know if there’s a thing called ‘gateway books.” – Josh Radnor

‘I think it’s restrictive to typecast myself as a novelist because I enjoy other forms of expression. I love literature and I love cinema.’ – Julia Leigh

‘I love the way you can fall in love with a piece of literature; how words alone can get your heart doing that.’ – Laura Marling

‘Each person has a literature inside them.’ – Anna Deavere Smith

‘I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called ‘global literature’ is going.’ – David Mitchell

‘I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can’t help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it’s taught writers.’ – David Mitchell

‘I would have to say the novel ‘War and Peace’ influenced me more than any other book. This greatest of novels demonstrated to me the enormous power of literature and fired me up with a desire to become a writer, to participate in what I considered then to be the greatest of all endeavors.’ – Douglas Preston

‘A movie is painting, it’s photography, it’s literature – because you have to have the screenplay – it’s music. Put a different soundtrack to a comedy and it’s a tragedy. A movie combines all those forms and forces you to pay attention for two hours with a group of people.’ – Paula Patton

‘My favorite literature to read is fairly dry history. I like the framework, and my imagination can do the rest.’ – Andrew Bird

‘I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels… a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.’ – Seth Grahame-Smith

‘If American literature has a few heroes, Miller is one of them. He refused to name names at the McCarthy hearings, and his play ‘The Crucible’ analysed the hearings in the context of a previous American mass psychosis, the Salem witch trials.’ – Jane Smiley

‘Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.’ – Martin Amis

‘With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.’ – Terry Eagleton

‘People may think of Southern humor in terms of missing teeth and outhouse accidents, but the best of it is a rich vein running through the best of Southern literature.’ – Roy Blount, Jr.

‘People around the world now complain about stressors everyday, and the word shows up throughout professional and lay literature. But in reality there is no such thing as a stressor. Why not? Because nothing has the inherent power to provoke stress.’ – Andrew J. Bernstein

‘Much that is great in literature is an acquired taste, and you have to acquire it in the first place. Our job as parents is essentially to pass on the enthusiasm we had for the things we loved. That’s how we’ll get them to fall in love with reading in the first place and, hopefully, to stay in love with it.’ – Michael Morpurgo

‘It would be hard to exaggerate Ernest Hemingway’s influence over American literature, but his influence on our lives is probably larger still.’ – Arthur Phillips

‘Escapist literature gets a bad rap. But I think escape is important for a lot of people in a lot of places.’ – Lois McMaster Bujold

‘If you look at the purported dangers of salt or fat, there is no consensus of support in scientific literature. So I would ask first: ‘Is it possible to have an informed government that actually follows the science?’ From what I’ve seen, it’s not likely.’ – Tim Ferriss

‘I have a lot of feminist idols. My favorite thing about growing up in Arkansas – well, not favorite but something I’ve always felt grateful for – was that I really had to dig for what I could. There was no Internet. There wasn’t tons of feminist literature floating around.’ – Beth Ditto

‘There were no vampires of note in Western literature until about the 18th century. But they tell us where we park our anxieties, whether its over-powerful women, death or damnation. We make our own monsters.’ – Deborah Harkness

‘The world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature.’ – Deborah Harkness

‘If critics of ‘readable fiction’ want literature to change the ways people dream, they need first to come down from the mountain and speak to the people.’ – Graham Joyce

‘I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.’ – Kate Atkinson

‘You’re meant to think somehow that literature, in espousing eternal values, is kind of normal and balanced and reasonable. When it fact it’s anything but.’ – Errol Morris

‘I grew up in an non-athletic family, where my parents were interested in music, in literature, in education and art.’ – Bill Walton

‘I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.’ – Richard Ford

‘Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can’t tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.’ – Richard Ford

‘I’ve loved ‘Vanity Fair’ since I was 16 years old. You know, we’re all colonial hangovers in India, steeped in English literature. It is one of these novels that I read under the covers at my convent boarding school in Simla.’ – Mira Nair

‘The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.’ – Leslie Jamison

‘I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That’s my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.’ – Karl Marlantes

‘I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.’ – Robert Metcalfe

‘In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.’ – Julian Barnes

‘I have quite a few different Bibles. Having rejected my parents’ religion, I still think the King James Bible is the most important work of literature in English. None of us can help being influenced by it.’ – Ken Follett

‘I’m not so sure that horror should be dismissed as something less than literature.’ – Whitley Strieber

‘The truth is, everything ultimately comes down to the relationship between the reader and the writer and the characters. Does or does not a character address moral being in a universal and important way? If it does, then it’s literature.’ – Whitley Strieber

‘Science fiction is an amazing literature: plot elements that you would think would be completely worn out by now keep changing into surprising new forms.’ – Connie Willis

‘If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else’s shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.’ – Jim Leach

‘An action movie should, like any other, follow the narrative traditions of literature. That means there should be subtlety, a slow build and a gradual bringing together of all the separate threads of the plot. To see all of it coming together slowly is very rewarding for the audience.’ – Shane Black

‘I never set out to write literature; I set out to tell stories. And some of my work may be very raunchy and very bloodthirsty – but life, for me, is a violent thing.’ – Wilbur Smith

‘At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham’s ‘Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.’ To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester’s works and the little urn that contains my mother’s ashes.’ – Wilbur Smith

‘Literature throws us many great heroes. Real life invariably outdoes them.’ – Wilbur Smith

‘Well, there’s just some universal truths in a way that I’ve just observed to be true. You read Voltaire. You read modern literature. Anywhere you go, there’s these observations about romantic love and what it does people, and these rotten feelings that rarely are people meaning to do that to each other.’ – Feist

‘I think the class divide is going to change. I think a lot more working class people are going to get published. It is really class ridden, literature.’ – Denise Mina

‘Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise.’ – Ali Smith

‘I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.’ – Philippa Gregory

‘I wish that the adults who are ‘in power’ cared more about what their children read. Books are incredibly powerful when we are young – the books I read as a child have stayed with me my entire life – and yet, the people who write about books, for the most part, completely ignore children’s literature.’ – Gabrielle Zevin

‘For kind of sophisticated art I’m interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don’t think makes for good literature.’ – Junot Diaz

‘I know for a fact that – it’s just the way our biases work now in the industry of literature, but certainly a short story collection does not receive the same kind of attention as a novel.’ – Junot Diaz

‘You see Michelangelo and Picasso and you read literature. I had some innate inchoate yearning for that, but I never really saw where I would fit in. That’s called art. And then something happened to pop music, which is that it became art under the hand of the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan and some other people.’ – David Chase

