Quotes About Literary

#1. Writing is not a literary act but spiritual. And pastoring is not managing a religious business but a spiritual quest.

Eugene H. Peterson

#2. In order to read one must sit down, usually indoors. I am restless and would rather sail a boat than crack a book. I've never had a very lively literary curiosity, and it has sometimes seemed to me that I am not really a literary fellow at all. Except that I write for a living.

E.B. White

#3. Messages are the death of an honest literary transaction with children

Maurice Sendak

#4. In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#5. A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#6. 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

#7. Allen Ginsberg startled the audience at OutWrite, the gay literary conference, when he confessed he didn't worry about AIDS since his sex life consisted chiefly of giving blowjobs to straight college boys.

Christopher Bram

#8. So it may well be believed that when I found him taking a complete holiday, with a vast supply of books at command, he had the air of indulging in a literary debauch, if the term may be applied to so honorable an occupation.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#9. A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts - for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work.

Andrei Tarkovsky

#10. If our DNA has a literary equivalent, it's Finnegan's Wake.

Jonah Lehrer

#11. The biggest misconception that people have about the literary life is the romance of it. That a writer has this large world available to him or her of people, of ideas, of experiences, of interchange of ideas.

Walter Mosley

#12. You don't expect your readers to go, "Ah this book's not just a fine work of literary whatshisname, but also a get-rich-quick scheme," to be followed shortly by a go-to-prison-quick scheme, which I believe he did. Are

Neil Gaiman

#13. Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.

Terry Eagleton

#14. In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs.

Northrop Frye

#15. If I were taking notes, they would read: I see something. A shape? I have no idea. It's not exactly the stuff that literary archives are made of.

Ann Patchett

#16. I was a businessman for 16 years of my life, so when I started writing, I wanted to keep my literary identity separate.

Ashwin Sanghi

#17. 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

#18. In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

George Bernard Shaw

#19. By now, we're all familiar with the literary post-apocalyptic world's metaphors. The zombies are our anxieties. The vampires are our greed. Our fairies are hope. Our werewolves are ... what again? Something

Taffy Brodesser-Akner

#20. 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

#21. I don't know that I've gotten much feedback directly from the literary world; sometimes I doubt even the notion that there is a literary world, though I guess there is or was.

Jonathan Ames

#22. I don't think comics necessarily think in literary terms. There is an element of developing your stage persona and your comedic voice, but I don't think comics see it like a character in a novel.

Ted Alexandro

#23. The New Testament evinces its universal design in its very, style, which alone distinguishes it from all the literary productions of earlier and later times.

Philip Schaff

#24. Attempts to connect men's circumstances too closely with their literary productions are usually, I believe, unsuccessful.

C.S. Lewis

#25. You don't have to be dead to write a classic, and you don't have to be literary to be smart.

Lisa Scottoline

#26. I think my sensibility is very literary; all my books were built as books, and I wasn't thinking about them being movies.

Bret Easton Ellis

#27. I still think 'The Lord of the Rings' is the greatest literary achievement in my lifetime. Like so many other people, I couldn't wait for the second and then the third book. Nothing like it had ever been written.

Christopher Lee

#28. It is the growth of advertising in this country which, more than any single element, has brought the American magazine to its present enviable position in points of literary, illustrative and mechanical excellence.

Edward Bok

#29. No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist.

Haruki Murakami

#30. Your literary style reflects your personality.

Louis Auchincloss

#31. I approach poetry and spirituality like literary nitroglycerin
a little can do a lot and you better damn well be careful with it.

Craig Johnson

#32. I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.

Carlos Fuentes

#33. I can't help but to write, I have a inner need for it. If I'm not in the middle of some literary project, I'm utterly lost, unhappy and distressed. As soon as I get started, I calm down.

Kaari Utrio

#34. not sit while the wind went by. Is the literary man to live always or chiefly sitting in a chamber through which nature enters by a window only? What is the use of the summer?

Henry David Thoreau

#35. 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

#36. But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now.

Rick Moody

#37. No one in the modern world is more lonely than the writer with a literary conscience.

Ellen Glasgow

#38. Life is a very orderly thing, but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There's nothing that says I can't write a page of full stops. There is no 'should' involved, although you wouldn't know that from literary reviews and critics.

