One has a sort of spiritual obligation to go back to the source material of the literature, to make contact with one of the seminal plays of the modern theater. – Arthur Penn
The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
You become a reader by reading the literature, not by reading the handbooks about it. – Aidan Chambers
Bobby Fischer has an enormous knowledge of chess and his familiarity with the chess literature of the USSR is immense. – Boris Spassky
There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress. – Benjamin N. Cardozo
The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature. – Alfred North Whitehead
It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression. – Alfred North Whitehead
I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
If it is good literature, the reader and the writer will connect. It’s inevitable. – Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Nineteenth-century English literature I know; 19th-century sewage systems, not so much. – Glen Duncan
All great characters, great icons, in literature are a bit of a riddle, and that’s the reason we go back to them over and over. – David Lagercrantz
German writers in the late 18th century were the first to uphold a prickly, literary nationalism, in reaction to the then dominance and prestige of French literature. – Pankaj Mishra
To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature. – Ernst Fischer
My idea of teaching literature is just to read great passages aloud or to look at it the way a writer does, which is what I try to do. Which is to say, ‘How does this writer do this? How did he order his scenes? Do you notice any pattern to his sentences?’ – Ethan Canin
We will always have more to discover, more to invent, more to understand and that’s much closer to art and literature than any science. – Daniel Tammet
In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern. – Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
There were no vampires of note in Western literature until about the 18th century. But they tell us where we park our anxieties, whether its over-powerful women, death or damnation. We make our own monsters. – Deborah Harkness
I didn’t make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature. – Naguib Mahfouz
American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World. – Christopher Dawson
Literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist. – Morris Raphael Cohen
There’s always a host of voices you’re inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He’s one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens. – Dylan Moran
I had never read Victorian novels before going overseas. I read a handful of authors, but I had not immersed myself in the literature of the 19th century. – Eleanor Catton
I’ve been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don’t think there is anything. – Phil Klay