Quotes About Literary

These self-appointed deacons in the Church of Latter-Day American Literature seem to regard generosity (of words) with suspicion, texture with dislike, and any broad literary stroke with outright hate. The result is a strange and arid literary climate where a meaningless little fingernail paring like Nicholson Baker's Vox becomes an object of fascinated debate and dissection, and a truly ambitious American novel like Matthew's Heart of the Country is all but ignored.

Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary studies have been slow to wake up to the importance of MSA (media-specific analysis). Literary criticism and theory are shot through with unrecognized assumptions specific to print. Only now, as the new medium of electronic textuality vibrantly asserts its presence, are these assumptions clearly coming into view.

A word, and all the infinite fluctuations it may possess. Like that moment when you know you have something to say, and you know you're speaking, even, but you still have no idea how you will say it. Or the moment when, as a reader, you're reading, and you are understanding what you are reading, but still have utterly no idea what will come next for you, what precisely the author wants to say. For me, that is the ultimate level of literary depth, of literary density.

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

I don't know that I had a sense that there was such a thing as "the poetry world" in the 1960s and early 70s. Maybe poets did, but for me as an onlooker and reader of poetry, poetry felt like it was part of a larger literary world. I mean, even the phrase "the poetry world" reflects a sort of balkanization of American literary and artistic life that has to some extent happened since then.

This is how I understand literature - as a kind of remix or echo chamber. What's going on in a literary work are other literary things disinterred, cannibalized, and recombined.

Literary modernism kind of 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? I know! I’ll write Ulysses.”

I think that literary forms are losing their capacity to connect people to issues, to the experiences that feel most meaningful to them.

Living in Korea as a girl meant living under a lot of discrimination and limitation. It was the same in my university and in the Korean literary world I am involved in now.

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

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

I do not know what might be the most fitting description.... I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner. And this is what I said when they asked me if I would accept my election as pontiff: I am a sinner, but I trust in the infinite mercy and patience of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I accept in a spirit of penance.

Many intellectual heroes in the European tradition seem to find the great outdoors a chilling prospect - and its literary analogue, the mythworld, equally chilling. As if a world in which humans have no leverage, and might not be present at all, couldn't be interesting to humans.

The cultural wars of the sixties are over. I've reconciled with those who were my critics and opponents years ago. I was at odds with some those who were Black nationalists. Yet when feminists attempted to end my career and leave me as literary road kill, it was the Black nationalists who came to my rescue.

I can't help but think that it's an unfortunate custom to name children after people who come to sticky ends. Even if they are fictional characters, it doesn't bode well for the poor things. There are too many Judes and Tesses and Clarissas and Cordelias around. If we must name our children after literary figures then we should search out happy ones, although it's true they are much harder to find.

People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.

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.

There was the usual dreaminess, I suppose. Also a shyness that caused me - and others - to notice that I could express myself better by writing than by speaking. This is typical of many writers, I think. What is a drawback in childhood is an asset to a literary life. Not being fluent on one’s feet sends one to the page and a habit is born.

You got a job?" "Ignatius hasta help me at home," Mrs. Reilly said. Her initial courage was failing a little, and she began to twist the lute string with the cord on the cake boxes. "I got terrible arthuritis." "I dust a bit," Ignatius told the policeman. "In addition, I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.

Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics.

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

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.

To be shockingly original with your first novel, you don’t have to discover a new technique: Simply write about people as they are and not as the predominantly liberal and humanist literary establishment believes that they ought to be.

In my day a reporter who took an assignment was wholly on his own until he got back to the office, and even then he was little molested until his copy was turned in at the desk; today he tends to become only a homunculus at the end of a telephone wire, and the reduction of his observations to prose is commonly farmed out to literary castrati who never leave the office, and hence never feel the wind of the world in their faces or see anything with their own eyes.

A great literary work can be completely, completely unpredictable. Which can sometimes make them very hard to read, but it gives them a great originality.

I would never do a printed memoir. I've been asked to publish a memoir from years by different publishers and literary agents. I think it wouldn't be great for me because all I'd really want to talk about it music and I'd rather just play it.

He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child. He must take to pieces the whole web of his mind. He must unlearn much of that knowledge which has perhaps constituted hitherto his chief title to superiority. His very talents will be a hindrance to him.

I wrote a query letter to an editor - a friend of a friend. The editor called me an idiot, told me never to contact an editor directly, and then recommended three literary agents he had worked with before. Laurie Fox was one of them, and I've never looked back.

Tragedy is a literary concept.

Literature, the study of literature in English in the 19th century, did not belong to literary studies, which had to do with Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but instead with elocution and public speaking. So when people read literature, it was to memorize and to recite it.

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.

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.

Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.

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.

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.

"Cracking the Ice" scores the literary equivalent of a hat-trick: funny, harrowing and finally, heartfelt. This book is a winner.

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike

Anything less than total candor was bullshit. I owed that to my readers, I owed that to myself, and I owed that most specifically to my mother. I've had some thrilling moments in my 18-year literary career to this point, and nothing comes close to giving Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, the farm girl from Tunnel City, Wisconsin, to the world.

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

Two polar groups: at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.

I try to see their moral relevance [in the Bible] and, of course, to admire the literary beauty of the text. Prophetic poetry: No one has written the way Isaiah does.

Pride and Prejudice' - perhaps more than any other Jane Austen book - is engrained in our literary consciousness.

In the first night of the Arvon Foundation course, Elspeth Barker said something about the newspaper along the lines of - and I'm paraphrasing - "I do these pieces for them and it's amazing, because I don't type it out, I just fax it as it is, and the literary editor has a machine that can transform my handwriting into typed text." At which point I put my hand up and said, "Actually, I'm that machine."

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

I tend more towards what some people call literary science fiction, but what I mean by that is that it is full of interesting language, experimentation, and ideas.

I often say to my students in workshops that if they are trying to find literary inspiration, they should not go and read novels, because novels are more appropriate for series. Where as they should read short stories - that's the right format for you to be able to actually display the narrative in a film.

Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did.