The glittering structure of her cultivation sits on her novels like a rather showy icing that detracts from the cake beneath.

-Auchincloss, Louis Stanton
  Of Edith Wharton. Pioneers and Caretakers:  A Study of Nine American Women Novelists.

Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writerenters intoa structure of traditional stories and images.

-Frye, Northrop
The Bush Garden,'Conclusion'.

It's all honourable enough in its way, but it creates societies which simply cannot sustain any kind of democratic structure. It always leads to totalitarian and corrupt tyrannies† There's no tradition of moral individual courage in Chinese culture.

-Mo,Timothy
  Of Chinese tradition. In The Fiction Magazine, vol.1, no.4.

Styleandstructurearetheessence ofa book; great ideas are hogwash.

-Nabokov,Vladimir
  Interview in the Paris Review, Summer.

   Science is intimately integrated with the whole social structure and cultural tradition. They mutually support one anotheröonly in certain types of society can science flourish, and conversely without a continuous and healthy development and application of science such a society cannot function properly.

-Parry, Sir Charles Hubert Hastings
The Social System, ch.8.

The grand manner consists of four elements: subject or theme, concept, structure, and style. The first requirement, fundamental to all the others, is that the subject and the narrative be grandiose, such as battles, heroic actions, and religious themes.

-Poussin, Nicolas
Quoted in Giovanni Pietro Bellori Lives of the Modern Painters (1672).