African Quote by J. M. Coetzee

Literature usually begets literature.

— Susan Sontag

I thought that, post-apartheid, there would be absolutely no interest in South Africa. That has been both true and untrue. The major writers like…

— Justin Cartwright

For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is…

— Ama Ata Aidoo

Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to…

— Robert Bringhurst

Literature is what you write when you think you should be saying something. Writing begins when you'd rather be doing anything else: and you've…

— Kenneth Patchen

If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn't concern the central issues, it wouldn't be worth publishing.

— Alan Paton

Literature is the expression of society.

— Charles Nodier

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is…

— Ezra Pound

Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next.…

— Laurie Anderson

Literature is a form of permanent insurrection. Its mission is to arouse, to disturb, to alarm, to keep men in a constant state of…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

English literature is a kind of training in social ethics. English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is…

— Marilyn Butler

I like the South: Southern literature and that relationship between grotesqueness and living below the Mason-Dixon line. But I also understand that people view…

— Holly Hunter