‘I read, read enormously on all different fields of Islamic thought, from philosophy to Islamic literature, poetry, exegeses, knowledge of the Hadith, the teachings of the prophet. That’s how I trained myself. And then I was appointed imam by a Sufi master from Istanbul, Turkey.’ – Feisal Abdul Rauf

‘I’m not at all snobby about book prizes and how they pollute the world of literature. Just like with the Olympics, a little bit of competition gets people truly engrossed in the business of literature.’ – Emma Donoghue

‘To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another’s life.’ – Nicole Krauss

‘I am always coming up with architectural metaphors when I think about writing. But I think one of the things that draw us to literature is that it gives us this very attractive illusion that there is meaning in the world – things connect.’ – Nicole Krauss

‘Early Islam was a time of great creativity. Scholars excelled in sciences and literature.’ – Basmah bint Saud

‘Literature, of course, is not a contest.’ – Lorrie Moore

‘So much of young adult literature has turned dark, almost pathological. It’s almost as if there is a race to see who can be the most dysfunctional.’ – Richard Paul Evans

‘In Bosnian, there’s no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there’s no word describing that.’ – Aleksandar Hemon

‘For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.’ – Anne Fadiman

‘I think literature can make familiar the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar is very much about the dispossessed, and so the value of literature seems to me to go into the stories that not everybody wants to tell.’ – Colum McCann

‘Mention the gothic, and many readers will probably picture gloomy castles and an assortment of sinister Victoriana. However, the truth is that the gothic genre has continued to flourish and evolve since the days of Bram Stoker, producing some of its most interesting and accomplished examples in the 20th century – in literature, film and beyond.’ – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

‘Shirley Jackson’s writings are a must for aficionados of the gothic and of good literature.’ – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

‘The orphan in children’s literature allows the child protagonist to move the story forward themselves. I think that, however happy a family, every intelligent child thinks: ‘How did I come to be born to these parents?’ – it is about finding your place in the world.’ – Brian Selznick

‘Today there is a division between those who write about literature and those who create it. I, obviously, don’t think that should be there.’ – Alistair MacLeod

‘If people aren’t creating literature, there would be nothing for people to criticize.’ – Alistair MacLeod

‘How any person decides to emphasize strengths and mitigate weaknesses is something people have to figure out for themselves. I’m wary of the self-help literature that suggests there are certain rules. I’m very happy for people to look at my story and say it’s possible to achieve many things.’ – Daniel Tammet

‘We will always have more to discover, more to invent, more to understand and that’s much closer to art and literature than any science.’ – Daniel Tammet

”No Sweetness Here’ is the kind of old-fashioned social realism I have always been drawn to in fiction, and it does what I think all good literature should: It entertains you.’ – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

‘There should be a democracy of voices in literature. There are people who live with a kind of striving and with a certain kind of tenderness – it’s not an unusual thing – and maybe that’s not written about enough.’ – Anne Michaels

‘Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.’ – Abraham Verghese

‘I grew up reading not-serious literature, like comic books and pulp novels, so my instinct is to amuse the reader and entertain.’ – Kevin Wilson

‘I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can’t find the time, there are people who’ve never enjoyed reading and question the value of literature, either as entertainment or education, or believe that a love of books, and of fiction in particular, is sentimental or frivolous.’ – David Nicholls

‘There’s no shortage of orphans in 19th-century literature, but it’s hard to find a single happy, communicative, functional parental relationship in the whole of ‘Great Expectations,’ even among the minor characters.’ – David Nicholls

‘I don’t aspire at present to be king of the hill in American literature.’ – Mark Helprin

‘I am honored to have served as our great nation’s first National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. I will continue to serve as Ambassador Emeritus. And I will make good on my Ambassadorial promise to my wife to stop playing the ‘Fanfare’ every time I walk into or out of a room.’ – Jon Scieszka

‘I do think that part of literature’s job is to comment on and participate in the social issues of the time.’ – Linda Sue Park

‘I’m not terribly conversant with children’s literature in general. I tend to read books for adults, being an adult.’ – Lois Lowry

‘If you want to communicate with the American public, the literature tells you you’ve got to be talking at about a sixth-grade, seventh-grade level.’ – Richard Carmona

‘Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author’s own problems with finishing the piece.’ – James Surowiecki

‘I think that Oprah’s on a mission to improve the lives of the average American in various ways. And one of them is to bring literature to people who would normally not be quite as demanding in their reading tastes, to show them writing that can be more than just entertainment.’ – Janet Fitch

‘I like literature that you respond to in some way. You laugh, you cry, you turn the light on – that’s great, it’s eliciting a response by proxy.’ – Joanne Harris

‘In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned – or the very brilliant – dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person’s work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of satire and ridicule.’ – Joanne Harris

‘It’s great people still care about books, and it’s great you can still fashion a life from literature.’ – John Banville

‘All of us use art and literature as an escape from time to time, but if it’s any good, it has a healing quality – a quality that enlarges our human spirits.’ – Katherine Paterson

‘Thinking – in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature – helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.’ – Kathryn Lasky

‘There isn’t, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.’ – Khaled Hosseini

‘I can’t speak for readers in general, but personally I like to read stories behind which there is some truth, something real and above all, something emotional. I don’t like to read essays on literature; I don’t like to read critical or rational or impersonal or cold disquisitions on subjects.’ – Laura Esquivel

‘So much of the literature we had to read for high school English class was filled with victimized, tragic, symbolic women who spurred the plot forward with their inevitable shunning/death/shunning-followed-by-pregnancy-followed-by-death timelines.’ – Libba Bray

‘It’s true, some senior Hungarian writers are not known for their laughter. There is a strong Germanic influence – an attitude that if it’s enjoyable it can’t possibly be literature.’ – Tibor Fischer

‘I went to a British Council event a while back and there were lots of German professors of literature. About half of them were convinced I had a German sense of humour and the other half were sure it was British. They are probably still arguing about it now.’ – Tibor Fischer

‘If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That’s because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends.’ – Tom Hodgkinson

”Harry Potter’ opened so many doors for young adult literature. It really did convince the publishing industry that writing for children was a viable enterprise. And it also convinced a lot of people that kids will read if we give them books that they care about and love.’ – Rick Riordan

‘No one spoke in terms of children’s literature, as opposed to adult literature, until around the 1940s. It wasn’t categorised much before then. Even Grimm’s tales were written for adults. But it is true that ever since ‘Harry Potter’ there has been a renaissance in fantasy literature. J. K. Rowling opened the door again.’ – Rick Riordan

‘In a way, ‘Billy Elliot’ was autobiographical. I can’t dance, but I think his dancing was me discovering about writing and literature.’ – Lee Hall

