The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.
Life develops, changes, is in motion. The forms of literature are not.
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
All literature becomes a sacred text.
Without literature, life is hell.
Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.
Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature.
To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.
Literature cannot be imposed; it must be discovered.
Literature is painting, architecture, and music.
Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.
literature is a way in which we can learn to live deeper lives -- husband with wife, parent with child, brother with sister, fellow member with fellow member. Most good authors are better than we are. They are much better company than our own friends...
I’ve always like Medieval literature. As a young girl I read mythologies and Norse legends, that sort of thing. I loved . While I was studying at Middle Tennessee State University for doctoral program I came in contact with more ancient literature....
Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I...
Literature keeps presenting the most vicious things to us an entertainment, but what it appeals to is not any pleasure of these things, but the exhilaration of standing apart from them and being able to see them for what they are because they aren't ...
It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our sense of under...
Amateur detectives in fiction had always annoyed Ella. They were so unrealistic. She didn’t intend to be the Rabbit Back version of Miss Marple or a cheap Baker Street knock-off, and she really didn’t like the idea of making the tabloids. That wa...
I would be happy to take credit for all of the wonderful experiences I describe in my novels, but my life isn’t quite that rich. Unfortunately we authors are sometimes forced to use other people’s lives, too.” “Sounds rather beastly,” the j...
I don’t have the heart to tell my sons that the older one gets, the less funny literature becomes—and they would refuse to believe me if I tried to explain that some people don’t think jokes even belong in proper books. I won’t bother breakin...
In my profession it isn’t a question of telling good literature from bad. Really good literature is seldom appreciated in its own day. The best authors die poor, the bad ones make money — it’s always been like that. What do I, an agent, get out...
History gives us the facts, sort of, but from literary works we can learn what the past smelled like, sounded like, and felt like, the forgotten gritty details of a lost era. Literature brings us as close as we can come to reinhabiting the past. By r...
