I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.
Jose Saramago

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

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

I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies.
Francis Ford Coppola

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

It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein.
Raymond Queneau

Our literature is in great shape.
James Welch

A great speech is literature.
Peggy Noonan

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.
Paul Ricoeur

I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart.
Douglas Sirk

For years, I had heard about the lack of interest in literature in the U.S. and I had complained about it. I failed to understand how people could fail to be moved by art.
Rita Dove

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 question minus the answer.
Roland Barthes

It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.
Lafcadio Hearn

Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature.
Rita Dove

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.
George Henry Lewes

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.
Mao Zedong

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
Paul Valery