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

Reverence is fatal to literature.
E. M. Forster

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

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

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

The crown of literature is poetry.
W. Somerset Maugham

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

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Thornton Wilder

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

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

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

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

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
Wallace Stevens

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

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

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

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

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

Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
Thomas Mann

Without literature my life would be miserable.
Naguib Mahfouz