Top 100 Quotes About Literary
#1. You should prefer a good scientist without literary abilities than a literate one without scientific skills
Leonardo Da Vinci
#2. If you want to be a good lair, tell people what they want to hear. (From Hot dogs under The Dakota)
Johannes Gouws
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Hell, everybody is a masochist. Some of us are just a little more private.
Cecil Brown
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. Forget ideas, Mr. Author.
What kind of pen do you use?
Stephen Fry
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. The world is full of sluts on skates. From Penn-warren's "All the Kings Men.
Martha Miller
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. The heroes of literary history have been no less remarkable for what they have suffered than for what they have achieved.
Samuel Johnson
#21. 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
#22. I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike
Harold Bloom
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. So you're the little smart ass from Poleglass.
I wanted to point out he sounded like Dr. Seuss but bit my lip and remembered the warning the old lady gave me.
David Louden
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next. - RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Richard Dawkins
#32. You have to make choices even when there is nothing to choose from.
Peter Zilahy
#33. The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.
Charles Simic
#34. 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
#35. They were magnificent all right, with the magnificence that can only grow in the ground of great foolishness.
Orna Ross
#36. If these walls could talk, the buildings would stutter, wouldn't remember their names.
NoViolet Bulawayo
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. HASH: There is no definition for this word - nobody knows what hash is.
Ambrose Bierce
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, or to whom they are related.
Heinrich Heine
#49. Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
John Updike
#50. Notoriety and public confession in the literary form is a frazzler of the heart you were born with, believe me.
Jack Kerouac
#51. The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.
Martin Amis
#52. I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.
Toni Morrison
#53. Just as the light and weightless vegetation of saltpeter floats over the old walls of houses as soon as the owner gets careless, so the literary vocation springs up in you.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#54. In the literary as well as military world, most powerful abilities will often be found concealed under a rustic garb.
Pliny The Elder
#55. [Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!
Terry Pratchett
#56. 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
#57. Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking.
Gertrude Stein
#58. 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
#59. No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.
Alan Lightman
#60. She wouldn't disapprove of people who gave up philosophy or literary theory to do ordinary things." "Maybe not," mused Maggie. "If we eat pies, then we should never, not for one moment, look down on the making of them.
Alexander McCall Smith
#61. Finn lowers his voice to a confidential whisper. 'Arabella was
my first literary infatuation. I had a mad crush on her.
Jessica Spotswood
#62. The literary man has a circle of the chosen few who read him and become his only public ... What more natural than that he should write for those who, even if they do not pay him, at least understand him?
Amado Nervo
#63. Literary influences are harder for me to point to, because mostly it's a mulch of all of my past reading.
Jeff VanderMeer
#64. German writers in the late 18th century were the first to uphold a prickly, literary nationalism, in reaction to the then dominance and prestige of French literature.
Pankaj Mishra
#65. Literary genres and techniques tend to take form in one's mind somewhat the way computer templates provide form for different computer tasks.
Aberjhani
#66. Anuj Bahari has always been a really good literary agent for me. What a good agent does is that he manages many of your business aspects so you can keep your time free for writing.
Amish Tripathi
#67. A man was leaning idly against an elm ... The man, who towered over the poet even at his slanting angle, too old for a student and too worn for a faculty member, stared at him with the familiar, insatiable gleam of the literary admirer.
Matthew Pearl
#68. I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.
Marilyn Hacker
#69. I have a really good idea for a novel and would like to just kind of try my hand at fiction. I'm starting to kind of get a really good body of work going from a literary standpoint. As long as the audience is there, man, I'll keep cranking them out.
Corey Taylor
#70. Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.
T. S. Eliot
#71. There is no modern literary form which is as little understood as is the short story. The
Charles Raymond Barrett
#72. 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
#73. People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.
Brian Reynolds Myers
#74. Let the enemy fall by their swords. Words not worth reading die their own death. But our Words will be Told!
K.A. Gunn
#75. The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work.
Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
#76. In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.
Terry Pratchett
#77. No highbrow literary type would ever say 'Moby Dick' is good but it's just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn't just writing about romantic relationships.
Sophie Hannah
#78. 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
#79. From the very moment of Kanga's appearance the pastoral playground is overshadowed by doubt and guilt, for the all-too-loving anima-Woman has pitched her temple here!
Frederick C. Crews
#80. I think respectful conflict is intrinsic to the spirit of literature. It reminds us that literary history is living and evolving and thrives on us being active participants.
Matthew Pearl
#81. Literature is news which stays news.
Ezra Pound
#82. There's a but, isn't there?" said Coraline. "I can feel it. Like a rain cloud.
Neil Gaiman
#83. Whenever I'd get howlin' over something, he'd grab my ass up from wherever I was and head straight for the john. Momma said my head would get banged up along the way, but she said it
was probably bein' dunked under water that made me stupid.
Cole Alpaugh
#84. I'm a child of the literary bent. I don't want to see 140 characters. I want to see a story.
Joanne Kelly
#85. The literary artist lends verbal depth to the visual. The visual artist provides visible articulation for the literary.
Aberjhani
#86. You couldn't escape the literary atmosphere in our home. I grew up as a Britisher. I played a protagonist of every nationality in stage adaptations of Shakespeare and Brecht. I graduated from Yale. When I moved to the U.S., I realized with some amount of surprise that I was seen as an ethnic actor.
Satya Bhabha
#87. Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.
Susan Sontag
#88. A public role endures for the literary high-command, as sages and seers, speaking out on social and political issues.
Tibor Fischer
#89. You can trust in nothing. Nothing is always there, holding all.
Orna Ross
#90. I've always tried out my material on my dogs first. Years ago, when my red setter chewed up the manuscript of 'Of Mice and Men,' I said at the time that the dog must have been an excellent literary critic.
John Steinbeck
#91. I've always read broadly: literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, chick lit, historical, dystopian, nonfiction, memoir. I've even read Westerns. I prefer female protagonists.
Sandra Cisneros
#92. We who have seen the truth will reshape the world, and Ireland shall be our entrance to this world beyond words.
Orna Ross
#93. If Art relates itself to an Object, it becomes descriptive, divisionist, literary.
Robert Delaunay
#94. Then there was silence, the air like ice. Brittle-looking birch trees with black marks on their white bark, and some kind of small untidy evergreens rolled up like sleepy bears. The frozen lake not level but mounded along the shore, as if the waves had turned to ice in the act of falling.
Alice Munro
#95. I couldn't write. I grew tense. I was strangled by my own ego, by my petty desire for what I perceived to be the literary brass ring. I was missing the point, of course. The reward is in the doing.
Dani Shapiro
#96. Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
Bertolt Brecht
#97. The charm of your writing," Evelyn Waugh once wrote to Mitford, "depends on your refusal to recognize a distinction between girlish chatter and literary language.
Nancy Mitford
#98. One learns little more about a man from the feats of his literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.
Frank Moore Colby
#99. 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
#100. 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
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