Top 405 Literary Quotes

English dialogues are always just what you need and nothing more – like something out of Hemingway. In Italian and in French, dialogues are always theatrical, literary. You can do more with it.

For a decade, Emma-Lee Moss has been steadily making weird, moody, melancholic music under the moniker ‘Emmy the Great’ that has been referred to as nue-folk, anti-folk, synthpop, and, most of all, literary.

I have a strange relationship with influences because mine are mostly literary or painters or poets, who I’ll even quote. I don’t do tributes to cinema.

My father is my biggest literary influence. Recently, I’ve been looking through his letters. He was in the National Guard when I was a child, and whenever he left, he would write to me. He wrote letters to me all through college, and we still correspond. His letters, and my mother’s, are one of my life’s treasures.

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, ‘Middlesex.’

I was lucky to develop in the U.K. because I find comedy – in addition to being caustic – it’s quite literary over here, and alternative comedy isn’t so alternative.

As a reader, I try to love all the literary forms equally, but I probably read novels most often.

I’m sometimes asked if I get bored with talking about ‘Kevin,’ and of course, the short answer is yes. Nevertheless, after a long slog in the literary trenches, I never take a single reader for granted and always remind myself that for new readers the unfolding story is fresh.

On the page, ‘Gone Girl’ was a literary game: a tennis match of alternating chapters from Nick and Amy, with the reader offering to take each character’s side every few pages.

By the time I left the bar, I was 30. I was a dishwasher. They call it a bar-back, but essentially, I washed dishes for a living. I had no high-school diploma, I had no agent, and my literary successes were non-existent… but it was the only thing I ever wanted to do, so I did feel trapped.

I hate to sound blase about it, but literary status is not important to me. Being happy is important to me.

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.

Literary fiction is kept alive by women. Women read more fiction, period.

I don’t think you can ever assess your work. I don’t think Turgenev could assess his any more than I can assess mine, and his didn’t have a social impact as much as great literary impact.

Being Jewish is a big part of my artistic sensibility and my humor… I think it gives me a certain take on the world on a literary level.

‘Luke Cage’ came out in 1972 at the height of the blaxploitation era. It was a literary response to this notion of blaxploitation movies. It was the first time in American culture that Hollywood was embracing black movies.

How can I impress strangers with the gem-like flame of my literary passion if it’s a digital slate I’m carrying around, trying not to get it all thumbprinty?

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.

The idea of a pseudonym had been flitting around my brain for a long time, along with its cognate, disappearance. In the 1980s, I published some poems under a pen name in a literary magazine to see what it would feel like. It was fun. It was even a little thrilling.

I don’t believe in pulling punches or being judicious, as the standard in literary criticism or academic musicology.

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.

The preoccupation of American historical and literary scholars with the New England Puritans must seem to outsiders like an obsession.

It’s a strange failure of the literary world that Updike never quite received his due. Despite winning two Pulitzers and two National Book Awards and countless other awards and honours, he was denied the Nobel.

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.

George V. Higgins’s ‘The Friends of Eddie Coyle’ (1970) added an extra literary layer to the con novel; James Crumley’s ‘The Last Good Kiss’ (1978) influenced countless writers and will be remembered forever for its opening line, quoted often in obituaries of the author.

It’s never really easy to be successful as a writer when you’re trying to write literary fiction. You’ve already limited your readership limited by that choice.

I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.

National independence, and the preceding political struggles, helped create the space for literary creation in many post-colonial countries. Much of modern Indian or Chinese literature is inconceivable without the political movement for freedom from foreign rule.

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

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It’s as difficult to write a crime or a children’s novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

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.

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

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.

Science fiction writers have usually been very poor prognosticators of the future, either in literary or technological terms, and that’s because we’re all too human and, I think, have the tendency to see what we want to or, in the case of those more paranoid, what we fear.

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.

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

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.

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.

Certainly there is abundant evidence of the early transmission by literary means of a considerable number of drolls and folk-tales from India about the time of the Crusaders.

No highbrow literary type would ever say ‘Moby Dick’ is good but it’s just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn’t just writing about romantic relationships.

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

I always say, and I mean it, that the great break of my literary career was when I went to law school.

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

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

I was born here and have been in love with the colloquial Telangana dialect ever since. I even wrote a play titled ‘Grahanam Pattina Ratri’ that was set in the heart of the region. It was well received across literary circles.

When I was a teenager, just about the only thing I could do right was play music. In my graduating class, I was certainly not voted ‘Most Literary Boy.’ I can assure you I was not voted ‘Mostly Likely to Succeed.’ I was voted ‘Most Musical Boy.’ And the music led to the poetry.

Literary novelists who have a strong handle on plot are often characterized as good vacation reads because they manage to transport you elsewhere, away from the petty facts of ordinary life.

On the subject of literary genres, I’ve always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I’d love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.

I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.

The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.

Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.