Literary Quotes

I get sent a lot of scripts which feature him as a kind of all-purpose Victorian literary character and really understand little, if anything, about him, his life or his books.

I have no literary fears.

They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?'

I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.

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.

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

The greater the conceptual significance of a literary product, the more it should be assumed that it is based on an idea that determines the whole, and that the deeper consciousness of the time to which it belongs is reflected in it.

You have to remember that I was a bright but simple fellow from Canada who seldom, if ever, met another writer, and then only a so-called literary type that occasionally sold a story and meanwhile worked in an office for a living.

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.

Bridget Jones is part of literary lore now and actually to be a part of it is enormously flattering.

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

A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.

Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.

Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.

We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it.

Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.

My literary success meant nothing to me.

A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate.

They are the literary equivalent of sequins on an evening dress.

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.

If Art relates itself to an Object, it becomes descriptive, divisionist, literary.

Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.

I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.