‘Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard. Some people don’t. Obviously I don’t. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature.’ – James Frey

‘By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature.’ – Stacy Schiff

‘Nonfiction writers are the packhorses of literature. We’re meant to carry the story. If we can make it up and down the mountain by a reliable if not scenic route, we have delivered. Technique is optional.’ – Stacy Schiff

‘I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don’t make many films about the world of a poet.’ – Alice Eve

‘Literature is capable of being a subject that people want to catch up on or discuss, whether at a coffee shop or a watercooler. It can become an intrinsic part of their dialogue.’ – Mark Z. Danielewski

‘Literature helps us transcend ourselves.’ – Mohsin Hamid

‘Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.’ – Nancy Pearcey

‘White people use their literature to maintain culture. That’s why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.’ – Ntozake Shange

‘There were two very distinct voices going on in my head and I moved easily between them. One had to do with sports, street life and establishing myself as a male… The other voice, the one I had from my street friends and teammates, was increasingly dealing with the vocabulary of literature.’ – Walter Dean Myers

‘Muhammadan law in its relation to women, is a pattern to European law. Look back to the history of Islam, and you will find that women have often taken leading places – on the throne, in the battle-field, in politics, in literature, poetry, etc.’ – Annie Besant

‘The language of literature is the language of all the world. It is necessary to divest ourselves at once of the notion of diversified vocal and grammatical speech which constitutes the various tongues of the Earth, and conceals the identity of image and logic in the minds of all men.’ – George Edward Woodberry

‘I did not go to any creative writing workshop; I did not major in literature. If I can write, anyone can write. All it needs is imagination.’ – Vikas Swarup

‘What sort of person you grow into should not be achieved by default, and often that’s exactly what happens to kids. I see literature as a method of guidance, information, and contemplation, and consider it the greatest compliment possible when a reader tells me that a book of mine really made him/her think.’ – Wendelin Van Draanen

‘The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy – rather like a long-term marriage.’ – Will Self

‘The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. But it’s beginning to happen.’ – Will Self

‘I feel a lot of adult fiction looks down on plot as a lesser form of literature.’ – Lauren Oliver

‘I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn’t that they are inaccurate, but that they’re incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn’t that it’s inaccurate, it’s that it’s incomplete.’ – Taiye Selasi

‘So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.’ – Taiye Selasi

‘I studied literature and Italian at Yale. I wrote my thesis about Italo Svevo, one of my heroes.’ – Nathaniel Rich

‘I believe love at first sight is possible. Centuries of literature and art and beauty has been dedicated to that idea, so who am I to argue, even if I’ve never experienced it?’ – Maggie Grace

‘Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to go to Oberlin and wanted the liberal arts. Obviously I really get intense pleasure out of drawing connections between pieces and poems and literature and ideas.’ – Jeremy Denk

‘I read a lot of heavy literature when I’m on set, so on holiday I want to indulge in something light-hearted.’ – Hayley Atwell

‘I’m very attracted to exile literature – particularly Nabokov – exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.’ – Zadie Smith

‘I don’t only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and… ants. I can understand ants.’ – A. S. Byatt

‘A surprising number of people – including many students of literature – will tell you they haven’t really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.’ – A. S. Byatt

‘I sort of mind living in a time when most of the literature is terribly personal. I suppose it’s because I grew up on a love of history, philosophy, science and religion, but not to think too much about yourself.’ – A. S. Byatt

‘You become a reader by reading the literature, not by reading the handbooks about it.’ – Aidan Chambers

‘Our points of reference in America aren’t steeped in literature; they’re steeped in that five minutes between commercials.’ – Clarke Peters

‘The cinema, as literature, as all the plastic arts, do not exist outside of a critical system that allows us to study them.’ – Jacques Audiard

‘For me, there was no great myth around the movies when I was a young child. My father was very simple about the whole thing. He did not consider cinema an art. Cinema was entertainment. Literature and music were art.’ – Jacques Audiard

‘We used to flock to watch gladiators, public torture and executions. In more recent times, our appetite for mortal violence has been sublimated in sports, photorealistic video games, film and literature.’ – Kenneth Oppel

‘A Christian philosophy of literature begins with the same agenda of issues that any philosophy of literature addresses. Its distinctive feature is that it relates these issues to the Christian faith.’ – Leland Ryken

‘Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation of literature enhanced by information about the writer’s work.’ – Leland Ryken

‘There is a quiet revolution going on in the study of the Bible. At its center is a growing awareness that the Bible is a work of literature and that the methods of literary scholarship are a necessary part of any complete study of the Bible.’ – Leland Ryken

‘Literature incarnates its meanings as concretely as possible. The knowledge that literature gives of a subject is the kind of knowledge that is obtained by (vicariously) living through an experience.’ – Leland Ryken

‘The idea behind a dish – the delight and the surprise – makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn’t just ‘Here’s the facts – boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.’ It’s how you tell it.’ – Nathan Myhrvold

‘Before college, I hadn’t voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn’t think I’d understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher’s interpretations of what we read.’ – Melissa Bank

‘My mother was a teacher, and when she wanted to show me art and literature and science, she’d take me to museums, parks and free exhibitions.’ – David Blaine

‘Anyone who reads advice books about romance has one problem to begin with: bad taste in literature.’ – Roger Ebert

‘Horror fans are a particular breed. They analyze films with such detail and expertise that I am reminded of the Canadian literary critic Northrup Frye, who approached literature with similar archetypal analysis.’ – Roger Ebert

‘I was a big reader as a child. My father is a great book lover and a librarian, but he forbid me to read bad literature. I was not allowed to read Nancy Drew or books like that. I often say to him that me becoming a crime author is both a way of pleasing him and annoying him.’ – Asa Larsson

‘I don’t think if you’re serious about literature your library is filled with award-winning books.’ – Andrew Wylie

‘I have an English literature degree. I wanted to be the next great American novelist from a very early age, but I put it aside for a while, because I got very realistic at one point.’ – Daniel Suarez

‘If you aren’t just brought up in your tribe but interact with other people either directly or vicariously, through journalism and literature, you see what life is like from other points of view and are less likely to demonize them or dehumanize others and more likely to empathize with them.’ – Steven Pinker

‘As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history.’ – Nathaniel Philbrick

‘Instead of being a page-turner, ‘Moby-Dick’ is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.’ – Nathaniel Philbrick

