Never underestimate the value of superior hair as a…

I don't know if nature is a direct literary influence on my writing, but it is certainly important to me. I take great joy…

— Per Petterson

My greatest influence has been the blues. And that's a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as…

— August Wilson

A literary influence is never just a literary influence. It's also an influence in the way you see everything - in the way you…

— Thom Gunn

My father is my biggest literary influence. Recently, I've been looking through his letters. He was in the National Guard when I was a…

— Louise Erdrich

Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived…

— Margaret Atwood

There's definitely been a focus on the literary aspects of my music, and I always get a little cringey because I don't feel like…

— Julia Holter

“And when I’d settled down, I considered the possibility that I wasn’t yet ready to ask for the love of anyone because I had…

— Steven Decker

They never opened the door which leads to the soul.

— Henry Miller

“You're smiling. But you must know yourself, since you are a literary person, that the work of fiction is always a form of recovery…

— Raymond Federman

I say quotations are literary. They are good only when dealing with ideas, not with experience. Experience should be pure, unique.

— Anais Nin

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

— Harold Bloom

I have said it somewhere - our literary lived lives are as important as our literally lived lives.

— Claire Messud

I'm more interested than Philip Roth in understanding women, even if I do it imperfectly. But that book, Portnoy's Complaint, is literary punk in…

— Karan Mahajan

Criticism even should not be without its charms. When quite devoid of all amenities, it is no longer literary.

— Joseph Joubert

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished…

— Terry Eagleton