Top 100 Literary World Quotes
#1. The world is full of sluts on skates. From Penn-warren's "All the Kings Men.
Martha Miller
#2. I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike
Harold Bloom
#3. In the literary as well as military world, most powerful abilities will often be found concealed under a rustic garb.
Pliny The Elder
#4. Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.
T. S. Eliot
#5. We who have seen the truth will reshape the world, and Ireland shall be our entrance to this world beyond words.
Orna Ross
#6. If literary fiction is reduced to only middle-class families dealing only with middle-class angst, then it's really finished as a force for grappling with the world.
J.M. Ledgard
#7. English dialogue is the best in the world. So dry and direct. The Italian language is beautiful, but it is too literary.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#8. Everything is much easier in the half-blind and half-deaf world of modern giants that seduce processions of the blind into the world of great emptiness. In their sky the stars shine and their names live in the parallel and independently of their work.
Dejan Stojanovic
#9. The hoary joke in the literary world, based on 'Dreams From My Father,' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer.
James Fallows
#10. I do find stories - or literary fiction - an apt form for analyzing the world. And especially for trying to imagine the other. An agenda, again, that seems more important now than ever.
Jim Shepard
#11. I've always viewed myself as a brand. When I started 10 years ago, that was very controversial. 'Marketing' and 'PR' were dirty words for the literary world, but that has changed. Once the book is finished, I want as many people as possible to read it.
Camilla Lackberg
#12. In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the world's Priest;
guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time.
Thomas Carlyle
#13. I'd be doing it to screw the literary world. Those bastards all huddle in their gloomy cave and kiss each other's asses, and lick each other's wounds, and trip each other up, all the while spewing this pompous crap about the mission of literature.
Haruki Murakami
#14. The bestselling novel taking the Ankh-Morpork literary world by storm was dedicated to Commander Samuel Vimes.
The title of the book was Pride and Extreme Prejudice.
Terry Pratchett
#15. In ancient Ireland the soul had but to stretch out its arms to fill them with beauty. Now all manner of ugliness besets the world.
Orna Ross
#16. If all literary women had such thoughtful angels for husbands, they would live longer and write more. Perhaps that wouldn't be such a blessing to the world though, as most of us write too much now,' said Mrs. Jo ...
Louisa May Alcott
#17. Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.
Charles Frazier
#18. Can I help it if the world cannot worship what it has not first martyred?
Casper Silk
#19. Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.
Samuel Johnson
#20. The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite; if you say, I believe in God, you have already suggested the possibility of not believing in him. [p.250]
Northrop Frye
#22. When AIDS was at its most brutal, frightening, my-God-what-are-we-going-to-do era, that was when vampire stories and stories about blood and trust swept the literary world.
Susie Bright
#23. But with whom, in the Pooh world, could a sexually and politically aroused Kanga speak?
Frederick C. Crews
#24. When I became a poet, the Korean literary world expected women poets to sing passively of love. Naturally, this was not written anywhere, but this rule existed nonetheless. Consequently, I received plenty of serious criticism.
Kim Hyesoon
#25. Olga was better, in the sun, where he could see every pore in her skin. Get closer. Feel her next to him. It was all he wanted in the world. It was the last thing in the world that he could do.
Graham Spaid
#26. My fears are the obvious ones: that marketplace-minded publishers - all four of them - will shy further away from literary fiction, international authors, poetry, and the other marginal but hugely important regions of the book world.
David Edelstein
#27. I entered the literary world, really, from outside. My entire background has been in sciences; I was a biology major in college, then went to medical school. I've never had any formal training in writing.
Khaled Hosseini
#28. The Beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, recreated, molded, and reconstructed in a personal form and original manner.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#29. Far from breaking with tradition, they understood the Great War and its aftermath in the light of tradition, believing, as did their literary and spiritual ancestors, that ours is a fallen world yet not a forsaken one.
Philip Zaleski
#30. Synesthesia has interested me for a long time, both as a literary device and as a puncturing of the membranes that organize how the world comes into someone's head.
Leni Zumas
#31. Nebraska was home to indigenous peoples for centuries. It became a state in 1867, and has produced an important literary figure, Willa Cather, as well as an investor said to be the world's second richest man, Warren Buffett.
Stephen Kinzer
#32. The sky had never seemed so sky; the world had never seemed so world.
