Top 64 Non Literary Quotes
#1. I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.
Adrienne Rich
#2. For me the path to the literary goes through the non - literary. For this reason it surprises me that I am a writer, or that people speak of me as a writer. I'm flattered, but I don't quite believe it.
Gustavo Perez Firmat
#3. A love letter can be very short or it can be long; it can be literary or non-literary; it can be bright or dark, cheerful or tragic. But above all, for a love letter to be a love letter it must be sincere!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#4. The uncanny is not a literary genre. But nor is it a non-literary genre. It overflows the very institution of literature. It inhabits, haunts, parasitizes the allegedly non-literary. It makes 'genre' blink.
Nicholas Royle
#5. 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
#6. The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.
Charles Simic
#7. When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.
Joyce Carol Oates
#8. I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.
Harold Bloom
#9. HASH: There is no definition for this word - nobody knows what hash is.
Ambrose Bierce
#10. Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.
Dan Simmons
#11. I should say that I'm not conscious of any particular style or any particular literary device when I am writing. I have written 22 books, and they are all very different. I have tried all kinds of genres.
Isabel Allende
#12. So poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their oeuvres.
Wislawa Szymborska
#13. She'd discovered the beginnings of her adult person, her preference for lucidity, prudence, responsibility, and restraint. Tranquility could be eked from boredom, results from hard work.
V.S. Kemanis
#14. Back when I was young, lists seemed like fences on the open range. But secretly, I was pleased to be corralled among other literary thoroughbreds.
Clive Sinclair
#16. If these walls could talk, the buildings would stutter, wouldn't remember their names.
NoViolet Bulawayo
#17. They were magnificent all right, with the magnificence that can only grow in the ground of great foolishness.
Orna Ross
#18. I have always been a big fan of the character and am more of a moviegoer than a comic book guy, there is always something about the character of Batman that is very elemental. There is a great powerful myth to the character and romantic element that draws from a lot of literary sources
Christopher Nolan
#19. 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
#20. The book I'm working on next, which will be my fifth, returns to literary history. I really do love literary history, and I have plenty more ideas on it.
Matthew Pearl
#21. Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, or to whom they are related.
Heinrich Heine
#22. Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.
Will Self
#23. The effect of reading literary non-fiction that matters most to me is when the coin drops, and this happens in the company of the great, mercuric, encyclopedic minds: Empson, Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye.
Paul Fry
#24. When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature
Tzvetan Todorov
#25. I used to advise writers to just write their books and it will find a home, and suddenly that didn't seem as certain. I figured it was time to act. I considered a small press through RADAR, my literary non-profit.
Michelle Tea
#26. By the time I left the bar, I was 30. I was a dishwasher. They call it a bar-back, but essentially, I washed dishes for a living. I had no high-school diploma, I had no agent, and my literary successes were non-existent ... but it was the only thing I ever wanted to do, so I did feel trapped.
Patrick DeWitt
#27. 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
#28. Informative and understandable, even for non-techies like me...
Eva Hunter
#29. For some reason, notwithstanding the alienation and utter rejection, I consider myself a global citizen. They say misery calls for company and I've always been a man of funerals. The companion of the misfortunate, until they are not!
Asaad Almohammad
#30. 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
#31. There's nothing quite as exciting or moving as the very finest literary non-fiction.
Catherine Jinks
#32. Jessica DuLong's elegantly written "My River Chronicles" brings the past of the Hudson River into the vivid present, and carries forward the craft of literary non-fiction with grace and energy.
Gay Talese
#33. Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#34. I thought I would write non-fiction. I thought I would enter the New York literary scene as copy editor, work my way up, and then write my own books.
Michael Gruber
#35. 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
#36. You should prefer a good scientist without literary abilities than a literate one without scientific skills
Leonardo Da Vinci
#37. If you want to be a good lair, tell people what they want to hear. (From Hot dogs under The Dakota)
Johannes Gouws
#38. Habits of literary composition are perfectly familiar to me. One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas. Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?
Wilkie Collins
#39. I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find.
Anne Lamott
#40. I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#41. Hell, everybody is a masochist. Some of us are just a little more private.
Cecil Brown
#42. Slavery is the parent of ignorance, and ignorance begets a whole brood of follies and vices; and every one of these is inevitably hostile to literary culture.
Hinton Rowan Helper
#43. I don't divide my reading into demographic categories, any more than I'd divide my friends into groups along ethnic or sexual lines. The thing I look for most is a sense of literary rawness - bareback fiction, if you will.
Christopher Fowler
#44. No, Ben. What I'm asking is: Are you the vehicle, and Georgie rides around in you? That is why Ben's the driver, right?
Jonathan Harnisch
#45. Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.
Audre Lorde
#46. It's no such thing! she said. It's friendship! And if you're a man who can't tell friendship from charity, then you're to be pitied!
Bette Lee Crosby
#47. Forget ideas, Mr. Author.
What kind of pen do you use?
Stephen Fry
#48. The greatness of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.
T. S. Eliot
#49. I am an artist, and, through my eye, must confess to a tremendous bias. In my purely literary voyages my eye is always my compass.
Wyndham Lewis
#50. You have to make choices even when there is nothing to choose from.
Peter Zilahy
#51. The world is full of sluts on skates. From Penn-warren's "All the Kings Men.
Martha Miller
#52. I can't do no literary work for the rest of this year because I'm meditating another lawsuit and looking around for a defendant.
Mark Twain
#53. The stereotype of the supercrip, in the eyes of its critics, represents a sort of overachieving, overdetermined self-enfreakment that distracts from the lived daily reality of most disabled people.
Jose Alaniz
#54. The heroes of literary history have been no less remarkable for what they have suffered than for what they have achieved.
Samuel Johnson
#55. 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
#56. I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike
Harold Bloom
#57. A religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends, myths or any type of literary device in order to establish a system of beliefs, values and rules with which to regulate a culture or society
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#58. 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
#59. I don't think I found my voice until I reached New York. I suppose it's possible I would have had some kind of different literary career if I had not discovered New York.
Jay McInerney
#60. It was only much later that he was made flesh and blood [in the Gospels] on paper. Thus Christ was created as a literary creation.
Paul Louis Couchoud
#61. I have been told by a member of the board of one of Canada's most prominent literary magazines that a submission of mine once caused a great deal of controversy.
John Barton
#62. Mankind is immortal
in the comic perspective not by virtue of man's subjugation of nature
but by virtue of man's subjection to it. The "fall" in tragedy ends in
death; the fall in comedy ends in bed, where, by natures's arithmetic,
one and one make a brand new one.
Rose A. Zimbardo
#63. I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously.
Claire Tomalin
#64. The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next. - RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Richard Dawkins
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