“To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.”
“The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.”
“The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.”
“Learning why one great book is just like every other great book is the key to understanding literature”
“The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.”
“A literary movement consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially.”
“The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood.”
“Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.”
“The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.”
“One learns little more about a man from his feats of literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.”
“Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.”
“Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.”
“There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.”
“In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.”
“Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.”
“Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.”
“The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.”
“For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?”
“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!”
“A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.”
“I am not a literary man. I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.”
“The cultivation of literary pursuits forms the basis of all sciences, and in their perfection consist the reputation and prosperity of kingdoms.”
“English literature is a kind of training in social ethics. English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.”
“In the electronic age, books, words and reading are not likely to remain sufficiently authoritative and central to knowledge to justify literature.”
“Literature, as a field of glory, is an arena where a tomb may be more easily found than laurels; and as a means of support, it is the chance of chances.”
“Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.”
“The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.”
“The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper -- whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.”
“Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.”
“Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.”