Literary Quotes

At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.

First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.

How dare anyone, parent, schoolteacher, or merely literary critic, tell me not to act colored.

Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single.

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.

People aren't used to thinking of cultural forms spreading out across the full range of formal interactions - or what is called the "text" in literary terms.

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

I can't change overnight into a serious literary author. You can't compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.

'Cerebus' is my attempt at a literary work.

Emerson was the chief figure in the American transcendental movement, a fact that complicates all accounts of him in literary or cultural history.

That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.

There's that unwritten schism that literary writers get all the awards and commericals writers get all the success.

I am in the Master of Professional Writing program teaching Humor Writing, Literary and Dramatic.

I have been told by a member of the board of one of Canada's most prominent literary magazines that a submission of mine once caused a great deal of controversy.

I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

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.

I don't write literary fiction - I write books that are entertaining, but are also, I hope, well-constructed and thoughtful and funny and have things to say about men and women and families and children and life in America today.

Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life.

Any biographer must of necessity become a pilgrim a peripatetic, obsessed literary pilgrim, a traveler with four eyes.

A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull.

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We'll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world.

I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.

One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.