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

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

There is only one school of literature - that of talent.
Vladimir Nabokov

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Bad literature is a form of treason.
Joseph Brodsky

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

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

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

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

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