Literary Quotations | Page 4

Everyone is still waiting for the book that everyone greets as the big literary book. People thought it would be a strong year for fiction but it hasn't turned out that way.

There was enormous interest from publishers in this book. We met with numerous publishers and ultimately conducted a traditional literary auction.

They are the literary equivalent of sequins on an evening dress.

It seems to me that one of the things that happened with a lot of literary fiction in the 1980s and 1990s was that it became very concerned with the academy and less with how people live their lives. We got to a point where the crime novel stepped into the breach. It was also a time when the crime novel stopped being so metropolitan.

We don't usually think of them as literary giants.

We have a curious relationship with 'funny' in the U.K. We love to laugh, but we also think that making people laugh is just a little bit second-tier, especially in a literary context.

It's funny, I don't know where I would place myself in the literary landscape. I really just write the book that I would want to read. I put on the blinders, and I really - it is, for me, that simple.

It is the intention for the Makars' Court to grow and develop as the Scottish national literary monument. This week's additions will take the number to 25 writers of national importance commemorated there.

It may seem odd that I'm here today - the unapologetic writer of popular fiction - on Faulkner's front porch about to announce the finalists for the National Book Award, which are our most prestigious literary awards.

It's a very interesting process to write in English because all my literary resources come from Spanish, ... I must confess that I felt really handicapped, creatively, when I accepted the proposal to sing in English. ... I thought that I would encounter more difficulties, but everything has come together.

I am well aware that the writers of New York, London, and Toronto are more readily noticed, though the shadowy and potent Ozarks Literary Cabal does what it can for me, then nightly joins me for dinner and calls me 'honey.'

I could, I think, write a literary novel, but I have no desire to - even my bleakest book has some jokes in it, and I'd feel nervous writing a book with no jokes.

I certainly think that the publishing houses have to learn more about this informal network of literary blogging and get over the idea that sending an author on a book tour - to Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles - is a successful model anymore.

I changed my writing style deliberately. My first two novels were written in a very self-consciously literary way. After I embraced gay subject matter, which was then new, I didn't want to stand in its way. I wanted to make the style as transparent as possible so I could get on with it and tell the story, which was inherently interesting.

I approached writing a story for the CBC Literary Awards as a mercenary venture - $5,000 for one story, not bad. Now, how do you win it? Jurors are wading through skyscrapers of paper, looking for one story that stands out.

I do have the sense that, although there may be no one way to write a novel, there are many novelists who are in fact part of some sort of larger literary community, whether in the form of a writing group or an MFA program, to name two of the more common forms.

I do not come out of a literary tradition.

For the first time in my literary career I have not gotten on the main talk shows in the morning. This year, I was turned down on all three shows.

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

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.

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

To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.

First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.

All of the founders are huge sports fans. So we grew up wearing sports apparel, since athletes are celebrated quite a bit in our society. Why not honor historical and literary figures in the same way? It's really not that foreign a concept.

America's revolutionary deists saw themselves as - and they were - participants in an international movement that drew on most of the same literary sources across the civilized world.

He [Aristotle] pointed out that people who had become initiates in the various mystery religions were not required to learn any facts 'but to experience certain emotions and to be put in a certain disposition.' Hence his famous literary theory that tragedy effected a purification (katharsis) of the emotions of terror and pity that amounted to an experience of rebirth.

The lawyer refused to tell me my brother's name, and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James - someone more talented than I: someone brilliant without even trying.

the leading figure in Spain's literary renewal during the post-war era.

Your literary style reflects your personality.

The literary activity of even the eighteenth century among the Gaels was very great.

The literary community is very rich. The Haitian culture stands out as unique, especially the literature. The Creole language also lends a flavor all its own, even in English, and the African tradition gives the literature a lot of folk tales and proverbs.

I am someone who values truth - actual truth as opposed to "truthiness." I am also someone who has been trained in deconstruction in the literary theory department of Yale University, so I am someone who is tempted to believe that no absolute truth is possible.

The difference between this award and any other is that it's a reader's choice. People holler about other awards because they are committee-selected. This is not committee-selected. There are purists in literary circles who have a different sense of what is going on here, but we think anything you can do to get people reading is a good thing.

I don't have traceable literary models because I haven't had great literary influences in my life.

The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology.

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.

I do not know whether to be delighted or outraged by the fact that Literary Theory: An Introduction was the subject of a study by a well known U.S. business school, which was intrigued to discover how an academic text could become a best-seller.

You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.

It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.

What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism .

Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

That the question of likability even exists in literary conversations is odd. It implies that we are engaging in a courtship. When characters are unlikable, they don’t meet our mutable, varying standards. Certainly we can find kinship in fiction, but literary merit shouldn’t be dictated by whether we want to be friends or lovers with those about whom we read.

I can't do literary work for the rest of this year because I'm meditating another lawsuit and looking around for a defendant

Having been an English literary graduate, I've been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since.

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything

Dictionary: a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic

HASH: There is no definition for this word - nobody knows what hash is.

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

A literary man - with a wooden leg.

There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.

A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

Writers who teach tend to prefer literary theory to literature and tenure to all else. Writers who do not teach prefer the contemplation of Careers to art of any kind.

As for me, my literary theory, like my politics, is based chiefly upon one main idea, to wit, the idea of freedom. I am, in brief, a libertarian of the most extreme variety, and know of no human right that is one-tenth as valuable as the simple right to utter what seems (at the moment) to be the truth

I do not know what might be the most fitting description.... I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner. And this is what I said when they asked me if I would accept my election as pontiff: I am a sinner, but I trust in the infinite mercy and patience of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I accept in a spirit of penance.

...book-buyers aren't attracted, by and large, by the literary merits of a novel: book-buyers want a good story...something that will first fascinate them, then pull them in and keep them turning the pages.