Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.

Literature is an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.

Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language

Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another. Writers can do something to combat these clichés of our separateness, our difference — for writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences — experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.

Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of utterance.

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.

Literature is a key to understanding human nature, social relations, and feelings.

Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.

Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.

The word literature enters the room with its nose in the air. But get it in a corner, ask the right questions, and it will reluctantly fess up to its humble origins. It hails from the Latin 'litterae,' you whisper in your date's ear. It puts on a big act, but it literally just means 'things made of letters.

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur "Thou still unravished bride of quietness," then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

Literature — which is art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality — seems to me the end towards which all human effort would have to strive, if it were truly human and not just a welling up of our animal self. To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colours with a durability not found in cellular life.

It seems that...literature grants us the ability to endure and encompass traumatic and horrifying events, to articulate them through writing and the evocative power of memory...It is a way of articulating the self, as well as the soul. A world without writers would be a world lingering in the shadows of silence...Literature moves us, rescues us from oblivion, and makes us witnesses to our history..literature binds the voices from the most diverse geographies, makes the experiences of women universal, and gives hope to future generations.