What Is A Literary Quotes

#1. What is a literary festival? Imagine a sort of cross between school and church. There are no actual festivities; what there are is a lot of public readings.

Russell Smith

#2. So." [Isobel] cleared her throat. "What are we doing?"
"We," [Varen] said at last, "are doing a project on Poe."
"Didn't he marry his cousin or something?"
"The man is a literary god and that's all you have to say?

Kelly Creagh

#3. We may not realize it, but every point during the passage of our lives is a point of no return -- except for what memory permits.

Norman Lock

#4. Argot is both a literary and a social phenomenon. What is argot, properly speaking? Argot is the language of misery.

Victor Hugo

#5. Q: What literary complexities do you find most interesting? That is, what do you like most to "solve," so to speak, as a novelist?
A: One wishes to create characters who will speak directly to the minds of comparative literature professors and intelligent book reviewers.

Gilbert Sorrentino

#6. I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way, perhaps. That's what I think writers are for.

Doris Lessing

#7. What you create when you're teaching fiction writing is a kind of literary salon, not a social club or a mutual admiration society, not a debating society, not a repair shop, not a fight club or a soap box. It's a place to have a conversation about a story.

John Dufresne

#8. In 1927, if you were stuck with idle time, reading is what you did. It's no accident that the 'Book-of-the-Month Club' and 'The Literary Guild' were founded in that period as well as a lot of magazines, like 'Reader's Digest,' 'Time,' and 'The New Yorker.'

Bill Bryson

#9. My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.

J.K. Rowling

#10. The best source for finding an agent is called Literary Agents of North America. It's a complete list of agents, not only by name and address, but by type of book they represent and by what their submission criteria are.

Sara Paretsky

#11. Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.
[Time Magazine, October 31, 1977]

John Osborne

#12. Who's to say what a 'literary life' is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don't need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time.
Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!

Roman Payne

#13. By deciding what is, and is not, allowed to be discussed in a review,
by removing discussion of social context, and saying that only the
words on the page count, Goodreads is ignoring fifty years of development
of literary criticism, and is engaging in censorship.

G.R. Reader

#14. Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#15. But everything written has style. The list of ingredients on the side of a cornflakes box has style. And everything literary has literary style. And style is integral to a work. How something is told correlates with - more - makes what's being told. A story is its style.

Ali Smith

#16. What I like most about the process of literary creation is gathering mundane facts and concepts, then clothing them with the ornate jewels and fine garments of imagination and fantasy, weaving a tale on the glittering edge of possibility.

Gregory Hamilton

#17. What is to be done about these literary people, who will never understand that painting is a craft and that the material side comes first? The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

#18. People aren't quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They're not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#19. 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

#20. What cannot be borne in reality, becomes a source of pleasure when it is transposed into the visual and somatic fiction of the dramatic spectacle.

Claude Calame

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. What surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer creating a writer-character?

David Mitchell

#25. My favorite book is anything by Kurt Vonnegut - he's my literary hero. I got to meet him several times, which was a great thrill for me. I don't really remember what we talked about.

Steven Wright

#26. What is more precious: a thousand answers derived from one question? Or, one answer ... from a thousand questions?

G.F. Smith

#27. My view, as one who taught it, is that the whole purpose of a literary education should be to tell people that these things exist. I don't think any teacher should try to 'teach an author,' but rather simply describe what the author has written. And this is what I tried to do.

Guy Davenport

#28. Literature, I have always thought, is in most places and companies a singularly dull and uninteresting thing to talk about, but one may, as a rule, hate literary conversation, and yet at the right moment, with all its powers of feeling, the mind in silence may feel what it owes to literature.

William Hurrell Mallock

#29. I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#30. The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.

Martin Amis

#31. Anuj Bahari has always been a really good literary agent for me. What a good agent does is that he manages many of your business aspects so you can keep your time free for writing.

Amish Tripathi

#32. Hash, x. There is no definition for this word - nobody knows what hash is.
Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.
Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.

Ambrose Bierce

#33. What is the sign of every literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole - the whole is no longer a whole.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#34. (On literary festivals) When you go and see a band play live, you are watching it do on stage what it is meant to do. When you watch an author perform live, you are, most of the time, watching a dog walk on its hind legs.

Nicholas Lezard

#35. (Feedback) People become addicted to it. That's why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.

Zadie Smith

#36. What is commonly called literary history is actually a record of choices.

Louise Bernikow

#37. Steampunk is...a joyous fantasy of the past, allowing us to revel in a nostalgia for what never was. It is a literary playground for adventure, spectacle, drama, escapism and exploration. But most of all it is fun!

George Mann

#38. I'm not against asking the audience to work, but I think what you have now is a sort of gratuitous deconstruction as a result of a fashion of literary deconstructionism indicating that there are no meanings.

Jonathan Miller

#39. What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy.

Joseph Pulitzer

#40. If I like a movie, I'm definitely advocating for it, but it's not "you should see this" or "you shouldn't see this." I try to take a longer view about what the movie is doing and where it fits in the context of other things, in the way that certain good literary criticism tries to do the same thing.

Wesley Morris

#41. It is dangerous to condemn stories as junk which satisfy the deep hunger of millions of people. These books are not literary art, but a great deal of what is acclaimed as literary art in our time offers no comfort or fulfillment to anybody.

Judith Skelton Grant

#42. I am obsessed with story. I had a late awakening in life. In college was the first time that I understood what you could do with a story and what a good novel is - literary value and subtext and irony and everything.

Shane Carruth

#43. The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature.

Julio Cortazar

#44. This is how I understand literature - as a kind of remix or echo chamber. What's going on in a literary work are other literary things disinterred, cannibalized, and recombined.

Tommy McCarthy

#45. Since it is impossible to know what's really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.

Mario Vargas-Llosa

#46. 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

#47. The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things"-the norms of human action.

Russell Kirk

#48. Evan Handler is not only a fine actor, he's a damn good writer. It's Only Temporary is wise and funny and as righteously indignant as it is endearingly self-effacing. In what may be a literary first, the book actually left me wanting more.

Meghan Daum

#49. Reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers ... annotations, arrows ... an oudine of its design ... very seriously mislead.

William H Gass

#50. But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is.

Taylor Hackford

#51. The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that.

Arthur Miller

#52. What's fascinating is where they come from in the world. People in Bangladesh, a chap in a fire-base in Tikrit in Iraq. Chap in an Irish pub in Dublin. And lovely to think this literary network - or rather network of readers - is well spread out.

John Gimlette

#53. She shakes him; that is what she presumable does to other readers too. That is, presumably why, in the larger picture, she exists. What a strange reward for a lifetime of shaking people: to be conveyed to this town in Pennsylvania and given money!

J.M. Coetzee