Literary Quotes

One learns little more about a man from the feats of his literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.

If any imagine from the literary tone of the preceding remarks that we are indifferent to the radical movement for the benefit of the masses which is the crowning glory of the nineteenth century, they will soon discover their egregious mistake.

I think there are readers out there and I don't think the book is dead. And more importantly I don't think readers have to choose between literary and commercial fiction.

There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.

For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete.

I am an Episcopalian who takes the faith of my fathers seriously, and I would, I think, be disheartened if my own young children were to turn away from the church when they grow up. I am also a critic of Christianity, if by critic one means an observer who brings historical and literary judgment to bear on the texts and traditions of the church.

I think my sensibility is very literary; all my books were built as books, and I wasn't thinking about them being movies.

I couldn't speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British, and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligible for literary awards. But I still think I'm regarded as one of their own in Japan.

When I was in college, I was the editor of the literary magazine and insisted neither the editors nor the writers be specifically identified-only our student numbers appeared on the title page. I love that idea and still do.

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

Some Critics on the Hearth are not only good-natured, but have rather too high, or, if that is impossible, let us say too pronounced, an opinion of the abilities of their literary friends.

The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work.

I did not win and in fact I was called into the principal's office for a consultation with my parents. But that was the beginning of my literary career.

No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.

My literary success meant nothing to me.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

It's too bad for us 'literary' enthusiasts, but it's the truth nevertheless - pictures tell any story more effectively than words.

I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.

Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.

The literary culture, if you examine it, the high literary culture is that which preserves the government and you know it's really the talk for those who have.

One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.

The poem is the literary form of the 21st century. It's able to connect young people in a deep way to language... it's language as play.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

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

I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit.

Me, my literary reputation is mostly abroad, but I am anchored here in New York. I can't think of any other place I'd rather die than here.

No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.

You don't have to know people personally for them to be role models. Some of my most important role models were historical or literary figures that I only read about - never actually met.

It took me fifty years to deal with the Holocaust at all. And I did it in a literary way.

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.