In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language.

The ultimate function of literature is to appreciate the world, sometimes indignantly, sometimes sorrowfully, but best of all to praise when it is luckily possible.

For a while, in the U.S. and Europe, a logical and practical approach to literature prevailed, but it didn't last very long. That’s because life is full of mystery. And the goal of literature is to explore those mysteries. It actually enlarges your horizons. When you allow dreams, visions, and premonitions to enter into your everyday life and your work as a writer, reality seems to expand.

Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.

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.

We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our own life stories and—equally important—to find ourselves by understanding our own life stories more clearly in the context of others’.

One of the most obvious uses [of literature], I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them as also possibilities.

Literature ... seeks to entertain — and why is this? ... The reason, fundamentally, is that literature knows something that science does not: the human resistance to hearing the truth. Science does not inform scientists of this basic fact. ... The wisdom of literature arises mainly from its attention to this point. To overcome the resistance to truth, literature makes use of fictions that are images of truth.

The job of literature is to change the reader’s soul. I don’t want my readers just to enjoy themselves. I want them to go through some sort of experience that might change themselves.

The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.

What literature should suggest to us as readers is beyond debate — it’s our ability to elaborate our perspectives and to have knowledge of the other from within his mind and feelings, allowing us to recognize the humanity of the other,” she said. “It makes us not only better human beings but better citizens of our worlds.

What is literature? How can you explain it? Why do writers write? Why do readers read? It is not enough to know. We want to understand. If knowing and knowledge were our main and only concern, art would have never come to exist. We would have science and maybe journalism… But we are not satisfied with simple information about what happened. We need more than an anecdote. We need a story that gives shape and meaning to the confusing chaos of life. Our minds need an order that does not exist in real life.

To translate knowledge and information into experience: that seems to be the function of literature and art.

Literature is one facet of a culture. The significance of a literature can be best understood in terms of the culture from which it springs, and the purpose of literature is clear only when the reader understands and accepts the assumptions on which the literature is based. A person who was raised in a given culture has no problem seeing the relevance, the level of complexity, or the symbolic significance of that culture’s literature. We are all from early childhood familiar with the assumptions that underlie our own culture and its literature and art. Intelligent analysis becomes a matter of identifying smaller assumptions peculiar to the locale, idiom, and psyche of the writer.