‘The reaction to ‘Aftermath’ has been far worse than to ‘A Life’s Work,’ yet I find I’m perhaps a little less touched by it. In both cases, I’ve coped artistically by believing the criticisms weren’t right. They upset me, but they didn’t challenge my understanding of how to write, nor of how morality functions in literature.’ – Rachel Cusk

‘A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common – the desire to write – could almost be considered meaningless.’ – Rachel Cusk

‘I love and collect contemporary art and go to all the art fairs. I love Damien Hirst and Matthew Barney. I grew up in Italy and had a humanistic education in philosophy and literature – things I love and appreciate. People are richer and more complex than just their day-to-day professional pursuits might suggest.’ – Nouriel Roubini

‘Some writers like to boil down headlines of liberal newspapers into fiction, so they say there shouldn’t be communal riots, everybody should love each other, there shouldn’t be boundaries or fundamentalism. But I think literature is more than that; these are political views which most of us hold anyway.’ – Arundhati Roy

‘I think one of the saddest things that’s happening to literature is that it’s getting over-simplified by this diet of simple political ideas.’ – Arundhati Roy

‘Literature is the stringing together of pictures in words.’ – Thomas Kinkade

‘Mark Twain created a new type of literature and not a lot of people can say that. Not a lot of people can say they’re absolutely original and completely self-made.’ – Val Kilmer

‘I like to be surrounded by books. My wife Evelyn has a Ph.D. in comparative literature, so we have a lot of her Spanish and German literature books which are wasted on me, plus a lot of novels and books on art and architecture shared by us both. Evelyn used to edit an art magazine called ‘FMR,’ so we have a common interest in design.’ – David Chipperfield

‘The vast literature concerning whistleblowers shows that, far from weird extremists, they are really quite ordinary people: male and female, young and old, junior and senior, no more nerdy or obsessive than most hard workers.’ – Margaret Heffernan

‘It’s not like since I make comics I only read comics and since I make movies I will only go out and watch movies. Any kind of artistic expression interests me; it goes from literature to music to sculpture, painting; whatever is extremely inspiring for me becomes a reference also for me.’ – Marjane Satrapi

‘One reason I’ve never been a fan of graphic novels is because a central aspect of literature for me has always been imagining what the things I’m reading about look like.’ – Martin Filler

‘Full disclosure: I went to university as an eager young feminist for many reasons – to get away from my parents, to soak up literature and knowledge, to cease being a child, to expand my mind and my world.’ – Janine di Giovanni

‘Over the years, I began to understand that there were a lot of people out there reading physics in popular literature that they could not understand – not because it was too advanced, but because it wasn’t advanced enough.’ – Leonard Susskind

‘Literature is reflecting what is happening in life. More and more women are having relationships with younger men. It’s partly that women are not losing their figures now.’ – Helen McCrory

‘School was rough for me. I was a good student in middle school, but high school wasn’t so fun. I still pulled through, though! I excelled in art, fashion, history and English literature – anything creative. Math and science I struggled a bit more in.’ – India de Beaufort

‘Irish writing is so strong that it can feel like the country has all been covered, but in fact, there are so many gaps. The small west of Ireland cities and the working classes there have almost never appeared in Irish literature, simply because those communities were never in the way of producing books.’ – Kevin Barry

‘Calling one thing ‘literature’ and another ‘fiction’ is a way to create status where there is none.’ – Tucker Max

‘I went to university in the north of England at University of Birmingham to do an English literature degree, and I knew I could do extracurricular stuff with theater and drama. I started a theater company, called Article 19, and I did it with a bunch of friends. I wrote and directed plays. I had a radio show.’ – Tom Riley

‘Don’t underestimate Laura Antonelli. She’s burning to do well. And then she has an extraordinary face, even without make-up. It’s not with her that I’d discuss literature. I speak only of the film ‘L’Innocente,’ and what she does she does well.’ – Luchino Visconti

‘Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.’ – Margaret Atwood

‘The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.’ – Margaret Atwood

‘I have many books that I want to write; I’d like to think that I’ll be around for another 20 years or so and write another dozen novels, probably some sort of imaginative literature… Never again another seven-volume saga.’ – George R. R. Martin

‘The distinction between literary and genre fiction is stupid and pernicious. It dates back to a feud between Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James. James won, and it split literature into two streams. But it’s a totally false dichotomy.’ – George R. R. Martin

‘I’m never going to be in danger of getting the Nobel Prize for literature.’ – David Eddings

‘I have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.’ – David Eddings

‘I am not a Ph.D. in economics or a doctorate in literature that I can afford to take my singing lightly. Even if I sing a jingle, I take it as seriously as oxygen.’ – Kailash Kher

‘Women’s books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it’s a woman, she’s ‘spilling her guts,’ and it’s not art.’ – Erica Jong

‘I have been aspiring to write some sort of literature for a long time.’ – Michael Moore

‘Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.’ – Salman Rushdie

‘The gamble of literature is that I make the best work I can; the most truthful, the most representative of how I see things. I try and do that, and then I put it out there and say to you, ‘What do you think?’ I hope that you think well of it, obviously.’ – Salman Rushdie

‘The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again.’ – Salman Rushdie

‘I’m a reader of Chinese literature, I like their films, but also: I’ve had great difficulty getting my work published in China; very little of it has been published there. The first two attempts to have all of my work published, for instance, were refused without any reason ever being given.’ – Salman Rushdie

‘There’s always a host of voices you’re inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He’s one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens.’ – Dylan Moran

‘God bless my father, but he always spoke in this continental, literary accent, probably because he was a professor of comparative literature and he made the decision to speak with distinction.’ – Nicolas Cage

‘A lot of my work comes from what in Asia is called the ‘mind of wonder.’ There is not a lot of ‘mind of wonder’ writing in contemporary Western literature. I think that’s what appeals to the readers who are my fans.’ – Tom Robbins

‘The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.’ – Umberto Eco

‘I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.’ – Vladimir Putin

‘One has a sort of spiritual obligation to go back to the source material of the literature, to make contact with one of the seminal plays of the modern theater.’ – Arthur Penn

‘I hadn’t planned on going to law school. I wanted to study 19th-century Russian literature.’ – Marian Wright Edelman

‘To me, cinema is cinema. Cinema is one big tree with many branches. The same as literature. In literature, you don’t just say, ‘Oh, I bought some literature.’ No, you say, ‘I bought a novel’ by so-and-so, or a book of essays by so-and-so.’ – Jonas Mekas

‘The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines.’ – Michael Eric Dyson

‘Barack Obama is an elegant and literate man with a cosmopolitan sense of the world. He is widely read in philosophy, literature, and history – as befits a former law professor – and he has shown time and again a surprising interest in contemporary fiction.’ – Teju Cole

