Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A public role endures for the literary high-command, as sages and seers, speaking out on social and political issues.
Sometimes literary critics review the book they wanted you to write, not the book you wrote, and that's very irksome.
Yes - 90% of fantasy is crap. And so is 90% of science fiction and 90% of mystery fiction and 90% of literary fiction.
Any biographer must of necessity become a pilgrim a peripatetic, obsessed literary pilgrim, a traveler with four eyes.
I love the idea of the literary salons in France where artists and writers would all come and talk and drink absinthe.
I was a businessman for 16 years of my life, so when I started writing, I wanted to keep my literary identity separate.
Creatively, most of my influences come from the literary world: Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara. Writers are my heroes.
Every literary culture has among its first bearings the 'blether' of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.
There might be a different model for a literary community that's quicker, more real-time, and involves more spontaneity.
I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form.
English dialogue is the best in the world. So dry and direct. The Italian language is beautiful, but it is too literary.
I grew up in a literary home and majored in French, English, and sociology. They all have served me well over the years.
I think my sensibility is very literary; all my books were built as books, and I wasn't thinking about them being movies.
Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.
There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!
I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.
New York offers a bubble out of the literary life that is very useful. We have more time for the children, for the cooking.
My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.'
My dad's got a brilliant eye for scripts 'cos he's a literary agent. He and my agent read a load of scripts and filter them.
I am not a pure fiction writer, nor am I an academic writer. Somehow I ended up in this blended area of literary journalism.
I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.'
The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.
In the 1970s colleges were under the reign of a very odd form of literary theory called deconstruction or post-structuralism.
When you read the Koran, you give up. At least the Bible is very beautiful because Jews have an extraordinary literary talent.
You can write a great book and be ignored. Literary history is full of classics that were under-appreciated in their own time.
One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.
As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.
I don't read literary blogs. I used to read them, but it was upsetting when they would talk, in a snarky way, about my friends.
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.
A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull.
Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?
It's not as if I've been unlucky. My books have been published and reviewed. I haven't lived through terrible literary suffering!
The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.
It's too bad for us 'literary' enthusiasts, but it's the truth nevertheless - pictures tell any story more effectively than words.
I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there.
The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all 'bottom line' editors; everything depends on the money.
Literary fiction - if we must use the term - is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.
It may be time for serious literary novelists to take back some of the subject matter we abandoned to hack novelists and the movies.
I sometimes think there is nothing really to be said about a novel but 'read the book.' I have a jaundiced view of literary critics.
I didn't know V. S. Naipaul very well, and to a large extent, my acquaintance with him was limited to meetings at literary festivals.
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.
The preoccupation of American historical and literary scholars with the New England Puritans must seem to outsiders like an obsession.
Now that I think about it, maybe my own literary exploration of the dark secrets held by families could be traced back to V.C. Andrews.
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.
The more you put out there, the more you have to resolve. 'Air' is the most literary comic I've written so far, and that poses problems.
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'm a huge fan of the book and Stephen King is one of my big heroes, literary heroes, and I am a fan, and I want to see a movie of 'It.'
It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.
Denise Mina is probably one of the most gifted writers out there, whether it's mystery or literary or whatever label you want to give it.