Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism, or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.

-Graves, Robert von Ranke
  In the Observer,11 Nov.

   Show me an enemy of literature, and I will show him my accounts.

-Hamilton, (Robert) Ian
  The Trouble  with Money and Other Essays.

Ina real sense, peoplewhohavereadgood literaturehave lived more than people who cannot or will not read.

-Hayakawa, S(amuel) I(chiye)
Language in  Action.

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick: camp- following eunuchs of literature.

-Hemingway, Ernest Millar
  Letter to Sherwood  Anderson, 23 May.

All modernAmericanliterature comesfromonebook by MarkTwain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing good since.

-Hemingway, Ernest Millar
  The Green Hills of  Africa, ch.1.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

-James, Henry
  Hawthorne, ch.1.

   Today's literature: prescriptions written by patients.

-Kraus, Karl
Aphorism collected in Heinrich Fischer (ed) Beim Wort genommen (1955). Translated by Harry Zohn in Half-truths and one-and-a-half truths (1986).

   Le mensonge et les vers de tout temps sont amis. Lies and literature have always been friends.

-La Fontaine,Jean de
  Fables, pt.2, no.1,'Contre ceux qui ont le gou"   t difficile'.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machineryand primitive music and primitive medicine.

-Leacock, Stephen Butler
  Behind the Beyond,'Homer and Humbug'.

She was thinkingöfor, since she had been formed by literature, she could think in no other wayöthat all this had been described in Dickens,Tolstoy, Hugo, Dostoevsky, and a dozen others. All that noble and terrific indignation had done nothing, achieved nothing, the shout of anger from the nineteenth century might as well have been silentöfor here came the file of prisoners, handcuffed two by two, and on their faces was that same immemorial look of patient, sardonic understanding.

-Lessing, Doris May ne¤  e Tayler
  Martha Quest, ch.2.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man.

-Lewis, (Harry) Sinclair
  Babbitt, ch.14.

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

-Lewis, (Harry) Sinclair
  Nobel prize address,12 Dec.

Literature has a lot to answer for, where concepts of the countryside are concerned.

-Lively, Penelope (Margaret)
A House Unlocked.

Literature ismostlyabout having sex and not muchabout having children. Life is the other way round.

-Lodge, David John
  The British Museum is Falling Down, ch.4.

Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.

-Mailer, Norman Kingsley
  The Spooky  Art: Some Thoughts on Writing.

We sing the love of danger.Courage, rashness, and rebellion are the elements of our poetry. Hitherto literature has tended to exalt thoughtful immobility, ecstasy, and sleep, whereas we are for aggressive movement, febrile insomnia, mortal leaps, and blows with the fist.We proclaim that the world is richer for a new beautyof speed, and our praise isfor themanat the wheel. There is no beauty now save in struggle, no masterpiece can be anything but aggressive, and hence we glorify war, militarism and patriotism.

-Marinetti, Emilio FilippoTomasso
  Manifesto of Futurism. Quoted in Denis Mack Smith Italy:  A Modern History (1959), p.270.

Literature†is lonely and waited for, brilliant and pure and frightened, a marriage of birds, a conversation of the blind.

-Moore, Lorrie
  In the NewYork Times,10  Jul.

   We have to acknowledge that the thing we call 'literature' ismorepluralisticnow, just associetyoughtto be. The melting pot never worked.

-Morrison,Toni Chloe Anthony ne¤  e Wofford
  In Newsweek, 30 Mar.

   I have always wanted to develop a way of writing that was irrevocably black. I don't have the resources of a musician but I thought that if it was truly black literature, it would not be black because Iwas, it would notevenbe black because of its subject matter. It would be something intrinsic, indigenous, something in the way it was put togetheröthe sentences, the structure, texture and toneöso that anyone who read it would realize.

-Morrison,Toni Chloe Anthony ne¤  e Wofford
Quoted in Paul Gilroy Small  Acts (1993),'Living memory: a meeting with Toni Morrison'.

The curse of Scottish literature is the lack of a whole language, which finally means the lack of a whole mind.

-Muir, Edwin
  Scott and Scotland, introduction.