Quotes About Literary

I use biography, I use literary connections (as with Platen - this seems to me extremely helpful for appreciating the nuances of Mann's and Aschenbach's sexuality), I use philosophical sources (but not in the way many Mann critics do, where the philosophical theses and concepts seem to be counters to be pushed around rather than ideas to be probed), and I use juxtapositions with other literary works (including Mann's other fiction) and with works of music.

Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.

I don't have traceable literary models because I haven't had great literary influences in my life.

I have always loved reading, so was interested in the literary world, and took many literary portraits.

But everything written has style. The list of ingredients on the side of a cornflakes box has style. And everything literary has literary style. And style is integral to a work. How something is told correlates with - more - makes what's being told. A story is its style.

Science fiction is the characteristic literary genre of the century. It is the genre that stands in opposition to literary modernism.

I think I'm up for not trying to play a literary heroine. I think I'd rather just do someone that has just been created in a script, rather than in a book that everyone knows and loves. The difficulty with it and the reason these characters are so loved is that every woman and man that reads it understands it in a different way. They're so relatable, but different aspects will be drawn from different people.

A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts - for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work.

My childhood was spent embracing one literary heroine after another. I identified passionately with each one and would slavishly imitate them.

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

So much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum.

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 doubt very much if a man whose main literary interests were in works by Mr. Zane Grey, admirable as they may be, is particularly equipped to be the chief executive of this country, particularly where Indian Affairs are concerned.

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.

For the grand and inescapable tradition of western literary classics confronts us with fundamental choices over our understanding of words, reading and art, as well as citizenship, civilization, faith, and the whole notion of the true, the good, and the faithful.

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

I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it's more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.

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.

It is my belief that we as human beings have a need to tell stories - I think it's evolutionary. So you can think of the short story as a literary form, or you can instead think of stories.

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.

A mere literary man is a dull man; a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man; but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man.

The Bible is obviously a mixed book. Literary and nonliterary (expository, explanatory) writing exist side by side within the covers of this unique book.

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.

The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures, and situations.

How have people come to be taken in by The Phenomenon of Man? We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of this kind [pseudoscience/'woo'], for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.

The argument of Alcidamas: Everyone honours the wise. Thus the Parians have honoured Archilochus, in spite of his bitter tongue; the Chians Homer, though he was not their countryman; the Mytilenaeans Sappho, though she was a woman; the Lacedaemonians actually made Chilon a member of their senate, though they are the least literary of men; the inhabitants of Lampsacus gave public burial to Anaxagoras, though he was an alien, and honour him even to this day.

Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary class.

Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always; and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.

Literary characters, like my grandmother's apparitions, are fragile beings, easily frightened; they must be treated with care so they will feel comfortable in my pages

Common hypocrites pass themselves off as doves; political and literary hypocrites pose as eagles. But don't be fooled by their eagle-like appearance. These are not eagles, but rats or dogs.

At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.

I guess both Nabokov and Popper had, in different ways, immunized me against the fashion for French-influenced literary theory in the '70s, '80s, and '90s - "immunized" in the sense that they made me no longer susceptible to this epidemic cultural virus. I looked into Derrida and found that he rarely seemed to be interested in truth; he was more interested in making a splash.

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.

I was writing fiction steadily, but I found that the stark determinisms of code were a welcome relief from the ambiguities of literary narrative.

Norwich is a fine city. None finer. If there is another city in the United Kingdom with a school of painters named after it, a matchless modern art gallery, a university with a reputation for literary excellence which can boast Booker Prize-winning alumni, one of the grandest Romanesque cathedrals in the world, and an extraordinary new state-of-the-art library then I have yet to hear of it.

Gunn would be an important figure-rewarding, delightful, accomplished, enduring-in the history of English-language poetry even were his life not as fascinating as it now seems; he would be an important figure in the history of gay writing and in the history of transatlantic literary relations even were his poetry not so good as it is. With his life as it was and his works as they are, he's an obvious candidate for a volume of retrospective and critical essays, and this one is first-rate.

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology.

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's one devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.

I know important literary writers who can't get published.

The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.

I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.

I felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there.

The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one.

A literary agent is nothing but a cheap salesman (or woman); while a writer is a cheap salesman (or woman) who also has to actually write the books.

People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.

. I used to advise writers to just write their books and it will find a home, and suddenly that didn't seem as certain. I figured it was time to act. I considered a small press through RADAR, my literary non-profit.