Top 100 Literary Life Quotes
#1. Horror. I can't manage it. I become
well
horrified. Self-help books have a similar effect.
When asked, "Any literary genre you simply can't be bothered with?" - (By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from the NYT Book Review, by Pamela Paul)
Emma Thompson
#2. Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.
Arthur Miller
#3. Could a literary life be referred to with the iambic pentameter of, say, harnessing wind power, transplanting hearts or saving the whales. Or did it necessitate the sombre and monotonous dirge of software, priority banking or turbine building.
Anita Nair
#4. My own luck has been curious all my literary life; I never could tell a lie that anyone would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.
Mark Twain
#5. I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt.
[As quoted in Pol Neveux's introduction, Guy De Maupassant: A Study]
Guy De Maupassant
#6. It is belief in the Bible, the fruits of deep meditation, which has served me as the guide of my moral and literary life. I have found capital safely invested and richly productive of interest, although I have sometimes made but a bad use of it.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#7. I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.
Siri Hustvedt
#8. Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life.
Rick Moody
#9. There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.
Anne Lamott
#10. 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
#11. The greatest calling of all is to have a literary life.
Lisa See
#12. Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.
Dana Gioia
#13. I quickly realized I live the least interesting literary life imaginable. My parents are happily married. There haven't been any major traumas. I'm not sure that the story of my life would be much fun to read.
Anthony Marra
#14. 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
#15. For twenty years I have sat alone at a desk tinkering with sentences and then sending them out, and for most of my literary life the difference between throwing something in the trash and publishing it was imperceptible...
Rebecca Solnit
#16. 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
#17. I might have simply settled down into an armchair literary life. I really don't know exactly why I didn't.
Edward Carpenter
#18. The biggest misconception that people have about the literary life is the romance of it. That a writer has this large world available to him or her of people, of ideas, of experiences, of interchange of ideas.
Walter Mosley
#19. 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.
Paul Theroux
#20. It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth.
Anna Quindlen
#21. 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
#22. I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.
Ayn Rand
#23. A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it.
Mary Augusta Ward
#25. Notice the malice toward an independent man. Look back at your own life. Howard, and at the people you've met. They know. They're afraid. You're a reproach.
Ayn Rand
#26. What is the sign of every literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole - the whole is no longer a whole.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#27. They had the magic pill, the solution to the inertia and frustration that has plagued the great literary protagonists I'd related to all my life - be it Leopold Bloom, Alex Portnoy, or Piglet from Winnie the Pooh. As
Neil Strauss
#28. I had learned of Gertrude Stein's bon mot that medicine opened all doors. This prompted me, in different moods, to view my future life as literary psychiatrist, globe-trotting tropical disease specialist, or academic internist.
Harold E. Varmus
#29. Of course the play as I wrote it amounted to nothing; but in weaving the plot through successive scenes, and in writing out some of the dialogues, I enjoyed the full bliss of literary creation. Never to have tasted this delight is never to have known one of the greatest joys of life.
Carl Schurz
#30. It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.
Lauren Oliver
#31. I don't think that my films are 'literary'; they are based on the most ordinary things of life.
Eric Rohmer
#32. It is not often that I have two options to choose from. It is nice to be compelled towards something, otherwise one drifts through life unimpeded.
Bhanggi
Faiqa Mansab
#33. The sublime beauty was almost hidden withing the castle walls. She believed that the treasured things in life were often hard to find - a pearl in an oyster shell, a kind word in the heat of the moment.
F.C. Malby
#34. I get sent a lot of scripts which feature him as a kind of all-purpose Victorian literary character and really understand little, if anything, about him, his life or his books.
Simon Callow
#35. When death becomes an escape, when it becomes attractive, the purpose of life is fulfilled. To teach one it's futility, it's worthlessness, that is the purpose of life. Incongruously, its value lies in having imparted that lesson.
Bhanggi
Faiqa Mansab
#36. Life is the literary result of my passionate love affair between self and the universe...
Curtis R. Smith
#37. It seems to me that my whole life I've been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. And the first person I had to rescue was myself.
