The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.
I take a certain pride in having maintained a reputation for fast copy throughout my newspaper career. Fast-breaking stories left my typewriter in a hurry. Not great literature, perhaps, but fast, and usually accurate.
It's what's missing, I think, from most music - the rebellious part. That rebelliousness is part of great rock music or great literature or any great creative stuff.
I think you can find all the elements that you can find in great literature in mundane experiences.
Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.
I'm not writing great literature. I'm writing commercial fiction for people to enjoy the stories and to like the characters.
And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature.
Hopefully, reading and being around great literature inspires me to write songs, but I'm not sure about that.
To me, characters are at the heart of great literature.
I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic.
When I was a kid, I went through the whole process of reading great literature and trying to be very widely read.
I'm not a great writer of literature. I'm an entertainer.
Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
Hemingway's remarks are not literature.
Lisbeth Salander is one of the most compelling heroines of 21st century crime literature, and I am thrilled to see readers have welcomed her return.
There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society.
I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.
Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of wealth.
I don't want to be like other authors and say that there are only a few story lines in literature. A story is like a human face. We have as many stories as human faces. You might have similar facial features, but they're all a little different.
What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.
