„Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.“

Origine: Soul Music

The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time
Contesto: In literature you don't just read one poem or novel after another, but enter into a complete world of which every work of literature forms part. This affects the writer as much as it does the reader.

From the fourth book, "The Book of Impotence"
The Pillow Book

Auf eine ähnliche Weise sollen in der vollkommnen Litteratur alle Bücher nur Ein Buch seyn, und in einem solchen ewig werdenden Buche wird das Evangelium der Menschheit und der Bildung offenbart werden.
“Ideas,” Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), § 95

On how he handled dialogue in his works in “An Interview with Ernest J. Gaines” https://www.missourireview.com/article/an-interview-with-ernest-j-gaines/ in The Missouri Review (1999 Dec 1)

Origine: The Book of Disquiet

Origine: Miscellaneous Aphorisms; The Soul of Man

Part I, Ch. 1
Green Hills of Africa (1935)

[…] it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.
Part I, Ch. 1
Green Hills of Africa (1935)

Origine: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

"American Literature" in Papers on Literature and Art (1846), p. 122.

Frankfurt Book Fair speech (2003)
Contesto: To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom.
Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

Origine: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 35.

Origine: I Shall Wear Midnight

Origine: Journey Within (1947), Ch. 2 : The Three Revelations
Contesto: No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself. And the most objective books are the most deceptive. The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest.

Query 2
Opticks (1704)