‘From the beginning of church history, music, writing, literature, and the greatest works of art all came from the church. To change the culture and make it a force for good, you have to be in it and be a part of it.’ – Patricia Heaton

‘With English literature, if you do a bit of shonky spelling, no one dies, but if you’re half-way through a maths calculation and you stick in an extra zero, everything just crashes into the ravine.’ – Mark Haddon

‘When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.’ – Mark Haddon

‘I always loved science. And in fact, I got a science award in high school. I mean, I loved science, but I think I loved literature more.’ – Rita Dove

‘I don’t teach literature from my perspective as ‘Joyce Carol Oates.’ I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I’m teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.’ – Joyce Carol Oates

‘My theory is that literature is essential to society in the way that dreams are essential to our lives. We can’t live without dreaming – as we can’t live without sleep. We are ‘conscious’ beings for only a limited period of time, then we sink back into sleep – the ‘unconscious.’ It is nourishing, in ways we can’t fully understand.’ – Joyce Carol Oates

‘I don’t read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I’m also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.’ – Joyce Carol Oates

‘I had the most incredible English and literature teachers in school, and it really influenced my love of storytelling. It’s what made me excited to study journalism in college. I love editorials and documentaries. All of that came from being given the opportunity to lose myself in good writing when I was a kid.’ – Sophia Bush

‘I was learning book-keeping at the age of 12, but it never stopped me from pursuing literature. Over the years, I grew to love the written word.’ – Ashwin Sanghi

‘I remember thinking that people were crazy for reading the same book more than once, but I now have a new-found appreciation for the re-discovery of literature. The lessons we learned from books in the school curriculum are reinvented and updated when we read as adults.’ – Rachel Nichols

‘I love food. I mean, I really love food. I take pictures of my finest, funniest and most fascinating dishes, post them on Twitter, and send them to friends. I treat menus like classic literature, refusing to skip even one word. I read the description of every item, regardless of whether or not I’m interested in eating it.’ – Rachel Nichols

‘Business students are very oriented to playing a role in the real world and accomplishing something, not training themselves to be scholars and contribute to the literature. Teaching in that kind of environment has focused me much more on the real world, how pieces of the theory I know can be applied to real-world situations.’ – Janet Yellen

‘I don’t hate language. I have my own language, but I also enjoy the English language. Obviously, you don’t read a lot of literature and not care about language.’ – Twyla Tharp

‘I am more and more convinced that literature is made up of works, genres, schools, discussions, problems, collective work in order to solve certain problems.’ – Italo Calvino

‘My stories are full of facts; they have a beginning and an end. For that reason, they will never… occupy a place in contemporary literature.’ – Italo Calvino

‘Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.’ – Italo Calvino

‘Good literature can be created only with something that is different from literature.’ – Italo Calvino

‘I don’t believe chance can play a role in my literature.’ – Italo Calvino

‘Two of my three siblings are older, so I suppose I learned from them and became a very avid reader at a young age, which I think enough cannot be said for what you can discover through literature.’ – Julia Roberts

‘All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.’ – Delmore Schwartz

‘The whole world recognizes Russia’s cultural achievements. It is impossible to imagine the world culture without Russian culture, without our music and literature.’ – Vladimir Putin

‘I found that dance, music, and literature is how I made sense of the world… it pushed me to think of things bigger than life’s daily routines… to think beyond what is immediate or convenient.’ – Mikhail Baryshnikov

‘I wanted to write plays. I was at Yale graduate school at the time for English literature, not for acting… I liked the idea of collaboration, and I thought if I’m gonna write plays, I should learn something about speaking the lines that I might try to write.’ – David Duchovny

‘If you’re trying to learn how to act from a class, you’re analyzing the teachers’ movements and their intricacies, and it becomes like a pantomime of you wanting to be them, and that’s wrong. Literature is an easier way to study acting, because then you can take any kind of spin. It’s your own imagination, and your own version of it.’ – Shia LaBeouf

‘Like many works of literature, Hollywood chooses for its villains people who strive for social dominance through the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. But the ordinary business of capitalism is much more egalitarian: It’s about finding meaning and enjoyment in work and production.’ – Alex Tabarrok

‘I hope to be remembered for writing books about social justice that also have enough aesthetic value to endure as works of literature.’ – Jonathan Kozol

‘All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature – even my thesis was on Shakespeare.’ – Jonathan Kozol

‘In the world of literature, I see prizes as more of a duty to the craft itself, rather than as something for the individual.’ – Wole Soyinka

‘The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not suffice.’ – Wole Soyinka

‘Because my dad’s Chinese-American, and they’re very concrete, he said, ‘There’s no money to be made in literature.’ So he told me to go into the sciences. And I was a good girl. And I did what Daddy said. And that’s how I ended up being a doctor. But you know, you just can’t stamp out that desire to tell stories.’ – Tess Gerritsen

‘Most of the famous love affairs of literature or film were quite short. What was ‘Romeo & Juliet’? How long were they together? A few days.’ – Jesse Harris

‘I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.’ – Robert Darnton

‘A taste for the best reading is not cultivated in Spanish girls, even where the treasures of that great Castilian literature are accessible to them.’ – Katharine Lee Bates

‘The real difference between literature and pulp is the kind of emotional responses they elicit. Dan Brown can’t pierce your heart. Patricia Cornwell can’t make you read a sentence twice and then look sightlessly out of the window.’ – Peter Temple

‘Confidence is highly overrated when it comes to creating literature. A writer who is overly confident will not engage in the struggle to get it exactly right on the page – but rather, will assume that she’s getting it right without the struggle.’ – Dani Shapiro

‘I’m a sucker for any band named after a work of literature. Los de Abajo take their name from Mariano Azuela’s famous novel ‘The Underdogs,’ and that says a lot about who they are and the music they make.’ – Daniel Alarcon

‘When I was growing up, there actually wasn’t a lot of YA literature as it exists today. Most of the YA that I read was from the ’60s and ’70s, older than me.’ – Lauren DeStefano

‘Once I got into college, I discovered literature – in particular, multicultural literature. I just started to understand the power of story and narrative, and you know, like anyone else, I kind of wanted to do it, too.’ – Matt de la Pena

‘At graduation, I assumed I’d be in publishing, but first I went to England and got a master’s degree in English Literature. And then I came back to New York and had a series of publishing jobs, the way one does.’ – Joseph Kanon

‘There are still some people out there who believe comic books are nothing more than, well, comic books. But the true cognoscenti know graphic novels are – at their best – an amazing blend of art literature and the theater of the mind.’ – John Ridley

