Top 100 A Literary Quotes
#1. I guess the two Manifesto, Communicating Vessels, Mad Love, and some of his poetry made a significant mark on me but as far as bringing a literary element into the music I see it as a much broader assimilation.
Trevor Dunn
#2. Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.
Adam Johnson
#3. When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
Anais Nin
#5. I research the role, and if it's a literary character, I read the book, and if it's an historical figure, I research documents and biographies. If it's a fictional character, I work off the script.
Luke Evans
#6. It is impossible that a genius - at least a literary genius - can ever be discovered by his intimates; they are so close to him that he is out of focus to them and they can't get at his proportions; they can't perceive that there is any considerable difference between his bulk and their own.
Mark Twain
#7. Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.
William Ernest Henley
#8. The fact that fairy tales remain a literary underdog-undervalued and undermined-even as they shape so many popular stories, redoubles my certainty that it is time for contemporary fairy tales to be celebrated in a popular, literary collection. Fairy tales hold the secret to reading.
Kate Bernheimer
#9. In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.
Cynthia Ozick
#10. As George Russell defined a literary movement: Five or six men who live in the same town and hate each other.
Ross Wetzsteon
#11. I have some pretty forceful ideas about the world - obviously I do. But I suppose I can only really speak about them from within the protection of a literary form.
Rachel Cusk
#12. 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.
Parker J. Palmer
#14. The word and the image mutually excluded each other. Joseph was a literary man to his very marrow; he put faith in the invisible Word; it was the most miraculous thing in all the world; though without form it had more power than anything endowed with form
Lion Feuchtwanger
#15. Close friends, or those in my pay, sometimes call me a literary polymath, while others say that I'm just a shallow dilettante, superficial and breezy, with a faux-naif style.
Michael Dirda
#16. This love for everyday things,
part natural from the wide eye of Infancy,
part a literary calculation
Billy Collins
#17. Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.
Rick Moody
#18. I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
#19. I have to say in premise 'Winter Journal' is really not a memoir. And I don't even think of it as an autobiography. I think of it as a literary composition - similar to music - composed of autobiographical fragments. I'm really not telling the story of my life in a coherent narrative form.
Paul Auster
#20. I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.
Garry Disher
#21. I used to enjoy the anonymity of being a literary figure and occasionally a public radio figure.
John Hodgman
#22. I call myself a literary agent simply to distinguish myself from actors' agents.
Irving Paul Lazar
#23. Argot is both a literary and a social phenomenon. What is argot, properly speaking? Argot is the language of misery.
Victor Hugo
#24. It is interesting to note that poetry, a literary device whose very construct involves the use of words, is itself the word of choice by persons grasping to describe something so beautiful it is marvelously ineffable.
Vanna Bonta
#25. It became plain very soon after our marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership.
Mary Augusta Ward
#26. The Press nowadays is not a literary press; classic diction and brilliancy of style do not distinguish it by any means.
Marie Corelli
#27. Many people go into the wilderness to experience it, and if they experience it in comfort, there's very little in a literary sense for them to write about.
Tim Cahill
#28. Vimes hung up the tube. Trolls with a message. It was unlikely to be an invitation to a literary lunch.
Terry Pratchett
#29. Why should there be only one sort of photography? I want to create images with elements of my choosing, narrative or evocative ... I give myself a literary frame, I tell a story.
Sarah Moon
#30. The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.
Aldous Huxley
#31. He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four.
G.K. Chesterton
#32. When I write plays, I'm already seeing the shapes on stage, of the actors and their interaction, and so on and so forth. I don't think I've ever written one play as an abstract piece, as a literary piece, floating in the air somewhere, to be flushed out later on.
Wole Soyinka
#33. I would have died, before a literary agent ever committed to my book. This is why I chose to empower myself by self publishing.
Mary Sage Nguyen
#34. It took me fifty years to deal with the Holocaust at all. And I did it in a literary way.
Leonard Baskin
#35. book brings her comfort still, now soothing different pains, a literary safety blanket Alba can wrap around her fingers and hold until she forgets all the things she wants to forget. Few other novels have been able to offer similar protection against poisoned memories,
Menna Van Praag
#36. You don't have to be in the habit of going to church to listen to such a literary minister; you don't have to be a believer to be moved by Mr. Buechner's faith.
John Irving
#37. If Carl Hiaasen and Donald Westlake had a literary love child, he would be Timothy Hallinan.
