Quotes About Literary Works

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. There is a difference between dramatizing your sensibility and your personality. The literary works which we think of as classicsdid the former. Much modern writing does the latter, and so has an affinity with, say, night-club acts in all their shoddy immediacy.

Paul Horgan

#4. I divide all literary works into two categories: Those I like and those I don't like. No other criterion exists for me.

Anton Chekhov

#5. All great literary works influence us as writers, not their stories as much as their storytelling ability.

Michael Scott

#6. Ever since my youth it has disturbed me that of the literary works that survived their own epoch, so many dealt with historical rather than contemporary subjects.

Lion Feuchtwanger

#7. One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.

Naguib Mahfouz

#8. Literary works quite often 'know' things that the reader does not know, or does not know yet, or perhaps will never know.

Terry Eagleton

#9. Reading literary works enlightened and sheltered me; now I'm paying back by writing.

--"My Confession

Zoe S. Roy

#10. I realise that a novel and a film are different mediums. As artistes, we need to respect other artistes. It also needs a lot of courage to take risks to experiment and interpret known literary works.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

#11. I've read countless literary works that detail the longing and ache that characters have for someone they love, and over time, I have developed a strong belief that it's just dramatic bullshit meant to entice readers.

Jessica Park

#12. That's the way literary recognition works, at least to a certain degree. It's all a matter of rumor, a rumor that multiplies like a virus until it becomes a collective affinity.

Valeria Luiselli

#13. At present, the novels which we owe to English ladies form no small part of the literary glory of our country. No class of works is more honorably distinguished for fine observation, by grace, by delicate wit, by pure moral feeling.

Thomas B. Macaulay

#14. Writing about Africa by Africans has been part of my literary apprenticeship, standing alongside works by authors such as Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary and Graham Greene as influences.

Giles Foden

#15. Creating one single story often requires experimenting and planning and falling on your literary rear more than once before you find the way that works for your particular tale. The most important issue is to keep on trying until you get it right.

Nancy Lam

#16. Some writers refuse to lay their heads peaceably on the pillow of literary history in order to give posterity good dreams.
review in London Review of Books, of the works of Knut Hamsun (26 nov 1998)

James Wood

#17. For a writer, New York works well. Literary work is very elitist. I worked two hours a day, maximum, and the time after that was very agreeable. I walked a lot with pleasure. Those two hours augmented the day. I wrote more here than in Paris, an entire chapter of a new novel.

Ismail Kadare

#18. Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#19. I doubt very much if a man whose main literary interests were in works by Mr. Zane Grey, admirable as they may be, is particularly equipped to be the chief executive of this country, particularly where Indian Affairs are concerned.

Dean Acheson

#20. Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.

Washington Irving

#21. A writer's letters should be as literary as his printed works.

Virginia Woolf

#22. My reasoning, if one can call it that, was inflamed by the scatter shot passions of youth and a literary diet overly rich in the works of Nietzshe, Kerouac, and John Menlove Edwards ...

Jon Krakauer

#23. History is indeed stranger than fiction. The twists and turns of human history are too outlandish for to be believable in any work of fiction.

A.E. Samaan

#24. The past haunts libraries, not only in documents bearing witness to past ages, but through scholarly works, literary reconstructions and images of all kinds.

Jacques Bonnet

#25. I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.

Samuel Johnson

#26. Sermon design is not just a matter of what works. Sermon design also relates to theology, literary form, and to the culture of the world in which we live. We cannot

Dennis M. Cahill

#27. In all literary history there is no such figure as Dante, no such homogeneousness of life and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition of the unessential.

James Russell Lowell

#28. The extraordinarily facile and in literary terms long lived works tend to be about ordinary people. Even Sappho writes about the utterly insignificant . What art can do is make the extraordinary more ordinary and ordinary more extraordinary.

Robert Dessaix

#29. I myself do not believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God than are Dante's Commedia, Shakespeare's King Lear, or Tolstoy's novels, all works of comparable literary sublimity

Harold Bloom

#30. Hinde Esther Kreitman is a forgotten literary foremother, her works largely lost, ignored and out of print.

Clive Sinclair

#31. What works for me is that I read widely and stay focused on my writing. I'm no longer concerned about what happens in the literary marketplace. It is distracting and can lead to discontent.

Sefi Atta

#32. Mal Peet: "In terms of sustaining a literate and literary culture, the books we put into our children's hands are immeasurably more important than the latest works of high-profile novelists.

M.G. Harris

#33. [A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.

G.K. Chesterton

#34. Everything is much easier in the half-blind and half-deaf world of modern giants that seduce processions of the blind into the world of great emptiness. In their sky the stars shine and their names live in the parallel and independently of their work.

Dejan Stojanovic

#35. 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