Literary Quotes

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.

I use the language I use to my friends. They wouldn't believe me if I used some high-flown literary language. I want them to believe me.

When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.

I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form.

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'

My literary success meant nothing to me.

The best source for finding an agent is called Literary Agents of North America. It's a complete list of agents, not only by name and address, but by type of book they represent and by what their submission criteria are.

Extremists often derive their inspiration from literal interpretations of texts that should rightly be read not as Associated Press reports from the ancient world, but as theological and literary enterprises requiring independent intellectual assessment.

I'm not expecting the American literary community to welcome me with open arms. To them I'm just some schmuck kid who wrote some book.

Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself.

I don't want to promote my own image either. I don't like going on television or mixing in literary circles.

But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole.

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.

Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.

Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.

Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking.

The first epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be read.

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

In England, literary pretence is more universal than elsewhere from our method of education.

At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language.

How can I impress strangers with the gem-like flame of my literary passion if it's a digital slate I'm carrying around, trying not to get it all thumbprinty?

For the last half of my life I have had the doubtful benefit of a brother whose literary reputation is much greater than my own.

I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer.

Literary life used to be quite different in Britain in the years I lived there, from 1971 to 1989, because money was not a factor - no one made very much except from U.S. sales and the occasional windfall.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

I hope Gunter Grass will continue helping the SPD in campaigns and that he will otherwise remain with us as a provocative literary figure, as well.

When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.