Julia Spencer-Fleming
#38. It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation ... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.
Robert Morgan
#39. Being Jewish is a big part of my artistic sensibility and my humor ... I think it gives me a certain take on the world on a literary level.
Adam Mansbach
#40. All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.
Raymond Chandler
#41. Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it
Mark Twain
#42. The old days of screenwriting, and myths about screenwriting, are maybe over. It's a literary form, if you can wake up to it.
William Monahan
#43. Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.
Milan Kundera
#44. I'm snobby about books that aren't crime fiction: if I start reading a literary novel and there's no mystery emerging in the first few pages, I'm like, 'Gah, this obviously isn't a proper book. Why would I want to carry on reading it?'
Sophie Hannah
#45. Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.
Marilyn Hacker
#46. The word 'western' usually refers to movies, of course, but there is a literary tradition of the same name that pre-dates the moving picture and retains its vitality yet.
Clive Sinclair
#47. Never underestimate the value of superior hair as a literary influence.
Margaret Atwood
#48. Who's to say what a 'literary life' is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don't need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time.
Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!
Roman Payne
#49. If the verses are for a literary competition, your grace should try to win second place; first is always won through favor or because of the high estate of the person, second is won because of pure justice, and by this calculation third becomes second, and the first becomes third ...
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#50. Whoever heard of a midwife as a literary heroine? Yet midwifery is the very stuff of drama. Every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain, followed by joy or sometimes remorse. A midwife is in the thick of it, she sees it all.
Jennifer Worth
#51. One has to choose a word in English. If you want to be eligible for a literary prize you have to designate it as something.
Robert Dessaix
#52. The thing is, if you make best-sellerdom your goal, you're going to be in trouble. It's a very nice thing to have happen, but if one makes that a goal like, say, a literary writer has the goal of getting the Pulitzer Prize, that's so unpredictable.
Diane Mott Davidson
#53. You have to remember that in addition to running a literary agency, I am also an ebook publisher.
Richard Curtis
#54. I never said that I was going to write a literary masterpiece. I just wanted to write something to make people feel something, hopefully in the nether regions.
Jennifer Lassalle Edwards
#55. My greatest influence has been the blues. And that's a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as black Americans have.
August Wilson
#56. That's what happens when you personify hopes and dreams in one person. He becomes nothing more than a literary device.
Marlon James
#57. The kingdom of God dawns in trailer parks and refugee camps. That shouldn't surprise us. The kingdom came to us not from a boardroom or a literary guild, but from a feeding trough and an execution stake.
Russell D. Moore
#58. My dad's got a brilliant eye for scripts 'cos he's a literary agent. He and my agent read a load of scripts and filter them.
Daniel Radcliffe
#59. My reviews of the above books appear in my series, A Literary Cavalcade. Reviews are listed alphabetically by author across the six volumes.
Robert A. Parker
#60. My reasoning, if one can call it that, was inflamed by the scatter shot passions of youth and a literary diet overly rich in the works of Nietzshe, Kerouac, and John Menlove Edwards ...
Jon Krakauer
#61. I wouldn't call myself a 'literary critic,' just a book reviewer.
Neel Mukherjee
#62. I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.
Anthony Burgess
#63. Me? I'm just a literary girl gone wrong. Slow with the tongue. Quick with the pen. Undeniably cute. But, on the whole, ill-equipped for the privilege of living.
Koren Zailckas
#64. My view, as one who taught it, is that the whole purpose of a literary education should be to tell people that these things exist. I don't think any teacher should try to 'teach an author,' but rather simply describe what the author has written. And this is what I tried to do.
Guy Davenport
#65. Rather, it provided a literary framework within which the author could effectively express the Hebraic conviction that one God created the world by bringing order out of chaos. He was interested in thematic rather than chronological organization. The
Gregory A. Boyd
#66. You could become internationally famous - you're Gemini, and according to antique authority have a literary talent, which of course your letters prove.
Ted Hughes
#67. I'm sold as a literary writer in Holland; I'm sold as crime fiction in England. I think of it as just literature.
Karin Slaughter
#68. Crude at first [the short story] received a literary polish in the press, but its dominant quality remained. It was concise and condense, yet suggestive. It was delightfully extravagant - or a miracle of understatement
Bret Harte
#69. Science fiction is a literary field crowded with strong opinions, and no SF novelist delivered himself more memorably of his views - on politics, sexuality, religion, and many other contentious topics - than Robert Heinlein.
