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.
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.
I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature.
If you want to communicate with the American public, the literature tells you you've got to be talking at about a sixth-grade, seventh-grade level.
So much of young adult literature has turned dark, almost pathological. It's almost as if there is a race to see who can be the most dysfunctional.
Current "literature" [is] well-written books in which disgusting people do disgusting things to other disgusting people for no apparent reason and with no apparent resolution.
Underground literature only began in the '70s, when technical developments made it possible. Before that, we were involved in a game with the censors. That was our struggle.
When you read the psychedelic literature, there is a distinction between the so-called natural psychedelics and synthetic psychedelics that are artificially produced.
I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.
