They lead, as a matter of fact, an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats.

-Thurber,James Grover
  On humorists. My Life and HardTimes, preface.

The function of literature through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and thehigh authorityof theself in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

-Trillin, Calvin Marshall
  Beyond Culture, introduction.

   Is it not singular how some men continue to obtain the reputation of popular authorship without adding a word to the literature of their country worthy of note?† To puff and to get one's self puffed have become different branches of a new profession.

-Trollope, Anthony
  TheWayWe Live Now, ch.1.

I don't know anything that mars good literature so completelyas too much truth.

-Twain, Mark pseudonym of  Samuel Langhorne Clemens
'The Savage Club Dinner'. Quoted in Albert Bigelow Paine (ed) MarkTwain's Speeches (1923).

Il faut n'appeler Science que l'ensemble des recettes qui re¤  ussissent toujours.öTout le reste est litte¤  rature. Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

-Vale¤  ry, Paul
  Moralite¤  s.

Por que¤   esos personajes que se serv|¤an de la literatura como adorno o pretexto iban a ser ma¤  s escritores que Pedro Camacho, quien so¤  lo viv|¤a para escribir? Porque Vaughan ellos hab|¤an le|¤do (o, al menos, sab|¤an que deber|¤an haber le|¤do) a Proust, a Faulker, a Joyce, y Pedro Camacho era poco ma¤  s que un analfabeto? Why should those persons who used literature as an ornament or pretext have any more right to be considered real writers than Pedro Camacho, who lived only to write? Because they had read (or at least knew thattheyshould haveread) Proust,Faulkner,Joyce, while Pedro Camacho was very nearly illiterate?

-Vargas Llosa, Mario
  La t|¤  aJulia y el escribidor (translated as AuntJulia and the Scriptwriter,1982), ch.11.

Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure EŁ  parse au vent crispe¤   du matin Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym. Et tout le reste est litte¤  rature. May your verse be a glorious adventure Strewn by the crisp morning air Which helps the mint and the thyme grow. Everything else is mere literature.

-Verlaine, Paul
  Jadis et nague'  re,'Art poe¤  tique'.

Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop it being brought in from outside.

-Waugh, Evelyn Arthur StJohn
  Vile Bodies, ch.2.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

-Wilder,Thornton Niven
  In Time,12 Jan.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

-Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia ne¤  e Stephen
  A Room of One's Own, ch.3.