John Leonard
#38. If you fall into water, you may still be saved. But if you fall down in literary matters, there is no life left for you.
Donna Jo Napoli
#39. Only in dreams and death can perfection be had. Life is broken and weary.
Orna Ross
#40. I really don't crave literary immortality - I will achieve life through my bloodline as a vampire. All I want is to see my work in print. Is that so much to ask?
Szecsi Noemi
#41. Now I've given up any hope of lasting fame or literary perfection. I don't care if I write a great book anymore, but just one which, whatever its flaws, will leave a record of my impossible life.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#42. All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life
John Cheever
#43. 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
#44. I would prefer to believe that things possess the power of recall, of recollection. That things are memoirs of the existences that once were theirs, if only we knew how to read them.
Norman Lock
#45. One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.
Robert Morgan
#46. My dancing is not an attempt to interpret life in the literary sense. It is an affirmation of life through movement.
Martha Graham
#48. Sometimes you can't wait for the rest of your life to come to you. You have to go to it. Or at least meet it half way.
Gerry Pirani
#49. I feel that there's a lot of would-be guardians of the culture who think that high-minded literary purpose and the life that gets chronicled in the gossip columns, that these two things are incompatible.
Jay McInerney
#50. I want to reveal in a simple way the usual - and unusual - life of the city; the corporation workman, the busmen, policemen, the civil servants, the theatres, Moore Street and also, what occupies so large a place in Dublin's life, the literary and artistic.
Patrick Kavanagh
#51. I'm looking for the exit."
"The Last Exit to Brooklyn, will it be?"
"Er, no! Just the way out."
From "One man in his time
Anthony J. Saunders
#52. Life if curious when reduced to its essentials
Jean Rhys
#53. Cyrus is the meat and potatoes of my life, but Prudence was a cupcake I could enjoy just for the sheer sweetness of being with her.
Bette Lee Crosby
#54. Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.
And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.
Anna Quindlen
#55. Over the years, I had something in principle against autobiographical writing altogether because memory plays tricks on us, and we also tend to reinvent ourselves. But there comes an age when one begins to observe life, and there are things that need time to mature, also in terms of literary form.
Gunter Grass
#56. I suggest in my own discussion of this episode, Mann invites us to set the attempt to philosophize about his predicament in the context of Aschenbach's life. The literary presentation thus adds to the naked philosophical skeleton.
Philip Kitcher
#57. I realized that my life of late had consisted of far too much dialogue and not enough exposition. I imagined an angry, bespectacled English teacher slashing his pen through the transcript of my life, wondering how someone could possibly say so much and think so little.
Catherine Lowell
#58. A literary influence is never just a literary influence. It's also an influence in the way you see everything - in the way you feel your life.
Thom Gunn
#59. My daughter has pointed out that there were not enough lovejobs to go around in this new world. In any event, I probably learned tolerance, maybe even literary affection for the person in the wrong historical moment, living such long, never to be mediate wars with other sufferers.
Grace Paley
#60. Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#61. It feels as though it were just yesterday Grandfather exited my life like a bullet, leaving a bleeding hole behind.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#62. The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.
Nancy Kress
#63. For the last half of my life I have had the doubtful benefit of a brother whose literary reputation is much greater than my own.
Laurence Housman
#64. At that moment in her life, Elisa was, he realized, almost pathologically attracted not to status or money or good looks but to literary and intellectual potential.
Adelle Waldman
#65. Malone's commentary on Sonnet 93 was a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general. What has emerged in our time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.
James Shapiro
#66. I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.
Elie Wiesel
#67. Whether we are men dreaming we are butterflies or butterflies dreaming we are men, the one truth is that all life is an illusion. We are all wandering shades.
Jenifer Mohammed
#68. A phrase begins life as a literary expression; its felicity leads to its lazy repetition; and repetition soon establishes it as a legal formula, undiscriminatingly used to express different and sometimes contradictory ideas.
Felix Frankfurter
#70. I am obsessed with story. I had a late awakening in life. In college was the first time that I understood what you could do with a story and what a good novel is - literary value and subtext and irony and everything.
