“Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.”
“Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.”
“The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.”
“For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.”
“Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.”
“The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words.”
“Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.”
“How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?”
“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.”
“That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?”
“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.”
“I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.”
“In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.”
“With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.”
“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.”
“It is the story-teller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.”
“For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?”