Henry Miller: "Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music-the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls, and interesting people. Forget yourself."
Ezra Pound: "Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree."
Joseph Heller: "He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it."
John Steinbeck: "I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."
Alfred North Whitehead: "It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression."
Henry James: "It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature."
C. S. Lewis: "Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become."
Oscar Wilde: "Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it but molds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac."
G. K. Chesterton: "Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
Virginia Woolf: "Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others."
Salman Rushdie: "Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart."
William Somerset Maugham: "The crown of literature is poetry."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation."
Robert Louis Stevenson: "The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean."
