Quotes About Literary

There are characters in some short stories who exist as people, and there are other characters in different short stories who exist as purely literary constructs. You know, the young man in "Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire" - I probably got that right - is a literary construct, and enjoys being a literary construct. He has no life off stage, whereas the young men in "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" were as near to being real human beings as I could possibly get them.

The moment in the account of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis is when they realize they're naked and try and cover themselves with fig leaves. That seemed to me a perfect allegory of what happened in the 20th century with regard to literary modernism. Literary modernism grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I'm telling a story! Oh, that can't be the case, because I'm a clever person. I'm a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself?...a lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller.

There's literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn't otherwise have.

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.

Today the crime novelist has one advantage denied to writers of 'straight' or 'literary' novels. Unlike them he can range over all levels of society, for crime can easily breach the barriers that exist in our stratified society. Because of these barriers the modern literary novel, unlike its 19th-century predecessors, is often confined to the horizontal, dealing only with one class. But crime runs through society from top to bottom, and so the crime novelist can present a fuller picture of the way we live now.

Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking.

My dancing is not an attempt to interpret life in the literary sense. It is an affirmation of life through movement.

Used to be in the old days, only the pulp writers wrote like machines. Now everybody is expected to be literary John Henrys. So in that context someone like me is an anomaly.

If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.

Whether early or late, the Parker novels are all superlative literary entertainments.

I think suspense should be like any other color on a writers palette. I suppose Im in the minority but I think its crazy for literary fiction to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto.

Evidently, there are many great American writers. But sometimes it can feel as though American fiction is dominated by relatively linear narrative form, with a heavy emphasis on psychological realism. If you limit yourself to a certain kind of American literary fiction, it's easy to forget about the different kinds of books that are being written. You can forget to be ambitious, both as a reader and a writer.

Kafka was certainly one of the great literary talents of the twentieth century, but he did not find his way to his own style until the age of nearly 30, so rather late. The disciplined immersion in unconscious psychical material is something he also learned only after long years of practice. When he succeeded in doing it for the first time - in the story The Judgement - it put him in a euphoric mood. He wanted to experience this again and again; the act of creation made him happy and proud.

I don't even know what a serious literary critic is.

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

I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling writers

In general I do not draw well with literary men -- not that I dislike them but I never know what to say to them after I have praised their last publication.

Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called other, which is simply another universe, another planet, another species.

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.

How can one talk in a classical language about a child who's torn apart in an explosion in the market near his school? People in Iraq don't talk about their joys, their problems, and the destruction of the country in literary diction.

The seeds of genius are in many blogs, but bloggers lack the interest in or understanding of the difference between blogging and fully-formed literary efforts.

The literary gift is a very dangerous gift to possess if you are not telling the truth, and I would a great deal rather, for my part, have a man stumble in his speech than to feel he was so exceedingly smooth that he had better be watched both day and night.

Our generation grew up with the Review as a fact of life. It was America’s literary magazine. To our minds, it still is. It has launched our favorite writers. It has made a special claim for the quarterly as such, being both timely and lasting, free of the news of the day or the pressure to please a crowd. Most of all, the Review has shown, repeatedly, that works of imagination can be as stylish and urgent as the flashiest feature reporting, and can do more to refocus our picture of the world.

Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them-almost all women; a vast number of clever, hardheaded men.

Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.

The further our civilization advances upon its present lines so much the cheaper sort of thing does "fame" become, especially of the literary sort. This species of "fame" a waggish acquaintance says can be manufactured to order, and sometimes is so manufactured.

I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.

It makes one hope and believe that a day will come when, in the eye of the law, literary property will be as sacred as whiskey, or any other of the necessaries of life. It grieves me to think how far more profound and reverent a respect the law would have for literature if a body could only get drunk on it.

I may be the person who put "dieselpunk" into the conversation. I have always been a reader who reads in a really broad way. I read genre writers and I read literary fiction and I read books by dead people.

I’m a huge fan of the books myself, so to know that I got to play Clary – who’s a literary heroine to me – was a huge honour.

I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.

Tragedy is a literary concept.

Instead of giving it [war] a rest I continued pursuing more research, talking to more people on the subject as if I was to please this aftermath of the book by knowledge that was more historical and psychological than literary and aesthetical.

Literary education must follow the education of the hand -the one gift that distinguishes man from beast.

If you read many contemporary literary novels today, you may notice that regardless of the subject matter there's a 'sameness' about them, the way in which thoughts are expressed and ideas, conveyed, the sometimes dogmatic application of what are, at best, useful maxims such as, 'less is more', the narrative techniques utilised, even the same, irritating, stylistic devices scattered like pepper all over the pages.

A preface is a species of literary luxury, where an author, like a lover, is privileged to be egotistical.

I love writing literary stuff. My favorite writer is definitely Edgar Allan Poe - so imaginative and prolific. My second favorite writer would have to be Shakespeare - I love the emotion and human truths he touches on so beautifully.

Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.

Suggestion is a literary strategy.

I think part of the success which Structuralist or post-Structuralist thought in critical theory has had in literary studies in American universities is due to a theoretical vacuum.

The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.

Literary science fiction is a very, very narrow band of the publishing business. I love science fiction in more of a pop-culture sense. And by the way, the line between science fiction and reality has blurred a lot in my life doing deep ocean expeditions and working on actual space projects and so on. So I tend to be more fascinated by the reality of the science-fiction world in which we live.

Autobiographical writings, essays, interviews, various other things... All the non-fiction prose I wanted to keep, that was the idea behind this collected volume, which came out about few years ago. I didn't think of Winter Journal, for example, as an autobiography, or a memoir. What it is is a literary work, composed of autobiographical fragments, but trying to attain, I hope, the effect of music.

I don't care very much for literary shrines and hauntsI knew a woman in London who boasted that she had lodgings from the windows of which she could throw a stone into Carlyle's yard. And when I said, "Why throw a stone into Carlyle's yard?" she looked at me as if I were an imbecile and changed the subject.

You have to remember that in addition to running a literary agency, I am also an ebook publisher.

The first epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be read.

There's a socialist bias to the consensus of the literary world: a '30s mentality that says factory workers are more worthy of our attention.

Of all literary exercitations, whether designed for the use or entertainment of the world, there are none of so much importance, or so immediately our concern, as those which let us into the knowledge of our own nature. Others may exercise the understanding or amuse the imagination; but these only can improve the heart and form the human mind to wisdom.