Shane Carruth
#71. All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.
John Banville
#72. Marriage, after all, is only a little detail in life.
Orna Ross
#73. I reminded you I studied literature, didn't I? I've had an endless supply of quotations at my disposal, but they had always highlighted the inadequacy of my life rather than providing an uplifting literary score to it.
Rosamund Lupton
#74. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more 'literary' you are.
Ray Bradbury
#75. Regarding children's literature, look for interesting content and well-constructed sentences clothed in literary language. The imagination should be warmed and the book should hold the interest of the child. Life's too short to spend time with books that bore us.
Deborah Taylor-Hough
#76. The ordinary literary man, even though he be an eminent historian, is ill-fitted to be a mentor in affairs of government. For ...
things are for the most part very simple in books, and in practical life very complex.
Woodrow Wilson
#77. In all literary history there is no such figure as Dante, no such homogeneousness of life and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition of the unessential.
James Russell Lowell
#78. Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.
Hunter S. Thompson
#79. Unlike literary characters, our future is mostly shaped by small, trivial choices - seemingly insignificant, but deceptively fateful.
Guillermo Erades
#80. To keep a diary is to attempt a difficult literary form. Its effectiveness is likely to derive from a special blend of honesty and appetite for life that gives the power to record everyday happenings while magically freeing them from banality and triviality.
William Plomer
#81. Since it is impossible to know what's really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#82. I am a romantic, in a literary way, by which I mean the Romantic poets, who thought just because a sensation is fleeting doesn't mean it isn't valuable. If the only criterion of value is whether something lasts, then the whole of human life is a waste of time.
Sebastian Faulks
#83. We are all of the same substance, the same life. Though there are many differences between us, those are merely the shadows that delineate our boundaries. Our light is the same.
Sally Wiener Grotta
#84. All good writers are thieves. The best get away with a heist.
Michael Stutz
#86. As an outsider I was free to pick my own literary traditions, to build my own system of literary values.
Dubravka Ugresic
#87. I learned that it's okay to feel the way I do: that my life has no meaning unless I have a boyfriend. A real man is like the perfect vampire-boy and all the perfect guys in Twue Wuv.
Jess C. Scott
#88. Psmith is the only thing in my literary career which was handed to me on a plate with watercress round it, thus enabling me to avoid the blood, sweat and tears inseparable from an author's life.
P.G. Wodehouse
#89. Can a literary character be said to live a life from birth to death or otherwise to undergo a development from beginning to end? Or is a literary character-fixed on the pages of a book, trapped forever in the same few words and actions-the very opposite of a living, developing human being?
Jack Miles
#90. People like to pigeonhole. People like to label - not just books and movies, but everything in their life. If people want to call me 'literary horror,' I guess that's fine. What I'm trying to do is be both thrilling and thought-provoking.
Benjamin Percy
#91. This was the curse of the voracious reader, she realized. Real life never quite measured up to the heightened and precise contours of her literary worlds. A real war was never as true as a fictive one.
Reif Larsen
#93. Just because something isn't good doesn't mean it's bad.
Rebecca McNutt
#94. In a way, for women, marriage was like an extended babysitting gig. The woman was committing herself to coddling and watching over a grown man for the rest of her life.
Bart Hopkins
#95. When life disappoints, one must apply one's will, not crumple.
Orna Ross
#96. The material of literary talent is words; the material of story talent is life itself.
Robert McKee
#97. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#98. Hardy classified A Pair of Blue Eyes among 'Romances and Fantasies'. A favourite of Tennyson, its melancholy treatment of youth, love and death is expressive of late nineteenth-century susceptibilities. Not unnaturally in an early novel, Hardy draws freely on his own life.
Geoffrey Harvey
#99. 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
#100. Where there's life, there's learning, and the truth is always calling us out of our pride. If we don't harken, it will call louder, and throw a situation at us. A pebble at first. If we still don't listen, we'll get a stone. Then a rock. Then a great crashing boulder. We must learn, or die.
Orna Ross