Kate Atkinson

#39. We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it.

Kevin Ayers

#40. The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. But it's beginning to happen.

Will Self

#41. The literary gift is a mere accident - is as often bestowed on idiots who have nothing to say worth hearing as it is denied to strenuous sages.

Max Beerbohm

#42. The sorcery is not confined to the story; it's matched by the magic of Austin's literary craftsmanship.
--Leland Dirks, author of Angelo's Journey

R.L. Austin

#43. Excessive literary production is a social offense.

George Eliot

#44. Plagiarism, n. A literary coincidence compounded of a discreditable priority and an honorable subsequence.

Ambrose Bierce

#45. Literary prizes serve a purpose if they allow for discussion of books.

Richard Flanagan

#46. One of the most widely read novels by a black American is Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man.' It is his masterwork - it won the National Book Award in 1953 and catapulted my man to the highest levels of literary esteem.

Victor LaValle

#47. Psalm 29:10 is another reminiscent literary reference to the ancient Egyptian heritage of the Jews' cow-worship faith

Ibrahim Ibrahim

#48. Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.

Julian Barnes

#49. It must inquire not merely about the circumstances of the time in general, but in particular about the writer's position with regard to these things, the interests and motives, the leading ideas of his literary activity.

Ferdinand Christian Baur

#50. Sex in a woman's world has the same currency a penny has in a man's. Every penny saved is a penny earned in one world and in the next every sexual adventure is a literary experience.

Harry Golden

#51. In India books are nearly always banned at the request of people who do not read but whose literary sensibilities are easily offended.

Tavleen Singh

#52. Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.

Rebecca Solnit

#53. A love letter can be very short or it can be long; it can be literary or non-literary; it can be bright or dark, cheerful or tragic. But above all, for a love letter to be a love letter it must be sincere!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#54. In England, literary pretence is more universal than elsewhere from our method of education.

James Payn

#55. I have not wasted my life trifling with literary fools in taverns, as Johnson did, when he should have been shaking England with the thunder of his spirit

George Bernard Shaw

#56. A distinguished clergyman told me that he chose the profession of a clergyman because it afforded the most leisure for literary pursuits. I would recommend to him the profession of a governor.

Henry David Thoreau

#57. Well, this is basically the end, so the answers should be in these next few pages. I doubt they will surprise you, but you never know. I don't know how smart or thick you are. You could be Albert Einstein for all I know, or some literary prizewinner, or maybe you're just middle of the road like me.

Markus Zusak

#58. The visual and literary arts are of perennial interest to me, and these art forms have become more and more a part of my life; they have become companions of sorts. I cannot imagine my day to day experiences without the presence of these art forms. They're absolutely essential.

Michael Hersch

#59. One's politics are part of one even when one is writing. But if I want to say anything about the state of civil society, I will write an essay. The responsibilities you feel as a novelist are literary ones, I think, not civic ones. And I think politicians are interesting to write about.

Thomas Mallon

#60. The ad world used to be something of a refuge for literary types. But I feared for myself at J.W.T. It seemed to be entirely peopled by blocked dramatists, likeably shambling poets, and one-off novelists. The whole place felt like a clubworld sunset home for literary talent.

Martin Amis

#61. I figured if you're a man who knows his books, you can deal with the literary types who come out when the moon is full.

Ivan Doig

#62. When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels.

Peter York

#63. The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit.

Michael Moorcock

#64. The kingdom of God dawns in trailer parks and refugee camps. That shouldn't surprise us. The kingdom came to us not from a boardroom or a literary guild, but from a feeding trough and an execution stake.

Russell D. Moore

#65. Never read books you aren't sure about . . . even supposing that these bad books are very well written from a literary point of view. Let me ask you this: Would you drink something you knew was poisoned just because it was offered to you in a golden cup?

John Bosco

#66. 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

#67. Modernism and feminism are two broad axes on which Woolf criticism turns, and there are many other categories that reflect the range of positions available in literary criticism more generally, such as postmodernist, psychoanalytical,
historicist, materialist, postcolonial, and so on.

Jane Goldman

#68. Lyrical poetry is not a big part of most people's lives. Twitter now becomes an interesting way of getting cared for language into people's space. Because there is something deep inside of us that responds to cared for language, whether it's literary, poetry, or really good lyrics in a song.

