The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.
~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe - [Literature]

One of the proud joys of the man of letters --if that man of letters is an artist is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory.
~ Edmond and Jules De Goncourt - [Literature]

It is the story-teller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.
~ Graham Greene - [Literature]

A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.
~ Edith Hamilton - [Literature]

A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate
~ Christopher Hampton - [Literature]

I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.
~ Vaclav Havel - [Literature]

The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
~ Vaclav Havel - [Literature]

It is a good lesson --though it may often be a hard one --for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of all significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.
~ Nathaniel Hawthorne - [Literature]

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.
~ Nathaniel Hawthorne - [Literature]

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
~ Ernest Hemingway - [Literature]