Quotes About Literary Genre

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. The present work is, then, the masterpiece of one particular literary genre that flourished in the fourth century BC in Greece, that of the rhetorical manual, and it is a remarkable fact that it should have fallen to Aristotle to write it. It

Aristotle.

#4. We can study files for decades, but every so often we are tempted to throw up our hands and declare that history is merely another literary genre: the past is autobiographical fiction pretending to be a parliamentary report.

Julian Barnes

#5. The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

Jose Saramago

#6. Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.

Marilyn Hacker

#7. Science fiction is the characteristic literary genre of the century. It is the genre that stands in opposition to literary modernism.

David G. Hartwell

#8. The thriller is the most popular literary genre of the 20th century.

Ken Follett

#9. But when interpreted correctly - paying attention to the original context, considering the literary genre, thinking through authorial intent - the Bible is never wrong in what it affirms and must never be marginalized as anything less than the last word on everything it teaches.

Kevin DeYoung

#10. I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story.

Jose Saramago

#11. I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.

Pope Francis

#12. I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

Ben Lerner

#13. I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form.

Sue Grafton

#14. We insist that this stuff we call science fiction is not SCI-FI. For some in the ghetto of Genre this is axiomatic, a secret truth known only to the genre kids, that there is proper science fiction and then there's that SCI-FI shit.

Hal Duncan

#15. 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

#16. Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition. I'm not entirely at ease with that self-description.

Charles Stross

#17. I love outsider stories. And I also like a lot of genre fiction, too. So I wanted to write a literary book that flirted with thriller and fantasy and even science fiction. I wanted the coming-of-age story and the love story to be about "outsiderdom" - one of the themes I am most interested in.

Porochista Khakpour

#18. The distinction between literary and genre fiction is stupid and pernicious. It dates back to a feud between Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James. James won, and it split literature into two streams. But it's a totally false dichotomy.

George R R Martin

#19. 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

#20. When a woman reads a romance novel, she is putting her own pleasure first. That small act of rebellion is perceived as a threat to the status quo. It's also why this eternally popular and profitable genre has been scorned, ridiculed and dismissed.

Maya Rodale

#21. ... 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

#22. I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

Garry Disher

#23. Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

Rick Moody

#24. 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

#25. twenty years after McCauley's effort, I concluded that it was time to prove, once and for all, that the horror and suspense genre is a serious literary one. I had other reasons

Al Sarrantonio

#26. [In "The Night Gwen Stacy Died"], death took on an existential quality -- the beloved, innocent but weak Gwen is merely a victim, the casualty of a war between superpowered rivals -- and as such the episode proved a turning point int eh genre's depiction of mortality.

Jose Alaniz

#27. Blogging has helped create an expanded awareness of the creative nonfiction genre, generally. But I suspect many bloggers continue to be unaware that they are (or have the potential to be) "literary" or "artful."

Lee Gutkind

#28. Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.

Dean Koontz

#29. I write across several genres. I'm a slut for words. I can't keep it in my literary pants.

Fierce Dolan

#30. 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

#31. Literary genres and techniques tend to take form in one's mind somewhat the way computer templates provide form for different computer tasks.

Aberjhani