Top 33 Best Literary Quotes
#1. The ultimate act of heroism shouldn't be death. You're always saying you want to give Baz the stories he deserves ... So you're going to kill him off? Isn't the best revenge supposed to be a life well-lived? The punk-rock way to end it would be to let them live happily ever after.
Rainbow Rowell
#2. Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.
Alan Furst
#3. English dialogue is the best in the world. So dry and direct. The Italian language is beautiful, but it is too literary.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#4. The want of an international Copy-Right Law, by rendering it nearly impossible to obtain anything from the booksellers in the wayof remuneration for literary labor, has had the effect of forcing many of our very best writers into the service of the Magazines and Reviews.
Edgar Allan Poe
#5. Katherine, who tried so hard in London to be best friends with Virginia Woolf, who hated her, because Katherine was the kind of naif-imbecile that the literary men adored and championed at her expense.
Chris Kraus
#7. Digital forms are best illuminated by cultural criticism, which uses the tools of art and literary theory to make sense of the Internet's glorious illusion: that the Internet is life. Because
Virginia Heffernan
#8. I don't generally publicly respond to
reviews, no matter how wrong-headed or perspicacious I think them. Nine times out of ten, writers' responses to critics seem to me at best undignified.
China Mieville
#9. Chocolate is a perfect food, as wholesome as it is delicious, a beneficent restorer of exhausted power ... it is the best friend of those engaged in literary pursuits.
Justus Von Liebig
#10. Hacks are killing our national literary culture. America treats best-sellers like literary lions and literary lions worse than stray dogs.
David B. Lentz
#11. I have three younger siblings, and used to tell them an awful lot of lies when they were growing up. The best thing about being a writer is that now I can say that my lies were all in the name of literary creativity. Unfortunately, my brothers and sister don't believe me.
Marie Rutkoski
#12. All good writers are thieves. The best get away with a heist.
Michael Stutz
#13. I do not know whether to be delighted or outraged by the fact that Literary Theory: An Introduction was the subject of a study by a well known U.S. business school, which was intrigued to discover how an academic text could become a best-seller.
Terry Eagleton
#14. I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. '
Lev Grossman
#15. I don't know what to say about literary critics. I think it's probably best to say nothing.
Salman Rushdie
#16. The novel has become the leading hero in the drama of literary development in our time precisely because it best of all reflects the tendencies of a new world still in the making; it is, after all, the only genre born of this new world and in total affinity with it.
Mikhail Bakhtin
#17. Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat
planet Earth
could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama
soap opera with literary trimmings.
Edward Abbey
#18. My best girl wore diesel. Steamy asphalt ribbons poured over her gravel shoulders. Curves that took me to Zanzibar....
Michael Walsh
#19. Many Scandinavian writers who had made their name in literary fiction felt they wanted to have a go at the crime novel to show they could compete with the best. If Salman Rushdie had been Norwegian, he would definitely have written at least one thriller.
Jo Nesbo
#20. With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension.
Adrian McKinty
#21. One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.
George Saintsbury
#22. The best literary device I got from my people was their talk, rough, earthy, salty speech that starts dancing on me sometimes, crying on me other times whether I like it or not.
Mairtin O Cadhain
#23. ... Here we come close to one of the definitions of literary fiction. Even the best kind of popular novel just comes straight at you; you have no conversation with a popular novel. Whereas you do have a conversation (you have an intense argument) with [literary fiction].
Martin Amis
#24. As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.
Will Self
#25. The best source for finding an agent is called Literary Agents of North America. It's a complete list of agents, not only by name and address, but by type of book they represent and by what their submission criteria are.
Sara Paretsky
#26. It is impossible to pursue a successful literary career and follow the advice of all one's 'best friends'.I feel compelled to follow the light which my own intellect & judgement cast upon my way, rather than any one of the many conflicting rays which other minds would lend me.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
#27. 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
#28. You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.
Chuck Palahniuk
#29. 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
#30. 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.
Asne Seierstad
#31. Because you live to love and love to live/ And because of what your heardrum will give/ Now we might love to live and live to love.
Janet Goodfriend
#32. In matters of literary and historical appraisement, one cannot operate with the methods of a laboratory or furnish the proof to be demanded in a court of law. The best is only the probable. Any who raise complaint have an easy remedy: to offer something better, something coherent and constructive.
Ronald Syme