Neil Gaiman
#33. 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
#34. I don't know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering.
John Le Carre
#35. Martial (the main character of LOCUS SOLUS) has a very interesting conception of literary beauty: the work must contain nothing real, no observations about the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary constructions. These are in themselves ideas from an extrahuman world.
Pierre Janet
#36. Dear Literary World, Sorry for breaking down your door ... I'll pay for that!!! Since I'm here and planning to stay a while, let me tell you some stories!!
C.K. Webb
#37. I have never as yet gone a step to see a literary lion; but I would go a considerable way to see Emerson, this pioneer in the moral forests of the New World, who applies his axe to the roots of the old trees to hew them down and to open the paths for new planting.
Fredrika Bremer
#38. In the literary world today, Christianity has pretty well replaced sex as the present pet taboo, not only because Christianity is so often distorted by Christians as well as non-Christians, but because it is too wild and free for the timid.
Madeleine L'Engle
#39. Probably because I really love this bookmaking and storytelling world, I'd been thinking for years about the possibility of becoming a literary agent.
Rebecca Stead
#40. I call that creativity," Orville said. "The purpose of literature is to teach you how to THINK, not how to be practical. Learning to discover the connective tissue between seemingly unrelated events is the only way we are equipped to understand patterns in the real world.
Catherine Lowell
#41. America's revolutionary deists saw themselves as - and they were - participants in an international movement that drew on most of the same literary sources across the civilized world.
Matthew Stewart
#42. "Little magazines" are, for the most part, the mayflies of the literary world.
Frederick Crews
#43. In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering.
John Updike
#44. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful - nonfiction only, please.
Gabrielle Zevin
#45. Japan, Germany, and India seem to me to have serious writers, readers, and book buyers, but the Netherlands has struck me as the most robust literary culture in the world.
Paul Theroux
#46. Sermon design is not just a matter of what works. Sermon design also relates to theology, literary form, and to the culture of the world in which we live. We cannot
Dennis M. Cahill
#47. The genuine artist, Harris is saying, finds reality in a point of identity between subject and object, a point at which the created world and the world that is really there become the same thing. [p.211]
Northrop Frye
#48. Grandpa said that we could solve a lot of the world's problems if we considered cats and dogs edible. Like the neighbor's dog who goes to the bathroom in his flower garden. And know what else?
Cole Alpaugh
#49. Anna is the sort of woman who writers write about, Tom. Somewhere in the third act, women like her save characters like you and me from ourselves. She's the loveliest literary device in the world.
Matthew Norman
#50. I am, of course, greatly honoured to win the Booker, which is one of the great literary prizes in the world.
Richard Flanagan
#51. The literary world is made up of little confederacies, each looking upon its own members as the lights of the universe; and considering all others as mere transient meteors, doomed to soon fall and be forgotten, while its own luminaries are to shine steadily into immortality.
Washington Irving
#52. Historians are the consummate hairdressers of the literary world: cooing in public, catty in private.
Craig Brown
#53. I don't think in terms of that bizarre tautology 'value for money' in my literary and journalistic work - and nor will I in my academic role. However, if I don't believe I'm helping my students towards a fuller and more empowering relationship with the world, then I'll resign.
Will Self
#54. It is not that the girl is unfit for everything, it is that she is not of this world.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#55. They could never quite reconcile themselves to the idea that our lives don't follow the dramatic arc that a good author gives to a great literary character. Only in accidents of pure perfection does the world actually become a stage. (Rule of Four, 54-55)
Ian Caldwell
#56. I will not allow people to impose rules on me that don't make sense to me. And I live and work very much outside the literary world and the literary system. What they think and what they believe and what their rules are mean nothing to me.
James Frey
#57. The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that.
Arthur Miller
#58. Drama school introduced me to a world I had no idea about. I wasn't brought up in a literary household at all.
Imelda Staunton
#59. I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.
Adrienne Rich
#60. I don't read a lot of books that were published after 1755. One thing about having friends in New York who belong to the literary world, however, is that I have a steady stream of books coming to the house.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#61. What's fascinating is where they come from in the world. People in Bangladesh, a chap in a fire-base in Tikrit in Iraq. Chap in an Irish pub in Dublin. And lovely to think this literary network - or rather network of readers - is well spread out.
