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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Thornton Wilder

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

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

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

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