Great literature makes a great life.
– Lailah Gifty Akita
Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.
– A.E. Housman
Literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.
– Amy Bloom
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called “Huckleberry Finn.
– Ernest Hemingway
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
– Ezra Pound
Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
– Jules Renard
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
– Italo Calvino
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
– Henry James
The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.
– Johann Wolfgang
Literature is news that stays news.
– Ezra Pound
The republic of letters.
– Jean Baptiste
I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.
– John Steinbeck
A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience.
– O. Henry
But, indeed, we prefer books to pounds; and we love manuscripts better than florins; and we prefer small pamphlets to war horses.
– Isaac D’Israeli
There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.
– Allan Bloom
To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.
– Alvin Toffler
They castrate the books of other men in order that with the fat of their works they may lard their own lean volumes.
– Jovius
A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself.
– Walter Bagehot
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
– E.M. Forster
I made a compact with myself that in my person literature should stand by itself, of itself, and for itself.
– Charles Dickens