Quotes About Literary

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.

Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy - it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.

That literary-popular distinction is, in my view, vastly overstated. At the far poles there are clearly books that are purely commercial and purely literary, written for audiences that want to see the same thing enacted over and over and over again. But the middle is where most people read and most people write.

Edmund Wilson was our greatest American literary critic because he was more than a literary critic: He was a fearless, even radical judge of the society he lived in. (See, for example, _A Piece of My Mind_; _The Cold War and the Income Tax_; the introduction to _Patriotic Gore_.) Our conventional critics cannot forgive him for those scandalous lapses in good taste.

We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent wasa youthful effervescence which we have now lost.

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

The old days of screenwriting, and myths about screenwriting, are maybe over. It's a literary form, if you can wake up to it.

Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic.

Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as spectacles to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions. The learned are mere literary drudges.

Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.

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

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.

If I focused hard on getting a literary agent, and doing things like that, instead of designing my blog's header, I would have more money, I think. I think I don't view myself as an author. I view myself as a person. I view [anything] as part of being a person, so I feel okay with "marketing" or other things like that.

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.

It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and meter rhythm. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains, which he himself could never hope to hear.

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.

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

Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.

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

I always try to describe the situation just as it is. I try to find sentences that I believe tell the story best. Even my articles are more literary than ordinary news stories.

In fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it's one of the few kinds of writing that doesn't tell us what to think or what to buy or what to wear. We're surrounded by advertising.

If you look at history you'll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.

I teach Korean translation at the British Centre for Literary Translation summer school, so I see an emerging generation too, who are around my age. I'm hoping to find time to mentor, and to help emerging translators to a first contract through Tilted Axis.

I couldn't speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligible for literary awards. But I still think I'm regarded as one of their own in Japan.

A well arranged scrapbook, filled with choice selections, is a most excellent companion for anyone who has the least literary taste.

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 was always creatively stubborn, adverse to editing by others, and wanted to use the kind of Ukrainian we spoke among ourselves rather than the more artificial prescribed literary Ukrainian. The problem was the greatest in prose, where editors would change my language because "it sounded better this way." My poetry they left alone probably out of deference to that hallowed genre.

I grew up on a mixed diet of mass and class, and I still read that way. I hate it when people apologize for what they read. Some bestsellers aren't exactly literary. So what? They're fun and rip-roaring, Who instituted the book police and why do we have to answer them? Grrrrr!

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

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

Books help to form us. If you cut me open, you will find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA.

There is nothing wrong with "women's studies" that studying the right women can't cure, but feminist literary scholars have a penchant for dragging the rivers of deserved obscurity for third-rate neurotics.

The Gospels were not thought of as works of literature. People were not concerned with the literary reputation of Matthew or Mark, but with the substance of their records of our Lord's life. They did not have to respect their actual words, as they would if they were transcribing the works of Thucydides or Plato.

Dictionary: a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.

From a literary standpoint, I've been loving Raymond Carver's short stories, William Carlos Williams' poems, Richard Siken's 'Crush', John Fante, and Jim Harrison's book of ghazals. I love film and photography too, so many of my songs are very image rich from those influences.

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.

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.

Why does a literary scholar study the world of "fiction"? To show us that the facts can never be understood except in communion with the imagination.

There's a lot of funding of the media and film in particular, literary publishing gets recognized as culture. I think fashion should too.

Ive summarized dozens of books in my literary career; its become rather second nature.

What I teach is literary criticism and comparative literature and so on and that's my function, but from time to time it's possible for me actually to help a writer. I read something and something strikes me then, I feel I can talk to that writer about it.

I have done literary translation because the University of Arkansas, where I did my MFA, was program of creative writing and translation, and it's a very different experience. You're trying to honor the writer. You shouldn't allow yourself, for example, to encounter a sentence that's three lines long and break it up into four smaller sentences.

Phooey, I say, on all white-shoe college boys who edit their campus literary magazines. Give me an honest con man any day.

There is in Albert Camus’ literary craftsmanship a seductive intelligence that could almost make a reader dismiss his philosophical intentions if he had not insisted on making them so clear.

If what you write is true, it will not be so because of what you are as a writer but because of what you are as a being. There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull.

Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.