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

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

What we value about music and literature are the moments that they create in our minds when we encounter them.
Stephan Jenkins

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

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

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

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

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

A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.
John Henry Newman

Gossip is more popular than literature.
Hugh Leonard

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.
David McCullough

All literature is political.
LeVar Burton

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

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

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