‘I’m kind of a reluctant Anglophile. My mother’s a children’s librarian, and all of the children’s literature I read was from her childhood – E. Nesbit and Dickens, which isn’t children’s literature at all, but I was sort of steeped in English literature. I thought I was of that world.’ – Jefferson Mays

‘My mother was a children’s librarian, and I was raised on lots of English children’s literature. It gave me this weird idea that I was English.’ – Jefferson Mays

‘The pretentiousness of literature really annoys me; the way a writer is held as this sort of magical person to be revered on the stage. Everything I do on tour is to try and destroy that pretense.’ – Chuck Palahniuk

‘As far as I have been able to understand, the Japanese seem to keep things close to the vest. Friendly but remote and polite to the point of being invisible. It is in the music, literature, film and art that the Japanese really seem to express themselves.’ – Henry Rollins

‘I fell even more deeply in love with Tolkien’s legendarium after studying Old English literature at uni, as I got a sense of the historical events and cultures that Tolkien used to create his world. My favourite of his imaginary locations is Lothlorien.’ – Samantha Shannon

‘In the early 1970s in Atlanta, I attended what had formerly been an all-white school but had become a black school after integration and white flight. Perhaps because of this, the teachers created a curriculum that included a focus on African American literature and history year-round, not just in February.’ – Natasha Trethewey

‘Some people might be surprised that ‘Rambo’s creator has a doctorate in American literature. One of my influences is Henry James, whose major theme is awareness. Whether I’m writing about military personnel, law enforcement, or De Quincey, the persistent theme is paying attention in a hostile world.’ – David Morrell

‘Like most people, I have several pet subjects – that may or may not be interesting to other people. Don’t get me started on happiness, or habits, or children’s literature, or Winston Churchill, unless you really want to talk about it.’ – Gretchen Rubin

‘Children’s literature is one of my joys, and it’s also my mental comfort food.’ – Gretchen Rubin

‘My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.’ – Paulo Coelho

‘Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.’ – Helen Vendler

‘This is the harsh truth about us: not only do Filipinos ignore books, literature – we do not understand how important the arts are – not just to those of us who work at it, but to the nation as a whole.’ – F. Sionil Jose

‘You perhaps know me as a novelist. Literature is one of the arts – in fact, the noblest of the arts. That is not my opinion; it was first expressed by the ancients. As art, literature has many similarities with the other art forms.’ – F. Sionil Jose

‘Literature – Eastern and Western – abounds with stories, myths, legends about the search for youth, for eternal life.’ – F. Sionil Jose

‘For someone who loves literature, and all books on principle, being asked to name three titles over a half century of serious reading is akin to asking one to recall their three favorite sunsets.’ – Thomas Steinbeck

‘I never had the idea of moving to Paris and becoming something. I liked the idea of living in Paris because it seemed to have so many parts of life I really enjoyed. The people there seemed to prize literature and art, food and drinking, a more hedonistic way of living.’ – Rosecrans Baldwin

‘I have no illusions that my work can rouse the masses to create change, because literature simply doesn’t have that power anymore in my country, if it does anywhere. But I do hope that it can be read by those who are in positions to create change, or that it can at least be part of that dialogue.’ – Miguel Syjuco

‘I have to believe that literature can effect change; otherwise, I would have no purpose in my life and would have wasted four years on ‘Ilustrado.” – Miguel Syjuco

‘What I do know is that writing is the thing I am best at, and I don’t have the stomach, the ability, the strength or the courage to enter the political arena. And I think writing can be a political act, if only to let those people accountable know they are being watched. Literature can be a conscience.’ – Miguel Syjuco

‘With ‘Ilustrado,’ I set out to change the way we read literature, and I think I failed spectacularly. In fact, I know I failed. In reaching further than I could, I may not have produced a life- or literature-changing book, but I did produce one I am proud of.’ – Miguel Syjuco

‘I look at western literature and especially North American literature, and I feel like it gets bogged down so much with all of that, with domestic stories and relationships and a woman dealing with the loss of her husband.’ – Miguel Syjuco

‘I’m from Europe, and I was very aware that there are a lot of literature snobs – especially in Europe. As soon as something becomes a success, it has to be bad, and then they’ll do everything they can to stab it to death.’ – Anne Fortier

‘Ever since childhood, I’ve been interested in history and myth. Not just the facts and figures of the past, but everything that contributes to shape our perception of an age: architecture, art, literature and so forth.’ – Anne Fortier

‘As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer’s ability to render a fictional world – characters, landscape, emotions – into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.’ – Dinaw Mengestu

‘We often see literature about women that impair and immerse the women themselves, such as when women are portrayed as objects of consumerism.’ – Okky Madasari

‘I always knew when I graduated from high school, I’d go to college. I never thought about what I was walking away from… I just wanted to study literature and writing.’ – Gaby Hoffmann

‘I went to school to study literature and writing, even though I didn’t end up really doing that in the end.’ – Gaby Hoffmann

‘You can’t understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can’t recognise biblical allusions.’ – Richard Dawkins

‘The book of the Psalms, which is the primary devotional literature of the whole Bible, is full of complaints.’ – David Augsburger

‘The Bible is not just one book, but an entire library, with stories, songs, poetry, letters and history, as well as literature that might more obviously qualify as ‘religious.’ – John Drane’ – John Drane

‘I suppose it’s true that most great television, literature, and other forms of high art (and basic cable) benefit from a little hindsight. ‘M.A.S.H.’ comes to mind. So does ‘The Iliad.” – Kevin Bleyer

‘More people work at Walmart than anywhere else in the United States, but you wouldn’t know that from our literature. I’m trying to get at the reality of this country by portraying the lives of many of my friends who I left behind in Pittsburgh.’ – Said Sayrafiezadeh

‘While in some countries there’s a feeling that literature must stay away from religion, this is not so in India – in the Indian way, literature is just another means to find a more spiritual life, to find our way to God.’ – Amish Tripathi

‘There is a wealth of readership for regional language literature in India that is not given importance. We must give respect to our own languages.’ – Amish Tripathi

‘In literature classes, you don’t learn about genes; in physics classes you don’t learn about human evolution. So you get a fragmented view of the world. That makes it hard to find meaning in education.’ – David Christian

‘Productivity – the amount of output delivered per hour of work in the economy – is often viewed as the engine of progress in modern capitalist economies. Output is everything. Time is money. The quest for increased productivity occupies reams of academic literature and haunts the waking hours of C.E.O.s and finance ministers.’ – Tim Jackson

‘I am not opposed to e-readers. Any technology that encourages the reading of literature is a good thing.’ – Julia Glass

