Any amount of theology can be smuggled into people's minds under cover of romance without them knowing it.
Literature enables us to see our world and ourselves more clearly, to understand our lives more fully.
The world of literature is a sacred mirror that shows not the reality around us but the dreams and fears that reality stimulates: It’s not where we live, but life itself.
Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.
One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.
Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.
This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers.
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.
I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.
No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We’ve got too many dexterous drudges as it is.
Literature wasn’t intended to be about perfect people, it was about flaws, very real and very deep human flaws.
The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.
Good literature boils down to two things: How interesting is the story you are telling, and how interesting is your telling.
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by t...
What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I'm someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.
... since the history of words is a mainspring of our intellectual and emotional character.
Practically every movie that shows the pope or even a bishop as a character, and in much of western literature of the last 300 or 400 years, these are portrayed as awful figures.
Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds.
Anything can become a children's book if you give it to a child...Children are actually the best (and worst) audience for literature because they have no patience with pretence.
My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.
It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.
