Quotes about Literature

The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.

From my boyhood I have had an intense and overwhelming conviction that my real vocation lay in the direction of literature. I have, however, had a most unaccountable difficulty in getting any responsible person to share my views. - Cyprian Overbeck Wells: A Literary Mosaic

If in 100 years I am only known as the man who invented Sherlock Holmes then I will have considered my life a failure.

The writer] can easily foresee his fate ... in an age when an author who wants to have readers must take care to write in such a way that the book can easily be perused during an afternoon nap ....

The German language is so sonorous, isn't it? Beautiful language...the language of poetry. Angry, angry poetry.

Reading is more important to me than eating.

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

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

In a book, you can describe a scene and have any song you want playing on the radio and have any painting you want hanging on the wall. That was really freeing to me when I was writing 'Ready Player One.' I could throw in everything that I love.

To encourage literature and the arts is a duty which every good citizen owes to his country.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.