‘I didn’t know much about Texas when I moved there for graduate school. In my first or second semester, I took a class in life and literature of the Southwest, and that’s where I first heard about these events along the border in 1915-1918, what Anglos called the Bandit Wars.’ – Philipp Meyer

‘In my teaching, I try to expose my students to the widest range of aesthetic possibilities, so I’ll offer them stories from Anton Chekhov to Denis Johnson, from Flannery O’Connor to A.M. Homes, and perhaps investigating all that strange variation of beauty has rubbed off on me. Or perhaps that’s why I enjoy teaching literature.’ – Chang-Rae Lee

‘Excessively narrow reading is unhelpful, certainly. Reading only Serious Literature is no better than reading only trash in this respect.’ – Diane Setterfield

‘When I’m feeling frustrated with a story, I have faith that it’s going to come. Also, when I first started writing, I wanted to write the stories that were not in my childhood, to represent people who hadn’t historically been represented in literature.’ – Jacqueline Woodson

‘I read mostly Irish, African, Japanese, South American, and African writers. You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.’ – Chris Abani

‘All the questions discussed in the Talmud and related rabbinic literature are normative questions: either they are questions of what one is to think or what one is to do. Every prescribed thought has some practical implication; every prescribed act has some theoretical implication.’ – David Novak

‘An interesting thing about New Zealand, you know, literature is that it really didn’t begin in any real sense until the 20th century.’ – Eleanor Catton

‘There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I’m just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach.’ – Eleanor Catton

‘I had never read Victorian novels before going overseas. I read a handful of authors, but I had not immersed myself in the literature of the 19th century.’ – Eleanor Catton

‘I don’t feel like literature has the power to alienate. I think that’s something people feel if they don’t connect with a work of art. But I don’t think a work of art can actively reject the person who’s looking at it or reading it.’ – Eleanor Catton

‘Margaret Atwood was the author who took me out of children’s literature and guided me towards adult literature.’ – Eleanor Catton

‘I had many moments of disappointment, despondency, and exhaustion, but I always found that by reading the literature and showing up at my lab looking at the data as they emerged day by day and discussing them with my students and postdoctoral fellows, I would gain a notion of what to do next.’ – Eric Kandel

‘The Gospel of Judas is a kind of protest literature. It’s challenging leaders of the church.’ – Elaine Pagels

‘I didn’t want to be an author; I wanted to be a scientist. Not that I didn’t love literature, but I couldn’t distinguish it from reading, and reading was already my default activity, almost like breathing.’ – Barbara Ehrenreich

‘Canada has always been a great place for literature. It’s strong and growing stronger, and there will always be reading, and there will always be great writers.’ – Ruth Ozeki

‘I just totally do not believe in this sort of Bart Simpson character who infects so much of our literature and film and TV stuff nowadays, these know-it-all kids who seem to understand the hypocrisy of the adult world so thoroughly and can talk about it with such articulateness. That’s bunk.’ – David Small

‘I’ve always been interested in a certain kind of sophistication in children’s literature. I loved Roald Dahl; I loved the underlying nastiness of some of his – darkness of his tales.’ – David Small

‘As we have sought through the centuries to define ourselves as human beings and as nations through the prisms of history and literature, no small part of that effort has drawn us to the subject of war. We might even say that the humanities began with war and from war, and have remained entwined with it ever since.’ – Drew Gilpin Faust

‘If I’ve ever regretted anything, it was putting all my eggs in one basket, holing up and kneeling at the altar of literature, instead of going out and at least reviewing, running around and trying to write for magazines. That would’ve been the intelligent thing to do, but I didn’t, and that was because of fanaticism.’ – Cynthia Ozick

‘With certain rapturous exceptions, literature is the moral life.’ – Cynthia Ozick

‘Literature is for the sake of humanity.’ – Cynthia Ozick

‘The road that led me to literature was very different from the one followed by my fellow writers in Poland.’ – Marek Hlasko

‘Literature can allow us to experience the best side of humankind, where instead of giving up, we struggle desperately in the ruins for love, connection and hope.’ – Caroline Leavitt

‘It was at Juilliard that I realized that being a singer encompasses so many things that I am interested in. Literature, languages, physics, history, art. You really get to explore so many things.’ – Susanna Phillips

‘I went to graduate school with zero expectation. I kind of backed into it. I wanted to go back to school because I felt gaps in my literary background. I studied mostly twentieth-century English literature in college, so I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll go back for my writing.” – Susan Minot

‘At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can’t fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I’m reading, and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, I think I’m in literature,’ but my life was never like that.’ – Soledad O’Brien

‘I haven’t been very enthusiastic about the commercialization of children’s literature. Kids should borrow books from the library and not necessarily be buying them.’ – Beverly Cleary

‘Life develops, changes, is in motion. The forms of literature are not.’ – Karl Ove Knausgard

‘Is literature more important than hurting people? You can’t argue that. You can’t say it. It’s impossible.’ – Karl Ove Knausgard

‘My intention throughout has been to write, to create literature, and to be able to look people in the eye after I’d done it – the people I’d written about.’ – Karl Ove Knausgard

‘Early Islam was a time of great creativity. Scholars excelled in sciences and literature. Our religion should not be a shield behind which we hide from the world but a driving force that inspires us to innovate and contribute to our surroundings. This is the true spirit of Islam.’ – Basmah bint Saud

‘When I wrote about Mary Wollstonecraft, I found that here she was, in the late 18th century, going to work for the ‘Analytical Review.’ What was the ‘Analytical Review?’ It was a magazine that dealt with politics and literature.’ – Claire Tomalin

‘All over the world, maybe besides literature, there’s nothing that touches many people as movies do. People see them everywhere.’ – Jane Levy

‘It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books.’ – E. L. Doctorow

‘I think that Poe is so resonant because he represents that part of us that is in misery or sorrowful or wants to explore the darkness. He wrote a great story called ‘The Imp of the Perverse’ about the instinct towards self-destruction. Poe is the godfather of Goth literature and that whole movement.’ – John Cusack

‘I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF … No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future.’ – J. G. Ballard

‘I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed through English literature, probably for 400 or 500 years, well predating modern science.’ – J. G. Ballard

‘I can see a day soon where you’ll create your own college degree by taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the world – some computing from Stanford, some entrepreneurship from Wharton, some ethics from Brandeis, some literature from Edinburgh – paying only the nominal fee for the certificates of completion.’ – Thomas Friedman

‘I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn’t have access to previously.’ – Chiwetel Ejiofor

