Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic.

In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.

Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.

A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.

The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment.

The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.

Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline Hill to worship at the temple of Jupiter. But Horace's poetry has lasted longer than Jupiter's religion, and Jupiter himself has only survived because he disappeared into literature.

A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.

For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he can exploit; for the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong.

The book is the world's most patient medium.