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

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

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
Sinclair Lewis

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

Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!
David Herbert Lawrence

Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
David Herbert Lawrence

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

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

Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.
William O. Douglas

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

First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.
Mason Cooley

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
Cyril Connolly

Gossip is more popular than literature.
Hugh Leonard

All literature is political.
LeVar Burton

I've always said that music is like literature.
Jose Carreras

What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction?
Julio Cortazar

Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature.
Martin H. Fischer

Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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