Literary Quotes

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.

'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.

But it's not just a game of finding literary references.

The New Testament evinces its universal design in its very, style, which alone distinguishes it from all the literary productions of earlier and later times.

The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all "bottom line" editors; everything depends on the money.

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

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.

The intercourse between the Mediterranean and the North or between the Atlantic and Central Europe was never purely economic or political; it also meant the exchange of knowledge and ideas and the influence of social institutions and artistic and literary forms.

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.

To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.

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.