Top 100 Quotes About Literary Fiction
#1. If you want to be a good lair, tell people what they want to hear. (From Hot dogs under The Dakota)
Johannes Gouws
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. The world is full of sluts on skates. From Penn-warren's "All the Kings Men.
Martha Miller
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. They were magnificent all right, with the magnificence that can only grow in the ground of great foolishness.
Orna Ross
#8. 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
#9. [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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. You can trust in nothing. Nothing is always there, holding all.
Orna Ross
#13. 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
#14. We who have seen the truth will reshape the world, and Ireland shall be our entrance to this world beyond words.
Orna Ross
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Nothing is 'wrong' with me, Dan. What's wrong with you? she said in the same eerily quiet voice, dark eyes fixated on Dan, as she breathed heavily.
Martin Hopkins
#18. Reading literary fiction stimulates cognition beyond the brain functions related to reading, say, magazine articles, interviews, or most online nonfiction reporting.
Susan Reynolds
#19. We're just like the antiques. We grow old and get scarred and beat up along the way, and the only question becomes whether we're going to make it until we realize what we already have is valuable." --Faith Bass Darling's Last Garage Sale
Lynda Rutledge
#20. War's all either country knows, and everything seems to depend on it now.
Samuel Snoek-Brown
#22. Underneath the ground
you can't hear a sound
not even the sweet falling rain
you might forget about tomorrow
forget about the swallows
but they won't forget you
they won't forget you
Karl P.T. Walsh
#23. It takes a village to raise a child, they say, and it takes a community to raise a genius, no matter how singular the individual.
Orna Ross
#24. After all, she knows how painful it can be not to follow your heart and she knows about the obstacles and about loyalty and duty and about the countless kinds of love. If only Eve and Myles were freer to make the right choices, she thinks.
Claire Dyer
#26. I guess if you get too close, the twinkling stops; they don't look like stars anymore.
Graham Spaid
#27. 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
#28. Not having any drink about ain't the same as not understanding the need for one. Times like these change a body's perspective.
Samuel Snoek-Brown
#29. 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
#30. He takes a draw on a cigarette, blows out a smoky ghost. I reach to catch the phantom in my hands, but it eludes me. I've been trying to catch a ghost for as long as I can remember.
Brenda Sutton Rose
#31. 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
#32. In American fiction, belief is like that. Belief as upbringing, belief as social fact, belief as a species of American weirdness: our literary fiction has all of these things. All that is missing is the believer.
Paul Elie
#33. A Quote from Monty's journal in GOD MUST BE WEEPING. I felt as anonymous as a grain of sand.
J.D. Winston
#34. The standards for horror fiction should be no less than those for 'serious literary' fiction in which originality of concept, depth of characters, and attentiveness to language are vitally important.
Joyce Carol Oates
#35. 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
#36. I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.
Mark Haddon
#37. 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
#38. Don't ever let anyone tell you that things can't be changed, that things can't be done. The can and they will, if we are united in what we believe.
F.C. Malby
#39. I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.
Ben Lerner
#40. 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
#41. For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.
Karen Russell
#42. There was some more good-natured laughter at the expense of women.
Zora Neale Hurston
#43. Suspense doesn't always have to be about physical danger. Making the reader worry is a universal concept that can be applied to any story.
Sandy Vaile
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. For Thanksgiving, a quote from my book, The Restaurant Reviewer, with deepest thanks for all the bounty:
In the kitchen here ingredients are cherished. This restaurant remembers that food tastes good.
Nao Hauser
#47. Time may be a river, but memory is a meteor shower, a staccato beat of energetic impacts.
James J. Houts
#48. Literary fiction is kept alive by women. Women read more fiction, period.
Khaled Hosseini
#49. Some ghosts are so quiet you would hardly know they were there.
Bernie Mcgill
#50. Yes - 90% of fantasy is crap. And so is 90% of science fiction and 90% of mystery fiction and 90% of literary fiction.
George R R Martin
#51. She thought of his boat silhouetted against the horizon and the image of him hurrying toward her through the fog.
Abigail Easton
#52. Only in dreams and death can perfection be had. Life is broken and weary.
Orna Ross
#53. Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.
Susan Sontag
#54. Star Trek, I thought, was a very inconsistent show, which at times sparkled with true ingenuity and pure science fiction approaches, and other times was more carnival-like, and very much more the creature of television than the creature of a legitimate literary form.
Rod Serling
#55. When looked at from the woman's side of the bed-sheet, most tales take a turning.
Orna Ross
#56. Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#57. Were the stars against him? A woman's fingers are quicker in the sky and shine more brightly.
Graham Spaid
#58. The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.
Wilkie Collins
#59. His fierce appreciation of female beauty, the unrelenting desire he felt for their company, the pleasure he both derived and sought to give, had led him in and out of quite a few bedroom doors.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#60. 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
#61. The lines in the corners of her eyes spoke of years of wisdom, as a tree with the number of rings increasing with each passing year. She was a small frame of a woman with piercing eyes that suggested that they knew you, understood you even.
F.C. Malby
#62. Someone who dreams cannot be forced to stop - there are no limitations to dreams, because we do not own dreams, dreams are from God.
Christina Westover
#63. If you don't read my book, I'm not coming to your birthday party.
Tim Yeager
#64. There's something in your eyes that scares me,"
Max whispired, looking through the window.
Landon took her face into his hand and made her look into his eyes "What?" he asked. "What do you see?"
"Fear," she answered plainly. "I see fear
Shawn Kirsten Maravel
#65. Kids never jumped head first from the top ledge. Never. It seemed forever before
Stoney came back to the surface. Most of the white bubbles had already disappeared.
Cole Alpaugh
#66. ...the pleasures of literary fiction are the pleasures of orientation; the pleasures of literature are the pleasures of bewilderment.
Toby Litt
#67. 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
#68. Action fiction is driven more by what than by who. Put that ticking nuclear suitcase under Manhattan, and it's relatively easy to create suspense. Literary fiction is driven more by who than by what.
Barry Eisler
#69. 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
#70. Fiction should be in its way subversive. I don't think books should be neat or gentle or genteel or comforting. I think they should be raw. They should be written as perfectly as possible, but what they do is to stir up, to lance the reader.
Edna O'Brien
#71. 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
#72. And although he recognized that tenderness was not the same as passion, and certainly not equivalent to love, for now it seemed to him a suitable substitute.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#73. Life if curious when reduced to its essentials
Jean Rhys
#74. 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
#75. Maybe that's why I was so afraid of Sasha's love. With him comes the remembering part that I was so good at forgetting.
~Piper - 'Breathe Me
Alexia Purdy
#76. With literary biographies, you're either shelved with other biographies or next to your subject's fiction.
Blake Bailey
#77. He looked along the line of children, exhibits A to C of his existence and heirs to the twisted throne of his corrupt genetics.
David Louden
#78. I've always taken that as my guiding principle and the rest is just set dressing. You can have dragons in it, or aliens and starships, or a western about a gunslinger, or even literary fiction, and ultimately you're still writing about the human heart in conflict with itself.
George R R Martin
#79. 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
#80. I resisted children's writing for a long time. I saw myself as a writer of literary fiction. But I had so much more fun writing kids' books.
Ellen Potter
#81. Darkness crept through. Shadows pried at doors, teased dull edges of recollections that never quite took hold. Memories that would have shriveled under the blinding sun of daylight. And reason.
Edward Fahey
#82. Bearing witness from the sides of the room, ten or more lepers shouted at the bizarre scene, "Diable! Diable!" And then chants of some sort, or prayers, followed by more shouts of "Diable!" They were hurling these words at Moreau like stones.
Cole Alpaugh
#83. Write for joy. It is the *only* reason to write. Whatever happens to your books afterward, just write for joy. Send your current one out when it's done and forget it, start another, and keep on writing for joy. Words I now live by. Welwyn Wilton Katz
Welwyn Wilton Katz
#84. I'm a minicamp body in 102-degree heat getting screamed at by the only other man my size: a middle-aged receivers coach they call Bow Wow.
Christopher Harris
#85. Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.
Joanne Harris
#86. Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.
Dean Koontz
#87. She realized, when relationships failed to last, it was not because love was no longer present, but because people had stopped believing in themselves and in their partners.
Christina Westover
#88. It feels as though it were just yesterday Grandfather exited my life like a bullet, leaving a bleeding hole behind.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#89. I believe a family just isn't complete without skeletons. My dearest momma clean bit off my daddy's nose right around the time they divorced.
Cole Alpaugh
#91. Women come more easily to that wisdom which ancient peoples, and all wild peoples even now, think the only wisdom.
Orna Ross
#92. To a degree, literary taste is a subjective matter. One can admire a work of fiction without particularly enjoying it; one can dislike a novel even while appreciating its value.
Claire Messud
#93. The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.
Nancy Kress
#94. I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.
Eleanor Catton
#95. I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.
Anne Enright
#96. A lot of young-adult authors, great ones, have tried their hands at literary fiction, and not a lot of them have succeeded. Not even Roald Dahl could switch-hit, and not for lack of trying.
Lev Grossman
#97. I think speculative fiction has fewer unspoken prerequisites than literary fiction for writers of color.
Nnedi Okorafor
#98. Dare I ask Mao and his Communist Party?
I fear my throat will be cut into two pieces.
In the name of revolution, for thought crimes,
Such questions can turn me to ashes.
Zoe S. Roy
#99. How ridiculous were the attentions the weak paid one another in the shadow of the strong!
V.S. Naipaul
#100. In serious Victorian fiction, as in Shakespearian tragedy, melodrama normally functions as metaphor. The author finds a vivid equivalent for a reality too elaborate or too extended to be briefly depicted.
Ian Gregor
