Top 100 Quotes About Literary Fiction
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Reading literary fiction stimulates cognition beyond the brain functions related to reading, say, magazine articles, interviews, or most online nonfiction reporting.
Susan Reynolds
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.
Karen Russell
#9. Literary fiction is kept alive by women. Women read more fiction, period.
Khaled Hosseini
#10. 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
#11. ...the pleasures of literary fiction are the pleasures of orientation; the pleasures of literature are the pleasures of bewilderment.
Toby Litt
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.
Dean Koontz
#17. The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.
Nancy Kress
#18. I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.
Eleanor Catton
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. I think speculative fiction has fewer unspoken prerequisites than literary fiction for writers of color.
Nnedi Okorafor
#22. With literary fiction, generally a film maker falls in love with a book. In commercial fiction, it's a producer or studio falling in love with a book they can make into a movie with worldwide appeal.
Robert Gottlieb
#23. It's never really easy to be successful as a writer when you're trying to write literary fiction. You've already limited your readership limited by that choice.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#24. It's literature. It's all books. There are good books and bad books. Literary fiction can be bad, and so can sci-fi. Sci-fi can be wonderful and so can literary fiction. As long as it's a good book, who cares? Hold my attention; that's all I ask. Make me believe.
Margaret Atwood
#25. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful - nonfiction only, please.
Gabrielle Zevin
#26. Like literary fiction, mathematical imagination entertains pure possibilities.
Daniel Tammet
#27. Literary fiction - if we must use the term - is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.
Dave Morris
#28. I write literary, not commercial, fiction - or so I've been told by my publishers who are proud I write literary fiction but secretly wish I wrote commercial.
Tawni O'Dell
#29. If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all that contemporary, is it
Warren Ellis
#30. No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.
Amy Tan
#31. In matters of religion a skeptical mind is not a higher manifestation of virtue than is a believing heart, and analytical deconstruction in the field of, say, literary fiction can be just plain old-fashioned destruction when transferred to families yearning for faith at home.
Jeffrey R. Holland
#32. 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
#33. I read a lot of science fiction, but I also mixed it up with a lot of other genres: crime, literary fiction, as well as nonfiction. Author-wise, I'm a fan of Stephen King, Lauren Beukes, Robert McCammon, Raymond Chandler, Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker and Gail Simone, among many others.
Adam Christopher
#34. Many Scandinavian writers who had made their name in literary fiction felt they wanted to have a go at the crime novel to show they could compete with the best. If Salman Rushdie had been Norwegian, he would definitely have written at least one thriller.
Jo Nesbo
#35. Question: You're 21-years-old, a young adult writing mature adult literary fiction. Imaj: Yes, I feel creativity is an ageless thing.
Imaj
#36. With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension.
Adrian McKinty
#37. Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.
Dennis Lehane
#38. ... Here we come close to one of the definitions of literary fiction. Even the best kind of popular novel just comes straight at you; you have no conversation with a popular novel. Whereas you do have a conversation (you have an intense argument) with [literary fiction].
Martin Amis
#39. If you write literary fiction that's set partly in the future, you're apparently a sci-fi writer ... I think of it as being more of a story about what remains after we lose everything and the importance of art in our lives.
Emily St. John Mandel
#40. I think suspense should be like any other color on a writer's palette. I suppose I'm in the minority but I think it's crazy for 'literary fiction' to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto.
Jess Walter
#41. One of the things that doesn't come up as much as it should, especially in literary fiction, is this idea of faith and God ... I feel like those are things that should be wrestled with ... because they are such an integral part of our community on every level.
Victor LaValle
#42. Don't get me started on the term literary fiction. I think the idea is that there are some books who know how to order from a wine list and some who don't. I like wine, but I prefer the company of beer drinkers any day.
Keir Graff
#43. Local markets for literary fiction remain underdeveloped; the metropolis often holds out the only real possibility of a professional writing career.
Pankaj Mishra
#44. Think of literary fiction as a meal with intricate scents, flavors, and textures that you can't recognize unless you chew with your eyes closed.
Jessica Bell
#45. When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.
Richard Russo
#46. science fiction is literary fiction with the lid blown off
Robin Winter
#47. In fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it's one of the few kinds of writing that doesn't tell us what to think or what to buy or what to wear. We're surrounded by advertising.
Barbara Kingsolver
#48. It's perceived as an accolade to be published as a 'literary' writer, but, actually, it's pompous and it's fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself.
Neil Cross
#49. I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.
Barbara Kingsolver
#50. If you want to be a good lair, tell people what they want to hear. (From Hot dogs under The Dakota)
Johannes Gouws
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. The world is full of sluts on skates. From Penn-warren's "All the Kings Men.
Martha Miller
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. They were magnificent all right, with the magnificence that can only grow in the ground of great foolishness.
Orna Ross
#57. 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
#58. [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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. You can trust in nothing. Nothing is always there, holding all.
Orna Ross
#62. We who have seen the truth will reshape the world, and Ireland shall be our entrance to this world beyond words.
Orna Ross
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. War's all either country knows, and everything seems to depend on it now.
Samuel Snoek-Brown
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#72. I guess if you get too close, the twinkling stops; they don't look like stars anymore.
Graham Spaid
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. A Quote from Monty's journal in GOD MUST BE WEEPING. I felt as anonymous as a grain of sand.
J.D. Winston
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.
Ben Lerner
#82. 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
#83. There was some more good-natured laughter at the expense of women.
Zora Neale Hurston
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. Time may be a river, but memory is a meteor shower, a staccato beat of energetic impacts.
James J. Houts
#89. Some ghosts are so quiet you would hardly know they were there.
Bernie Mcgill
#90. She thought of his boat silhouetted against the horizon and the image of him hurrying toward her through the fog.
Abigail Easton
#91. Only in dreams and death can perfection be had. Life is broken and weary.
Orna Ross
#92. Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.
Susan Sontag
#93. 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
#94. When looked at from the woman's side of the bed-sheet, most tales take a turning.
Orna Ross
#95. Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#96. Were the stars against him? A woman's fingers are quicker in the sky and shine more brightly.
Graham Spaid
#97. 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
#98. 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.
#99. 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
#100. 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
