  In natural language using short sentences is considered efficient for
communication. However, a text composed exclusively of such sentences looks
technical and reads boring. A text composed of long ones, on the other hand,
demands significantly more effort for comprehension. Studying characteristics
of the sentence length variability (SLV) in a large corpus of world-famous
literary texts shows that an appealing and aesthetic optimum appears somewhere
in between and involves selfsimilar, cascade-like alternation of various
lengths sentences. A related quantitative observation is that the power spectra
S(f) of thus characterized SLV universally develop a convincing `1/f^beta'
scaling with the average exponent beta =~ 1/2, close to what has been
identified before in musical compositions or in the brain waves. An
overwhelming majority of the studied texts simply obeys such fractal attributes
but especially spectacular in this respect are hypertext-like, "stream of
consciousness" novels. In addition, they appear to develop structures
characteristic of irreducibly interwoven sets of fractals called multifractals.
Scaling of S(f) in the present context implies existence of the long-range
correlations in texts and appearance of multifractality indicates that they
carry even a nonlinear component. A distinct role of the full stops in inducing
the long-range correlations in texts is evidenced by the fact that the above
quantitative characteristics on the long-range correlations manifest themselves
in variation of the full stops recurrence times along texts, thus in SLV, but
to a much lesser degree in the recurrence times of the most frequent words. In
this latter case the nonlinear correlations, thus multifractality, disappear
even completely for all the texts considered. Treated as one extra word, the
full stops at the same time appear to obey the Zipfian rank-frequency
distribution, however.
