For Mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.

All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool.

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.

Literature is my calling To hold up the mirror to my countrymen comes natural to me; and in the open field of invention I am not without hopes of giving them pleasure.

Don't ask to live in tranquil times. Literature doesn't grow there.

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.

Bad literature is a form of treason.

Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.

That a literature in our time is living is shown in that way that it debates problems.

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.

The knowledge of languages was very useful. I have a university degree in foreign languages and literature.

If you say city to people, people have no problem thinking of the city as rife with problematic, screwed-up people, but if you say suburbs - and I'm not the first person to say this, it's been said over and over again in literature - there's a sense of normalcy.

Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo clinic.

The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective.