-
True love exists only in the language your hearts invent; a bespoke dialect woven through stories only you can narrate.
Author:
Lila Amorus
-
Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.
Author:
Lisa See
-
The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into impossibly.
Author:
Arthur Clarke
-
Words have the power to create worlds that never existed, shaping the reality we live in.
Author:
Sophia Morris
-
Nourish your mind with curiosity; feed your soul with imagination.
Author:
Harper Lee
-
In a world full of paper, be someone's favorite book
Author:
Emily Rodriguez
-
You don't have to know people personally for them to be role models. Some of my most important role models were historical or literary figures that I only read about - never actually met.
Author:
John Wilson
-
Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.
Author:
Patrick White
-
I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit.
Author:
Edmund White
-
Sometimes there's a snobbery among literary types that these people don't really get it, but in a lot of ways they get it more than the literati. There's a culture in the background that they understand and know. They get that deeper level.
Author:
Irvine Welsh
-
Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.
Author:
H. Wells
-
It became plain very soon after our marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership.
Author:
Mary Ward
-
As I said earlier, there are no writers who could create a literary vision of the new reality.
Author:
Andrzej Wajda
-
Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.
Author:
Voltaire
-
You have to remember that I was a bright but simple fellow from Canada who seldom, if ever, met another writer, and then only a so-called literary type that occasionally sold a story and meanwhile worked in an office for a living.
Author:
A. Vogt
-
I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.
Author:
Andrew Vachss
-
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.
Author:
Scott Turow
-
The great break of my literary career was going to law school.
Author:
Scott Turow
-
So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.
Author:
Donna Tartt
-
I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.
Author:
Amy Tan
-
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.
Author:
Amy Tan
-
I don't want to promote my own image either. I don't like going on television or mixing in literary circles.
Author:
Antonio Tabucchi
-
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.
Author:
Theodore Sturgeon
-
There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.
Author:
Anne Stevenson
-
I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art.
Author:
Anne Stevenson
-
Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.
Author:
Stendhal
-
Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking.
Author:
Gertrude Stein
-
First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.
Author:
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
-
Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent.
Author:
Frank Sinatra
-
Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.
Author:
Dan Simmons
-
But it's not just a game of finding literary references.
Author:
Dan Simmons
-
Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying No to any authority - literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political.
Author:
Ignazio Silone
-
Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.
Author:
Michael Shermer
-
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.
Author:
Philip Schaff
-
There might be a different model for a literary community that's quicker, more real-time, and involves more spontaneity.
Author:
George Saunders
-
The period that I could consider the most important in my literary work came about beginning with the Revolution, and in a certain way, developed as a consequence of the Revolution. But it was also a result of the counterrevolutionary coup of November 1975.
Author:
Jose Saramago
-
I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.
Author:
Jose Saramago
-
The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.
Author:
Jose Saramago
-
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.
Author:
George Saintsbury
-
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.
Author:
Richard Russo
-
If any imagine from the literary tone of the preceding remarks that we are indifferent to the radical movement for the benefit of the masses which is the crowning glory of the nineteenth century, they will soon discover their egregious mistake.
Author:
George Ripley
-
There can be no literary equivalent to truth.
Author:
Laura Riding
-
Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.
Author:
Paul Ricoeur
-
When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.
Author:
Ted Rall
-
As the poet has expected, the alarms now are sounded, for - and it must be said again - the birth of a poet is always a threat to the existing cultural order, because he attempts to break through the circle of literary castes to reach the center.
Author:
Salvatore Quasimodo
-
A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.
Author:
Marcel Proust
-
And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature.
Author:
Jerry Pournelle
-
The Bible was written in several languages, embraces many literary forms, and reflects cultures very different from our own. These are important considerations for properly understanding the Bible in its context.
Author:
Troy Perry
-
In England, literary pretence is more universal than elsewhere from our method of education.
Author:
James Payn
-
Some Critics on the Hearth are not only good-natured, but have rather too high, or, if that is impossible, let us say too pronounced, an opinion of the abilities of their literary friends.
Author:
James Payn
-
One would think that in writing about literary men and matters there would be no difficulty in finding a title for one's essay, or that any embarrassment which might arise would be from excess of material. I find this, however, far from being the case.
Author:
James Payn
-
One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most.
Author:
Walter Pater
-
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.
Author:
Sara Paretsky
-
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
Author:
Anais Nin
-
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
Author:
V. Naipaul
-
I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.
Author:
Toni Morrison
-
It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.
Author:
Robert Morgan
-
I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.
Author:
Robert Morgan
-
Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.
Author:
Rick Moody
-
I use the language I use to my friends. They wouldn't believe me if I used some high-flown literary language. I want them to believe me.
Author:
Adrian Mitchell
-
Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.
Author:
Slobodan Milosevic
-
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.
Author:
Jonathan Miller
-
Some literary types subscribe to the notion that being a writer like Salinger entitles a person to remain free of the standards that might apply to mere mortals.
Author:
Joyce Maynard
-
The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements.
Author:
Paul Man
-
One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.
Author:
Naguib Mahfouz
-
A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!
Author:
Brian Lumley
-
There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.
Author:
Mario Llosa
-
Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.
Author:
Dean Koontz
-
I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother's side of the family in general were interested in literature.
Author:
Kenneth Koch
-
We served on the editorial board of a literary monthly called Face in 1968 and 1969. He was a young writer, and I was also interested in broad cultural issues. We agreed on all major issues and became friends.
Author:
Vaclav Klaus
-
I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries.
Author:
Stephen King
-
They are the literary equivalent of sequins on an evening dress.
Author:
Stefan Kanfer
-
I did not win and in fact I was called into the principal's office for a consultation with my parents. But that was the beginning of my literary career.
Author:
William Joyce
-
Emerson was the chief figure in the American transcendental movement, a fact that complicates all accounts of him in literary or cultural history.
Author:
Howard Jones
-
Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.
Author:
Samuel Johnson
-
During half a century of literary work, I have endeavoured to introduce the philosophy of evolution into the sphere of literature, and to inspire my readers to think in evolutionary terms.
Author:
Johannes Jensen
-
The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work.
Author:
Johannes Jensen
-
I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.
Author:
Jim Jarmusch
-
The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.
Author:
Henry James
-
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.
Author:
Kazuo Ishiguro
-
I couldn't speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British, and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligible for literary awards. But I still think I'm regarded as one of their own in Japan.
Author:
Kazuo Ishiguro
-
Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least.
Author:
Horace
-
Books on horse racing subjects have never done well, and I am told that publishers had come to think of them as the literary version of box office poison.
Author:
Laura Hillenbrand
-
For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete.
Author:
Lafcadio Hearn
-
At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language.
Author:
Lafcadio Hearn
-
There are two methods for the literary study of any book - the first being the study of its thought and emotion; the second only that of its workmanship. A student of literature should study some of the Bible from both points of view.
Author:
Lafcadio Hearn
-
Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.
Author:
Robert Hall
-
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.
Author:
Mark Haddon
-
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.
Author:
Taylor Hackford
-
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.
Author:
Marilyn Hacker
-
I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.
Author:
Marilyn Hacker
-
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.
Author:
Marilyn Hacker
-
I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form.
Author:
Sue Grafton
-
A contemporary artist can use the findings of all epochs and all styles, from the most primitive literary expressions up to the most refined products of the baroque.
Author:
Juan Goytisolo
-
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.
Author:
Harry Golden
-
I have always loved reading, so was interested in the literary world, and took many literary portraits.
Author:
Fay Godwin
-
When I became more involved in music, I had to give up some of my writing in the literary sense. However, on occasion, I would write something for my own pleasure or I would write notes and introductory remarks in the songbooks I put together.
Author:
Tom Glazer
-
Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?
Author:
Ellen Glasgow
-
The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.
Author:
Clifford Geertz
-
Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.
Author:
John Galbraith
-
The thriller is the most popular literary genre of the 20th century.
Author:
Ken Follett
-
Bridget Jones is part of literary lore now and actually to be a part of it is enormously flattering.
Author:
Colin Firth
-
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.
Author:
Lion Feuchtwanger
-
The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all "bottom line" editors; everything depends on the money.
Author:
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
-
Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.
Author:
T. Eliot
-
Excessive literary production is a social offense.
Author:
George Eliot
-
I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.
Author:
George Eliot
-
A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.
Author:
Will Eisner
-
Any biographer must of necessity become a pilgrim a peripatetic, obsessed literary pilgrim, a traveler with four eyes.
Author:
Leon Edel
-
I guess the two Manifesto, Communicating Vessels, Mad Love, and some of his poetry made a significant mark on me but as far as bringing a literary element into the music I see it as a much broader assimilation.
Author:
Trevor Dunn
-
If Art relates itself to an Object, it becomes descriptive, divisionist, literary.
Author:
Robert Delaunay
-
I was editor of my high school literary magazine and a reporter for the school newspaper.
Author:
Jeffery Deaver
-
The intercourse between the Mediterranean and the North or between the Atlantic and Central Europe was never purely economic or political; it also meant the exchange of knowledge and ideas and the influence of social institutions and artistic and literary forms.
Author:
Christopher Dawson
-
Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself.
Author:
Robertson Davies
-
We now open our mail with gloves and mask, though I can't imagine why anyone would target a literary agency!
Author:
Richard Curtis
-
You have to remember that in addition to running a literary agency, I am also an ebook publisher.
Author:
Richard Curtis
-
If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.
Author:
Aaron Copland
-
First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.
Author:
Mason Cooley
-
Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.
Author:
Mason Cooley
-
To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.
Author:
Mason Cooley
-
The aim of literary ambition is to demonstrate one's greatness of soul.
Author:
Mason Cooley
-
People aren't used to thinking of cultural forms spreading out across the full range of formal interactions - or what is called the "text" in literary terms.
Author:
Tony Conrad
-
As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.
Author:
Joseph Conrad
-
One learns little more about a man from the feats of his literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.
Author:
Frank Colby
-
That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.
Author:
J. Coetzee
-
The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's.
Author:
Jonathan Coe
-
When I was in college, I was the editor of the literary magazine and insisted neither the editors nor the writers be specifically identified-only our student numbers appeared on the title page. I love that idea and still do.
Author:
Jonathan Carroll
-
There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
Author:
Thomas Carlyle
-
So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We'll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world.
Author:
James Cameron
-
My literary success meant nothing to me.
Author:
Taylor Caldwell
-
They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?'
Author:
Samuel Butler
-
Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single.
Author:
James Burke
-
Me, my literary reputation is mostly abroad, but I am anchored here in New York. I can't think of any other place I'd rather die than here.
Author:
Harold Brodkey
-
Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.
Author:
Erma Bombeck
-
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.
Author:
Edward Bok
-
The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective.
Author:
Harold Bloom
-
I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.
Author:
Harold Bloom
-
I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
Author:
Harold Bloom
-
I am in the Master of Professional Writing program teaching Humor Writing, Literary and Dramatic.
Author:
Shelley Berman
-
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.
Author:
Ferdinand Baur
-
The greater the conceptual significance of a literary product, the more it should be assumed that it is based on an idea that determines the whole, and that the deeper consciousness of the time to which it belongs is reflected in it.
Author:
Ferdinand Baur
-
Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.
Author:
Charles Baudelaire
-
It took me fifty years to deal with the Holocaust at all. And I did it in a literary way.
Author:
Leonard Baskin
-
I have been told by a member of the board of one of Canada's most prominent literary magazines that a submission of mine once caused a great deal of controversy.
Author:
John Barton
-
A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate.
Author:
John Barton
-
Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Author:
Gaston Bachelard
-
These were all middle-class kids from literary backgrounds, joining this sort of train going by, this pop train, jumping on. Whereas the rest of the rock scene, you'll find that there's mostly working-class people.
Author:
Kevin Ayers
-
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.
Author:
Kevin Ayers
-
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
Author:
W. Auden
-
A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull.
Author:
Louis Auchincloss
-
For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.
Author:
David Antin
-
The literary culture, if you examine it, the high literary culture is that which preserves the government and you know it's really the talk for those who have.
Author:
Kathy Acker
-
The first epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be read.
Author:
Lascelles Abercrombie
