Literary Quotes

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.
Juan Goytisolo

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.
Marcel Proust

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.
Will Eisner


A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it.
Mary A. Ward

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!
Brian Lumley

A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate.
John Barton

A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull.
Louis Auchincloss

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.
John Cheever

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.
Jerry Pournelle

Anonymous sources are a practice of American journalism in the 20th and 21st century, a relatively recent practice. The literary tradition of anonymity goes back to the Bible.
Joe Klein

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

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.
T. S. Eliot

Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.
David Cronenberg

As I said earlier, there are no writers who could create a literary vision of the new reality.
Andrzej Wajda

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.
Joseph Conrad

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.
Salvatore Quasimodo

At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.
Mark Haddon

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.
Lafcadio Hearn

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.
Audre Lorde

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.
Laura Hillenbrand

Bridget Jones is part of literary lore now and actually to be a part of it is enormously flattering.
Colin Firth

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

But it's not just a game of finding literary references.
Dan Simmons

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

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.
Arthur Miller

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.
Samuel Johnson

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.
Slobodan Milosevic

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?
Ellen Glasgow

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.
Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

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.
V. S. Naipaul

Emerson was the chief figure in the American transcendental movement, a fact that complicates all accounts of him in literary or cultural history.
Howard Mumford Jones

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

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
W. H. Auden

Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.
Mason Cooley

Excessive literary production is a social offense.
George Eliot

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

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.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.
David Antin

For the last half of my life I have had the doubtful benefit of a brother whose literary reputation is much greater than my own.
Laurence Housman

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.
Lafcadio Hearn

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.
Rick Moody

Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent.
Frank Sinatra

How dare anyone, parent, schoolteacher, or merely literary critic, tell me not to act colored.
Arna Bontemps

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.
Erma Bombeck

I am in the Master of Professional Writing program teaching Humor Writing, Literary and Dramatic.
Shelley Berman

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries.
Stephen King

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.
Andrew Vachss

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.
Kazuo Ishiguro

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.
Robert Morgan

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.
William Joyce

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.
Anne Stevenson

I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.
Harold Bloom

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

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.
Mark Haddon

I don't want to promote my own image either. I don't like going on television or mixing in literary circles.
Antonio Tabucchi

I get sent a lot of scripts which feature him as a kind of all-purpose Victorian literary character and really understand little, if anything, about him, his life or his books.
Simon Callow

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.
Trevor Dunn

I have always loved reading, so was interested in the literary world, and took many literary portraits.
Fay Godwin

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.
John Barton

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.
George Eliot

I might have simply settled down into an armchair literary life. I really don't know exactly why I didn't.
Edward Carpenter

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.
Jose Saramago

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.
Amy Tan

I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form.
Sue Grafton

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.
Jim Jarmusch

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.
Edmund White

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.
Adrian Mitchell

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.
Kenneth Koch

I was editor of my high school literary magazine and a reporter for the school newspaper.
Jeffery Deaver

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.
Marilyn Hacker

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
Harold Bloom

I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.
Toni Morrison

I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

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

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.
Aaron Copland

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.
George Ripley

If Art relates itself to an Object, it becomes descriptive, divisionist, literary.
Robert Delaunay

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

It became plain very soon after our marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership.
Mary A. Ward

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

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

It took me fifty years to deal with the Holocaust at all. And I did it in a literary way.
Leonard Baskin

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.
Robert Morgan

It's too bad for us 'literary' enthusiasts, but it's the truth nevertheless - pictures tell any story more effectively than words.
William Moulton Marston

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least.
Horace

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.
Ignazio Silone

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.
Robertson Davies

Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.
Dean Koontz

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Gaston Bachelard

Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life.
Rick Moody

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.
Harold Brodkey

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.
Dan Simmons

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.
John Kenneth Galbraith

My literary success meant nothing to me.
Taylor Caldwell

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.
Amy Tan

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.
H. G. Wells

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.
Robert Hall

Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking.
Gertrude Stein

One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.
Naguib Mahfouz

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

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

It took me fifty years to deal with the Holocaust at all. And I did it in a literary way.
Leonard Baskin

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.
Robert Morgan

It's too bad for us 'literary' enthusiasts, but it's the truth nevertheless - pictures tell any story more effectively than words.
William Moulton Marston

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least.
Horace

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.
Ignazio Silone

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.
Robertson Davies

Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.
Dean Koontz

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Gaston Bachelard

Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life.
Rick Moody

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.
Harold Brodkey

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.
Dan Simmons

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.
John Kenneth Galbraith

My literary success meant nothing to me.
Taylor Caldwell

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.
Amy Tan

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.
H. G. Wells

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.
Robert Hall

Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking.
Gertrude Stein

One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.
Naguib Mahfouz

One learns little more about a man from the feats of his literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.
Frank Moore Colby

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.
George Saintsbury

One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.
Robert Morgan

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.
Walter Pater

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.
James Payn

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

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.
Tony Conrad

Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.
Michael Shermer

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.
Marilyn Hacker

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.
Stendhal

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.
Patrick White

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.
Voltaire

Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.
Theodore Sturgeon

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

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

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.
Donna Tartt

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.
James Cameron

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.
James Payn

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.
Joyce Maynard

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.
Irvine Welsh

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.
J. M. Coetzee

The aim of literary ambition is to demonstrate one's greatness of soul.
Mason Cooley

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

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.
Troy Perry

The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.
Phillip Adams

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements.
Paul de Man

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.
Henry James

The first epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be read.
Lascelles Abercrombie

The great break of my literary career was going to law school.
Scott Turow

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.
Ferdinand Christian Baur

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.
Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

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.
Christopher Dawson

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.
Kathy Acker

The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's.
Jonathan Coe

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

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.
Jose Saramago

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

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.
Jose Saramago

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.
Clifford Geertz

The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all "bottom line" editors; everything depends on the money.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel.
Norman Spinrad

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

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.
Harold Bloom

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.
Lafcadio Hearn

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.
Laura Riding

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
Thomas Carlyle

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.
Mario Vargas Llosa

There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.
Anne Stevenson

There might be a different model for a literary community that's quicker, more real-time, and involves more spontaneity.
George Saunders

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.
Kevin Ayers

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

They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?'
Samuel Butler

To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.
Mason Cooley

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.
James Lee Burke

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.
Charles Baudelaire

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

We now open our mail with gloves and mask, though I can't imagine why anyone would target a literary agency!
Richard Curtis

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.
Vaclav Klaus

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.
Richard Russo

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.
Tom Glazer

When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.
Ted Rall

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.
Jonathan Carroll

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
Anais Nin

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.
Paul Ricoeur

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.
John Wilson

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.
A. E. van Vogt

You have to remember that in addition to running a literary agency, I am also an ebook publisher.
Richard Curtis