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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.
Herman Hesse

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.
Herman Hesse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Journalism is literature in a hurry.
Matthew Arnold

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

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