Literature throws us many great heroes. Real life invariably outdoes them.
Literature helps us transcend ourselves.
Literature is a struggle over the nature of reality.
Literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.
Literature is a house with many mansions.
Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.
Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
Literature ... is the rediscovery of childhood.
Literature is the question minus the answer.
Literature isn't innocent. I've known that since I was fifteen.
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Literature is the only access to truth we have on this planet.
Literature has its own life, even in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.
Literature invents its own rules.
Literature is dangerous: it awakens a rebellious attitude in us.
Literature doesn't exactly have a strong mental-health track record.
Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language.
Literature is analysis after the event.
Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.
Literature has drawn a funny perimeter that other art forms haven't.
Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.
Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.
Literature is news that stays news.
Literature decays only as men become more and more corrupt.
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.
Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.
Literature is my Utopia.
Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
Literature is the immortality of speech.
When people find a man of the most distinguished abilities as a writer their inferior while he is with them, it must behighly gratifying to them.
When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.
Whatever one writes, comes to pass.
Whatever I feel is felt against my will so that I can write that I felt it.
What’s in all this besides myself? Ah, but that, and that alone, is tedium. In all of this – the sky, the earth, the world – there is nothing at all but me!
When things were very bad his soul just crawled behind his heart and curled up and went to sleep.
When rain comes finally, washing away a low sky of muddy ocher, we who could not control the phenomenon are pressed into relief. The near-occult feeling: The face of being witness to the end of the world gives way to tangible things. Even if the succeeding sensations are not common, they are at least not mysterious.
When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.
When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to stop - that is, with a marriage; but when he writes about juveniles, he must stop where he best can.
When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person.
Whatever question arose, a swarm of these drones, without having finished their buzzing on a previous theme, flew over to the new one and by their hum drowned and obscured the voices of those who were disputing honestly.
