What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That’s what their substance is. – Jonathan Miller
I know not everyone starts out reading high literature. If you read enough you might be drawn to some other things, so maybe those vampire books are what they call ‘gateway books.’ I just coined that term. I don’t know if there’s a thing called ‘gateway books.’ – Josh Radnor
I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don’t get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists. – Kathy Acker
The vast literature concerning whistleblowers shows that, far from weird extremists, they are really quite ordinary people: male and female, young and old, junior and senior, no more nerdy or obsessive than most hard workers. – Margaret Heffernan
I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother’s side of the family in general were interested in literature. – Kenneth Koch
The amateur is very rare in French literature – as rare as he is common in our own. – Lytton Strachey
I got my first whiff of what big-time adult literature was all about when I was in 8th grade. I got it from Mark Linn-Baker. You know – the guy from ‘Perfect Strangers.’ – Lev Grossman
It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found – indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese. – Lafcadio Hearn
And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature. – Jerry Pournelle
At graduation, I assumed I’d be in publishing, but first I went to England and got a master’s degree in English Literature. And then I came back to New York and had a series of publishing jobs, the way one does. – Joseph Kanon
I think all literature should be read as comparative literature. And I think we should write out of what we know, but in the expectation that we can be changed at any moment by something we have yet to discover. – Margo Jefferson
In the ongoing celebration that is literature, we are asked to imagine ourselves as other selves, for better or worse. – Joanna Scott
The most enduring stories in literature generally have some kind of crime at their center, whether it’s the bloody butchery of ‘Hamlet,’ the lecherous misanthropes of Dickens or the lone gunman from ‘The Great Gatsby.’ – Karin Slaughter
Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world. – John Cheever
There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature. – Lawrence Durrell
What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power. – John Cheever
In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought. – Lytton Strachey
Although there is a very large literature, still growing almost daily, on the Chinese calendar, its interest is, we suggest, much more archaeological and historical than scientific. – Joseph Needham