"I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature"

"A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect"

"I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens"

"The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation"

"What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote"

"Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature"

"Literature is about as unnecessarily necessarily as tableware or ironed shirts"

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity"

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it"

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn"

"The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature"