Literary Quotes
Literary Quote of the day
The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit.
The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.
I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.
Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.
He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
Fine writing is a distinct disadvantage. So is unique literary style. They take attention from the subject
I divide all literary works into two categories: Those I like and those I don't like. No other criterion exists for me.
If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?
Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.
When a friend of Abigail and John Adams was killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail's response was to write a letter to her husband and include these words, "My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.
San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.
I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.
The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.
If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.
One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.
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.
Your page stands against you and says to you that you are a thief.
An essay is a work of literary art which has a minimum of one anecdote and one universal idea.
I can't change overnight into a serious literary author. You can't compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.
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.
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.
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.
Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.
Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old.
If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
In literary art, as in the art of the architect, the painter, the musician, signs that the artist is thinking of his own achievement more than of his subject always offend me.
I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.
The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.
I don't have traceable literary models because I haven't had great literary influences in my life.
Science fiction is the characteristic literary genre of the century. It is the genre that stands in opposition to literary modernism.
Dictionary: a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic
I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there.
It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.
A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.
Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.
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.
This was a lucky recollection -- it saved her from something like regret.
In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.
But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.
There is in Albert Camus’ literary craftsmanship a seductive intelligence that could almost make a reader dismiss his philosophical intentions if he had not insisted on making them so clear.