quotations about literature
I don't wish to be a slave any longer to the stringent exigencies of literature.
PHILIP ROTH
Le Monde, special issue, Jan. 2013
The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
Behind the Beyond
If literature is to transcend political interference and return to being a testimony of man and his existential predicament, it needs first to break away from ideology. To be without "isms," is to return to the individual and to return to viewing the world through the eyes of the writer, an individual who relies on his own perceptions and does not act as a spokesman for the people. The people already have rulers and election campaigners speaking in their name.
GAO XINGJIAN
"Literature as Testimony: The Search for Truth", Witness Literature: Proceedings of the Nobel Centennial Symposium