John Gimlette
#62. Now the Irish have a strange custom: whenever the name of County Mayo is spoken (whether in praise, blame, or non-committally, as soon as the world Mayo is spoken, the Irish add: 'God help us!" It sounds like the response in a litany: 'Lord, have mercy upon us!
Heinrich Boll
#63. The urge to change my mind and not go at all is enormous. I'm absolutely terrified to leave on that boat. But, if I don't go, there'll be one more broken person in this world who gave up a dream to sit in a chair, pick up the TV remote and shrink.
Lexis De Rothschild
#64. Novelists and the literary world play an important part in shaping languages. The Swahili they write influence the readers and their languages. The literary obstacle in Tanzania is not that people do not read, but that they don't read because there are no interesting writers.
Enock Maregesi
#65. When a bookworm finally decides to leave the house, perhaps to explore some literary destination in one of her novels, she will be surprised to know that there is a volatile, often antagonistic force in the real world known as the weather.
Joyce Rachelle
#66. 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
#67. In the analysis of books, as in the analysis of complex world events, we hover between two kinds of error: ascribing too much meaning where there is little, if any, to be found, and ignoring meaning that stares us right in the face.
J.C. Hallman
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. You know what people are doing on the other side of the world, what's happening on another planet, but not what's going on inside the person next to you.
Graham Spaid
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. I wasn't an expert or even the biggest Dennis Hopper fan in the world. All I knew about him were through his associations with James Dean and Andy Warhol, the fact that he made 'Easy Rider.' I thought his story would have a really great outlaw literary quality to it.
Tom Folsom
#74. 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
#75. The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one ...
Lawrence Block
#76. How stark everything became, at the end, all the wishes for one's children distilled by the world's swift cruelty into the desperate hope that death would take them fast.
Justin Cronin
#77. The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're ignored by everybody else.
Billy Collins
#78. I was afraid you'd turn into one of those literary types who say books can change the world when they're feeling good about themselves and it's only a book when anybody challenges them.
G. Willow Wilson
#79. There are many Latino writers as talented as I am, but because we are published through small presses, our books don't count. We are still the illegal aliens of the literary world.
Sandra Cisneros
#80. Few things are better in the world than a room full of librarians. I consider them literary heroes. The keepers and defenders of the written word.
Louise Penny
#81. The party at the bar was for an Internet literary journal that prints a hard copy version that was famous in the world of Internet literary journals that prints hard copy versions. What that means, I do not know.
Noah Cicero
#82. 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
#83. That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.
J.M. Coetzee
#84. The literary artist will ... portray what he knows, and little else. Imagination is built upon knowledge, and his dreams will rest upon his facts. He is worth to the world just about what he has learned from it, and no more.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward
#85. Write the wrong
Wrong the right
Spite the good fight
With no respite
And set the
Literary world
Alight
Robert Black
#86. The moment weighs down on me, threatening to unstitch my seams and expose me to the world.
Rebecca Berto
#87. Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.
Jasper Fforde
#88. My mullet was an insecurity shield. My mullet was an ethnic hatchet. My mullet was an arrow on fire.
My mullet said to the literary world, Hello, you privileged prep-school assholes, I'm here to steal your thunder, lightning, and book sales.
Sherman Alexie
#89. 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
#90. He loves the most beautiful woman in the world. And like Sir Lancelot, he shall love her exceedingly well.
Orna Ross
#91. The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective.
Harold Bloom
#92. There are so many reasons, but a big reason is that the literary world is simply too white. When there are more professors of color being employed by these institutions maybe there will be some change in the student populations.
Porochista Khakpour
#93. Kafka's inevitable tropism for the allegorical puts him in marked opposition to the realism that dominated the literary world of the first half of the 20th century.
John Kessel
#94. Whenever I read a contemporary literary novel that describes the world we're living in, I wait for the science fiction tools to come out. Because they have to - the material demands it.
William Gibson
#95. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
Rafael Sabatini
#96. 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.
James Cameron
#97. Extremists often derive their inspiration from literal interpretations of texts that should rightly be read not as Associated Press reports from the ancient world, but as theological and literary enterprises requiring independent intellectual assessment.
Jon Meacham
#98. Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#99. I don't know if nature is a direct literary influence on my writing, but it is certainly important to me. I take great joy in writing about it. It is something I have taken with me from my childhood; the body exposed to the threat of the physical world and at the same time being at home in it.
Per Petterson
