Civilians Quote by Walter Kirn

personally I don't trust literature that soothes people's consciences.

— Antonio Tabucchi

I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.

— Aleksandar Hemon

A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.

— Mohsin Hamid

Literature is humanity talking to itself.

— Norman Rush

No work of literature is the product of only one or two conscious ideas. A story is mysteriously dense of meaning.

— Carol Bly

Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an…

— Philip Roth

Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget…

— Barbara Kingsolver

The truth is that literature, particularly fiction, is not the pure medium we sometimes assume it to be. Response to it is affected by…

— Vance Palmer

Good literature substitutes for an experience which we have not oursleves lived through.

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to…

— William H. Gass

Steven Pinker says, the invention of printing and the widespread appearance of fiction - this taught empathy. If you read a novel, you're in…

— Martin Amis

I think there's a fine line between being so obtuse that you lose the reader completely, which is the intention for some writers, though…

— Laurie Foos