‘It’s no wonder the narcissistic mother will always have a place in literature: she’s a freak of nature.’ – Koren Zailckas

‘I have always been fascinated by the supernatural elements in stories, whether fairy tales, myths, film or literature.’ – Trudi Canavan

‘Nineteenth-century English literature I know; 19th-century sewage systems, not so much.’ – Glen Duncan

‘I mark the reading of ‘Look Homeward, Angel’ as one of the pivotal events of my life. It starts off with the single greatest, knock-your-socks-off first page I have ever come across in my careful reading of world literature.’ – Pat Conroy

‘In some ways, getting published in children’s literature is a little more open than publishing adult literature. It’s less hinged on who you might know.’ – Marie Rutkoski

‘It’s pathetic, but I don’t really remember my first time reading ‘The Great Gatsby.’ I must have read it in high school. I’m pretty sure I remember it being assigned, and I generally did the reading. But I don’t remember having a reaction to the book, even though I loved literature, and other works made a lasting impression on me at that age.’ – Susan Choi

‘Being a literature major, you know, I’m very familiar with the ways symbolism is used in our sort of mythic tales of society, so anyone who is consciously trying to pull that off I think is really interesting and clearly very smart.’ – Carrie Coon

‘Film is not literature – the image on screen is the information you get.’ – John Hurt

‘As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature.’ – Robert Hass

‘There is commerciality in storytelling, even in a film or a piece of literature. These things exist. That’s why stories came to be: to hold attention and, while you’re not looking, you’ll get hopefully some nutritional value that the author has been working up. That’s narrative; that’s passing stuff down.’ – Shane Carruth

‘I went to study English for two reasons. Principally because when I was in university, studying drama wasn’t considered an option. You couldn’t get a degree course for it. And so many plays and things that I was interested in landed themselves in a broader spectrum of literature.’ – James Callis

‘Every game, and almost every life situation, has short cuts: ways you can get better without learning the entire literature of the game from beginning to end.’ – James Altucher

‘The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.’ – John Updike

‘The herbalist I met a few times – it was great – she gave me literature about the different processes that an herbalist would do to make medicines from certain herbs and things.’ – Caitriona Balfe

‘From an early age, I had the idea that writing was truth-telling. It’s on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature – the holy book. There’s nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious, and it should be totally transparent.’ – Edmund White

‘Science fiction is the ugly stepchild of mainstream literature, and fantasy is the ugly stepchild of science fiction, and tie-in novels are the ugly stepchild of fantasy… and on and on and on.’ – R. A. Salvatore

‘Art and literature are my surrogate religions.’ – Peter Shaffer

‘Perhaps no other body of literature is as subject to political pressures from within the community as gay fiction.’ – Edmund White

‘We didn’t have a television, so I grew up with books. This isn’t to suggest I’m an intellectual, but I do read a lot because part of acting is an exploration of literature.’ – Stephen Rea

‘I trained as a writer before I became a lawyer. I was headed for a life as an English professor, but that just wasn’t me. I’m not a scholar; I didn’t have a scholar’s attitude toward literature.’ – Scott Turow

”The Gambler’ by Dostoevsky. It was the first time I realised that it was possible to have good and evil in one person. It led me to read a lot of Russian literature.’ – Sue Townsend

‘Dying, we tell ourselves, is like going to sleep. This figure of speech occurs very commonly in everyday thought and language, as well as in the literature of many cultures and many ages. It was apparently quite common even in the time of the ancient Greeks.’ – Raymond Moody

‘The most enduring stories in literature generally have some kind of crime at their center, whether it’s the bloody butchery of ‘Hamlet,’ the lecherous misanthropes of Dickens or the lone gunman from ‘The Great Gatsby.” – Karin Slaughter

‘In mainstream literature, a trope is a figure of speech: metaphor, simile, irony, or the like. Words used other than literally. In SF, a trope – at least as I understand the usage – is more: science used other than literally.’ – Edward M. Lerner

‘I was born in 1952, so obviously the sixties were important. That’s when I came of age. It was also a revolutionary period, a complete break with the generation before us in terms of culture, literature, music, and in politics, of course. 1968 was an important year; I was 16, and the world became clear to me, visible, so to say.’ – Per Petterson

‘I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular.’ – Per Petterson

‘I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic – ‘Moby-Dick’ is just about the best book in the world – and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.’ – Per Petterson

‘I can always tell when I’m about to start writing. I go through cycles in reading. When I’m beginning to start to write something, I start reading what I think of as good literature. I read things with wonderful language.’ – Patricia MacLachlan

‘If what I write is literature, I guess you’d better emphasize the ‘litter.” – Lydia Lunch

‘Originally I had planned to write just a couple of children’s books and then, return the focus on adult literature. A funny thing happened along the way – I kept having new ideas, and then I looked up one day, and 30 years had passed!’ – Nikki Grimes

‘I was lucky enough to be a child during the renaissance of Australian children’s literature, when people like Ivan Southall, Colin Thiele, Lilith Norman and Wrightson were pumping out hugely inspiring stuff.’ – Catherine Jinks

”Jane Eyre,’ when I think of that book, it conjures up the best moments of college English courses. Literature is extraordinary, especially when you have a good professor.’ – Edward P. Jones

‘Whenever you’re trying to do your own take on a classic piece of literature, it’s almost like you’re trying to swim up your own stream or drive down your own path.’ – Joel Edgerton

‘At a very young age, I was influenced enormously by Julio Cortazar or Carlos Fuentes. In that literature, there’s always an exploration of different perspectives, points of view.’ – Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

‘The problem with the screenplay is that it’s not literature, and it’s not a film. It’s a very weird, technical kind of blueprint that will be absolutely transformed into something else that is not that, you know? Honestly, a screenplay is no literature.’ – Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

‘I’m into books – I love literature, so I toyed with the idea of being an English teacher. I had a fantastic English teacher at school. I think great English teachers make the world go round.’ – Taron Egerton

‘When I first stepped into literature twenty-five years ago, I wanted to work on behalf of the oppressed, the working masses, and it seemed to me, mistakenly, that I would not find them among the Jews.’ – S. Ansky

‘I have never worked on interrogation; I have never seen an interrogation, and I have only a passing knowledge of the literature on interrogation. With that qualification, my opinion is that the point of interrogation is to get at the truth, not to get at what the interrogator wants to hear.’ – Martin Seligman

‘The writers who reject tendentiousness and purpose in their work are the very ones who display it in every word they write. I could draw countless examples from the history of literature to show that the more a writer clamours for spiritual freedom, the more tendentious his work is liable to be.’ – Bjornstjerne Bjornson