Literary Art Quotes

#1. The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial ... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art.

Clement Greenberg

#2. A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.

Will Eisner

#3. In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political
especially that which pretends not to be.

Edward Abbey

#4. What care I if it be "wild and improbable" and "lacking in literary art"? I refuse to be any longer hampered by such canons of criticism. The one essential thing I demand of a book is that it should interest me. If it does, I forgive it every other fault.

L.M. Montgomery

#5. In truth, the legitimate contention is, not of one age or school of literary art against another, but of all successive schools alike, against the stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the vulgarity which is dead to form.

Walter Pater

#6. Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself.

Robertson Davies

#7. Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in 'Deerslayer,' and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.

Mark Twain

#8. They do the essential work of literary art: they make us more human than we were before. (from the Introduction to Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed)

Steve Almond

#9. The laurels of an orator who is not a master of literary art wither quickly.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

#10. It is dangerous to condemn stories as junk which satisfy the deep hunger of millions of people. These books are not literary art, but a great deal of what is acclaimed as literary art in our time offers no comfort or fulfillment to anybody.

Judith Skelton Grant

#11. San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.

William, Saroyan

#12. The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things"-the norms of human action.

Russell Kirk

#13. In literary art, as in the art of the architect, the painter, the musician, signs that the artist is thinking of his own achievement more than of his subject always offend me.

Herbert Spencer

#14. The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless.

George Bernard Shaw

#15. Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.

Salman Rushdie

#16. An essay is a work of literary art which has a minimum of one anecdote and one universal idea.

Carol Bly

#17. I didn't start publishing literary texts until I had left Iraq. At the Academy [of Cinematic Arts] I was busy with short films.

Hassan Blasim

#18. 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

#19. I often find myself privately stewing about much British art, thinking that except for their tremendous gardens, that the English are not primarily visual artists, and are, in nearly unsurpassable ways, literary.

Jerry Saltz

#20. 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

#21. If I could, I'd take the food and art of Italy, for example, couple it with the quiet, understated personality of France and the orderliness of Germany, the cinematic and literary wit of Britain, and blend it into one utopian, and ultimately dystopian, probably, civilization.

Tsh Oxenreider

#22. Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.

Aberjhani

#23. The delight we experience when we allow ourselves to respond to a fairy tale, the enchantment we feel, comes not from the psychological meaning of the tale (although this contributes to it) but from its literary qualities-the tale itself as a work of art,

Bruno Bettelheim

#24. My art tends toward the literary. My pictures tend toward the outskirts of painting: But why generalize? It is possible to realize one thing or another, according to the impressions gained from one point of view or another. But it is too difficult to make a general rule.

James Ensor

#25. If you write literary fiction that's set partly in the future, you're apparently a sci-fi writer ... I think of it as being more of a story about what remains after we lose everything and the importance of art in our lives.

Emily St. John Mandel

#26. The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

Clive James

#27. 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.

George Orwell

#28. I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art.

Anne Stevenson

#29. Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.

Chinua Achebe

#30. If there's any literary ability in a feller, getting fired out of a good government job will bring it out.

Kin Hubbard

#31. The visual and literary arts are of perennial interest to me, and these art forms have become more and more a part of my life; they have become companions of sorts. I cannot imagine my day to day experiences without the presence of these art forms. They're absolutely essential.

Michael Hersch

#32. Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition. I'm not entirely at ease with that self-description.

Charles Stross

#33. 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

#34. What cannot be borne in reality, becomes a source of pleasure when it is transposed into the visual and somatic fiction of the dramatic spectacle.

Claude Calame

#35. I've been in the art world for many years. But the sad fact is that most writers are visually prepubescent. Generally speaking, the literary world is provincial when it comes to matters of art. And it always has been.

Richard Grossman

#36. The others forgot the work and the weather watching them throw. It was art. A thousand dollars a throw in Madison Square Garden wouldn't have gotten any more breathless suspense. It would have just been more people holding in.

Zora Neale Hurston

#37. In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs.

Northrop Frye

#38. If you had to choose between art and the slogan, or between history and the slogan, you might as well choose the slogan and have done with pretending even to care about art and history. The reduction of all things to politics must reduce them, in their own right, to irrelevance.

Anthony Esolen

#39. If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings.

Jack Kerouac

#40. 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.

Os Guinness

#41. One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most.

Walter Pater

#42. Art, although produced by man's hands, is something not created by hands alone, but something which wells up from a deeper source out of our soul ... My sympathies in the literary as well as in the artistic field are drawn most strongly to those artists in whom I see most the working of the soul.

Vincent Van Gogh

#43. 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.

Lord Byron

#44. If Art relates itself to an Object, it becomes descriptive, divisionist, literary.

Robert Delaunay

#45. The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods - romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#46. The heart of [J.G.] Ballard's vision [is] the object at odds with its function and abandoned by its time.

Tacita Dean

#47. Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.

Wole Soyinka

#48. 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

#49. During five literary generations every enlightened person had despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.

George Orwell

#50. I believe the visionaries and true reflections of society will be rewarded after their lives. Those being rewarded now are giving the public what it needs now, usually applauding its current state and clearing consciences.

Hollace M. Metzger

#51. The extraordinarily facile and in literary terms long lived works tend to be about ordinary people. Even Sappho writes about the utterly insignificant . What art can do is make the extraordinary more ordinary and ordinary more extraordinary.

Robert Dessaix

#52. Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish
Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed
himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and
has lived selflessly for the art

Seamus Heaney

#53. I'm working when I'm fighting with my wife. I constantly ask myself-how can I use this stuff to literary advantage.

Art Buchwald

#54. It must be remembered that no art lives by nature, only by acts of voluntary attention on the part of human individuals. When these are not made it ceases to exist.

C.S. Lewis

#55. There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#56. I know I will always be attracted to the unknown as it does often verify what I am or what else I could be.

Hollace M. Metzger

#57. Writers who teach tend to prefer literary theory to literature and tenure to all else. Writers who do not teach prefer the contemplation of Careers to art of any kind.

Gore Vidal

#58. You can't live with literary characters no matter how much you might like to. You can have them as imaginary friends that you can call up when you need to. One of the tasks of art is to provide people with companions.

Henning Mankell

#59. Reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers ... annotations, arrows ... an oudine of its design ... very seriously mislead.

William H Gass

#60. Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

#61. Poetry lies at the centre of the literary experience because it is the form that most clearly asserts the specificity of literature.

Jonathan Culler

#62. The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented. Fragments of this nature are literary seeds. There may be many an infertile grain among them: nevertheless, if only some come up!

Novalis

#63. For writers from working-class families, the making of art is cultural disenfranchisement, for we do not belong in literary circles and our writing rarely makes it back home.

Valerie Miner

#64. And yet the point of view from which his ideas on art had sprung was a simple one: for him, literary schools did not exist; the only thing that mattered was the temperament of the artist; the only thing of interest was the way his brain worked, regardless of the subject he was treating.

Joris-Karl Huysmans

#65. Reviewers, critics, guest editors... Such people may have an eye for literary conventions and contrivances, allusions and innovations on the art. But what are their tastes based on? Do they tend to choose work that most resembles theirs?

Amy Tan

#66. In literary and art criticism there are two criteria, the political and the artistic.

Mao Zedong