Paul Di Filippo
#70. In order to read one must sit down, usually indoors. I am restless and would rather sail a boat than crack a book. I've never had a very lively literary curiosity, and it has sometimes seemed to me that I am not really a literary fellow at all. Except that I write for a living.
E.B. White
#71. So it may well be believed that when I found him taking a complete holiday, with a vast supply of books at command, he had the air of indulging in a literary debauch, if the term may be applied to so honorable an occupation.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#72. 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.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#73. If our DNA has a literary equivalent, it's Finnegan's Wake.
Jonah Lehrer
#74. I don't know that I've gotten much feedback directly from the literary world; sometimes I doubt even the notion that there is a literary world, though I guess there is or was.
Jonathan Ames
#75. I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.
Carlos Fuentes
#76. It's perceived as an accolade to be published as a 'literary' writer, but, actually, it's pompous and it's fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself.
Neil Cross
#77. No one in the modern world is more lonely than the writer with a literary conscience.
Ellen Glasgow
#78. Plagiarism, n. A literary coincidence compounded of a discreditable priority and an honorable subsequence.
Ambrose Bierce
#79. 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.
Julian Barnes
#80. Sex in a woman's world has the same currency a penny has in a man's. Every penny saved is a penny earned in one world and in the next every sexual adventure is a literary experience.
Harry Golden
#81. Writing is not a literary act but spiritual. And pastoring is not managing a religious business but a spiritual quest.
Eugene H. Peterson
#82. My comic sense, although deliberately Americanized, is, in its intent, much closer related to the crazy wisdom of Zen monks and the goofy genius of Taoist masters than it is to, say, the satirical gibes on Saturday Night Live. It has both a literary and a metaphysical function.
Tom Robbins
#83. Narration, after all, isn't just a literary function. It represents the human capacity to tell stories in such a manner that they yield meaning. Television replaced this concerted quest for meaning with a frantic pursuit of wonder.
Steve Almond
#84. Never read books you aren't sure about . . . even supposing that these bad books are very well written from a literary point of view. Let me ask you this: Would you drink something you knew was poisoned just because it was offered to you in a golden cup?
John Bosco
#85. There might be a different model for a literary community that's quicker, more real-time, and involves more spontaneity.
George Saunders
#87. As a literary composition, it is utterly worthless, and could be admired only by persons who know nothing about literature. As for its giving offence, that is the very thing I intended it to do.
Ethel Lilian Voynich
#88. Give me a literary love that doesn't need words, that flows like silent water and speaks to the bone. There I lose myself in the fantasy.
Julie Harvey Delcourt
#89. From my boyhood I have had an intense and overwhelming conviction that my real vocation lay in the direction of literature. I have, however, had a most unaccountable difficulty in getting any responsible person to share my views.
- Cyprian Overbeck Wells: A Literary Mosaic
Arthur Conan Doyle
#90. Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.
Washington Irving
#91. Any one who chooses will set up for a literary critic, though he cannot tell us where he went to school, or how much time was spent in his education, and knows nothing about letters at all.
Saint Basil
#92. Would it be anything like a literary disaster if Gore Vidal were to fall silent? Easy. No. In fact, there is something to be said for the idea.
Lance Morrow
#93. So." [Isobel] cleared her throat. "What are we doing?"
"We," [Varen] said at last, "are doing a project on Poe."
"Didn't he marry his cousin or something?"
"The man is a literary god and that's all you have to say?
Kelly Creagh
#94. Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single.
James Lee Burke
#95. The way 'The Icarus Girl' came about was by me just basically bragging it with a literary agent and telling him I'd written 150 pages when I'd only written 20. And I think it was when the agent e-mailed me back right the very next day after sending him the 20 pages and asking to see the other 130.
Helen Oyeyemi
#96. Those who lead a literary life seem old when they're young and young when they're old, but they're never actually either. Like a good book, they are bound by neither category nor time.
J.C. Hallman
#97. A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime.
Boris Pasternak
#98. The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.
Jose Saramago
#99. A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.
Carolyn G. Heilbrun
#100. I love outsider stories. And I also like a lot of genre fiction, too. So I wanted to write a literary book that flirted with thriller and fantasy and even science fiction. I wanted the coming-of-age story and the love story to be about "outsiderdom" - one of the themes I am most interested in.
Porochista Khakpour
