Great literature is simply language
charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
-Ezra Pound
It is in literature
that the concrete outlook of humanity
receives its expression.
-Alfred North Whitehead
There are some themes, some subjects,
too large for adult fiction;
they can only be dealt with adequately
in a children's book.
-Philip Pullman
Literature illuminates life
only for those to whom books are a necessity.
-Anthony Powell
In literature as in love,
we are astonished by what is chosen by others.
-Andre Maurois
Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life.
-Fernando Pessoa
All good Literature
rests primarily on insight.
-George Henry Lewes
The answers you get from literature
depend on the questions you pose.
-Margaret Atwood
Literature is the question
minus the answer.
-Roland Barthes
It's [literature is] the best way of telling the truth;
it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies
that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.
-Julian Barnes
Literature could be said to be
a sort of disciplined technique
for arousing certain emotions.
-Iris Murdoch
Great literature, past or present,
is the expression of great knowledge
of the human heart.
-Edith Hamilton
Personal experience
is the basis of all real Literature.
-George Henry Lewes
The really great novel
tends to be the exact negative
of its author's life.
-Andre Mauois
All fiction is autobiographical fantasy.
-James Joyce
Lost illusion
is the undisclosed title
of every novel.
-Andre Maurois
The use of literature is to afford us a platform
whence we may command a view of our present life,
a purchase by which we may move it.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is rather above the measure of all of us
(save for a very few perhaps).
We all need literature that is above our measure -
though we may not have sufficient energy for it all the time.
-J. R. R. Tolkien
The test of literature is, I suppose,
whether we ourselves live more intensely
for the reading of it.
-Elizabeth Drew
What is wonderful about great literature
is that it transforms the man who reads it
toward the condition of the man who wrote.
-E. M. Forster
This is the most intimate relationship
between literature and its readers:
they treat the text as a part of themselves,
as a possession.
-Ryszard Kapuscinsk
Our literature is a substitute
for our religion,
and so is our religion.
-T. S. Eliot
An interchange of literature
is the conversation of nations.
-Edward Counsel
A people's literature is the great textbook
for real knowledge of them.
The writings of the day
show the quality of the people
as no historical reconstruction can.
-Edith Hamilton
Literature is analysis after the event.
-Doris Lessing
The decline of literature
indicates the decline of a nation.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Literature becomes the living memory
of a nation.
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
