“Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.”

— John Cheever

Entry in his journal before his last public appearance, the ceremony at which he received the National Medal for Literature, quoted by Susan Cheever, Home before Dark Houghton Mifflin (1984).

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John Cheever 36

American novelist and short story writer 1912–1982

Romain Gary (1914–1980) French writer and diplomat

“No one can deny—no one would think of denying—the vast benefit which literature has conferred on mankind; and with what ingratitude has it ever been received!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

“I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Palm Sunday

"Self-Interview", originally appeared in The Paris Review no. 69 (1977)
Palm Sunday (1981)

“Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.”

Joris-Karl Huysmans book Là-Bas

Source: Là-Bas

“India has produced the profoundest metaphysics that we know of … the absolute superiority of India over the West in philosophy; poetry from the Mahabharata, containing the Bhagavad Gita, perhaps the most beautiful work of the literature of the world.”

Hermann von Keyserling (1880–1946) German philosopher

Source: The Case for India, Will Durant. Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

“Each person has a literature inside them.”

Anna Deavere Smith (1950) American actress, playwright and professor

“Christ and the life of Christ is at this moment inspiring the literature of the world as never before, and raising it up a witness against waste and want and war. It may confess Him, as in Tolstoi's work it does, or it may deny Him, but it cannot exclude Him; and in the degree that it ignores His spirit, modern literature is artistically inferior. In other words, all good literature is now Christmas literature.”

William Dean Howells (1837–1920) author, critic and playwright from the United States

In Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Editor's Study Christmas Literature (December 1888), p. 158-59, as quoted in An Imperative Duty, Appendix D, 7

“If England has any dignity left in the way of literature, she will forget for ever the pitiful antics of English Literature's performing flea.”

Sean O`Casey (1880–1964) Irish writer

Letter to The Daily Telegraph, July 8, 1941; published in The Letters of Sean O'Casey: 1910-41 (New York: Macmillan, 1975) p. 890.
Of P. G. Wodehouse's wartime broadcasts from Berlin.

“Scarcely anything in literature is worth a damn except what is written between the lines.”

Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) Novelist, screenwriter

“I try to solve problems, always remembering that the world has already been saved by the Lord, we must only participate in this salvation. It is a fact that I often repeat to myself.”

Augusto Paolo Lojudice (1964) Italian Catholic Archbishop

New cardinal sees clear continuity between Benedict XVI, Francis (9 November 2020) Crux Catholic Media https://cruxnow.com/church-in-europe/2020/11/new-cardinal-sees-clear-continuity-between-benedict-xvi-francis

“Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.”

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