Teju Cole

#69. Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#70. The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.

Will Self

#71. Narration, after all, isn't just a literary function. It represents the human capacity to tell stories in such a manner that they yield meaning. Television replaced this concerted quest for meaning with a frantic pursuit of wonder.

Steve Almond

#72. I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer.

Marilyn Hacker

#73. Every literary culture has among its first bearings the 'blether' of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.

Andrew O'Hagan

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

Virginia Woolf

#75. I always try to describe the situation just as it is. I try to find sentences that I believe tell the story best. Even my articles are more literary than ordinary news stories.

Asne Seierstad

#76. As any competent student of literary composition knows, the more natural and casual a voice sounds in print, the more likely it is to have been edited time and again.

Albert Murray

#77. "Story-tellers" should listen seriously to design and architecture without getting all literary and imperial about that. Hackers are arrogant geek romantics. They lack the attentive spirit of inquiry.

Bruce Sterling

#78. I tend more towards what some people call literary science fiction, but what I mean by that is that it is full of interesting language, experimentation, and ideas.

Edward Einhorn

#79. Those Yalta nights, with extraordinary women who could drink vodka without swooning until six in the morning and sweaty young people from the Association of Proletarian Writers of Crimea who came to ask for literary advice at four in the afternoon.

Roberto Bolano

#80. I'll be happy if I can gain even the smallest place inside the literary imagination of U.S. readers.

Elliot Perlman

#81. I've been in the art world for many years. But the sad fact is that most writers are visually prepubescent. Generally speaking, the literary world is provincial when it comes to matters of art. And it always has been.

Richard Grossman

#82. In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.

Victor Hugo

#83. I don't want to dive into that mud slide, which is what I consider the literary process.

Joseph Brodsky

#84. Any biographer must of necessity become a pilgrim a peripatetic, obsessed literary pilgrim, a traveler with four eyes.

Leon Edel

#85. 'Pride and Prejudice' - perhaps more than any other Jane Austen book - is engrained in our literary consciousness.

Seth Grahame-Smith

#86. I thought I would write non-fiction. I thought I would enter the New York literary scene as copy editor, work my way up, and then write my own books.

Michael Gruber

#87. If you write a screenplay that gets circulated, you have a bigger readership than any literary novelist. And it's an educated audience as well.

William Monahan

#88. I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.

John Updike

#89. Maybe it's just that no one knows how to conduct a real literary feud anymore, online or otherwise.

John Scalzi

#90. Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.

James Rollins

#91. So many Jonathans. A plague of literary Jonathans. If you read only the New York Times Book Review, you'd think it was the most common male name in America. Synonymous with talent, greatness. Ambition, vitality.

Jonathan Franzen

#92. There are plenty of brilliant people who are too stressed out to read challenging literary novels.

John Burdett

#93. Invention is almost the only literary labour which blindness cannot obstruct.

Samuel Johnson

#94. What care I if it be "wild and improbable" and "lacking in literary art"? I refuse to be any longer hampered by such canons of criticism. The one essential thing I demand of a book is that it should interest me. If it does, I forgive it every other fault.

L.M. Montgomery

#95. My comic sense, although deliberately Americanized, is, in its intent, much closer related to the crazy wisdom of Zen monks and the goofy genius of Taoist masters than it is to, say, the satirical gibes on Saturday Night Live. It has both a literary and a metaphysical function.

Tom Robbins

#96. But of all footmen the lowest class is literary footmen.

William Hazlitt

#97. The one thing I would like more credit for is being part of a movement which involves recognising the importance of plot and asserting that books of literary worth could be written that had plots.

Scott Turow

#98. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occassional cheese dip.

John Kennedy Toole

#99. Most definitely the real world, Komatsu said, and he rubbed his inner forearm. Pale veins rose to the surface. They were not very healthy-looking blood vessels - blood vessels damaged by years of drinking, smoking, an unhealthy lifestyle, and various literary intrigues.

Haruki Murakami

#100. My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers. Every two weeks, he'd take me to our local branch library and pull books off the shelf for me, stacking them up in my arms - 'Have you read this? And this? And this?'

Janet Fitch