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.
You’re more likely to finish a book you enjoy, than one that feels like literary drudgery.
The more you put out there, the more you have to resolve. ‘Air’ is the most literary comic I’ve written so far, and that poses problems.
I love bingeing. ‘The Wire’ was my first binge, and the thing about bingeing is, when you are doing four or five hours a day for a number of days, it becomes a literary experience, closer to reading.
I want to leave behind a literary legacy.
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.
Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can’t tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.
You can write a great book and be ignored. Literary history is full of classics that were under-appreciated in their own time.
I like to think I’ve grown as a writer and taken some risks, but I still consider myself to be a literary writer.
I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously.
George Orwell is a pinnacle writer, for his combination of moral insight and literary writing.
My literary success meant nothing to me.
Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.
My father was an engineer – he wasn’t literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world’s great readers.
I read a lot of sci-fi when I was younger. Loved it from the literary point of view.
I am not a pure fiction writer, nor am I an academic writer. Somehow I ended up in this blended area of literary journalism.
Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.
Many of the characters who appear in the pages of the Fourth Gospel are literary creations of its author and were never intended to be understood as real people, who actually lived in history.
But it’s not just a game of finding literary references.
Many of Judy Blume’s books – which I devoured when I was growing up and where I found characters that were believable because they were a lot like me – caused considerable consternation when they were first published, but now they’re widely accepted as an essential part of the children’s literary canon.
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.
I met an internationally esteemed writer at a literary party being given in her honor. She was wearing a beautiful pink, flouncy, frilly dress. I complimented her on it. She said, ‘Ach, it’s my nightgown. I couldn’t decide what else to wear.’
I have no literary fears.
Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Bridget Jones is part of literary lore now and actually to be a part of it is enormously flattering.
I’m not sure that the culture of literary prizes is always a good thing, but while there are literary prizes, it’s nice to be nominated.
In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality.
To discuss a Martin Amis book, you must first discuss the orchestrated release of a Martin Amis book. In London, which rightly prides itself on the vibrancy of its literary cottage industry, Amis is the Steve Jobs of book promoters, and his product rollouts are as carefully managed as anything Apple dreams up.
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.
I don’t divide my reading into demographic categories, any more than I’d divide my friends into groups along ethnic or sexual lines. The thing I look for most is a sense of literary rawness – bareback fiction, if you will.
There are three things I look for in a story – it has to be a thriller; I cannot see myself writing literary fiction or a saga! There has to be a historical connection; otherwise, the adrenalin will not flow. And I will try to bridge the gap between ‘Rozabal’ and ‘Chanakya’.
There are so many new young poets, novelists, and playwrights who are much less politically committed than the former generations. The trend is to be totally concentrated on the literary aesthetic and to consider politics to be something dirty that shouldn’t be mixed with an artistic or a literary vocation.
As I said earlier, there are no writers who could create a literary vision of the new reality.
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.
My advice for finding a literary agent would be first, put your work out there as much as possible and hopefully someone will find you, because I still have literary agents writing to me after they find my site. You want someone who understands your work and is going to be your cheerleader from day one.
I think I became less literary after I sold more!
If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.
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.
On the whole, I rather disapprove of cookbooks, except for the literary ones, like Elizabeth David’s.
Nathaniel Philbrick’s ‘In the Heart of the Sea’ has rightfully taken its place as a classic for its literary merits. It has a special place in the cannibalism canon as well.
All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.
To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.
I loved literary science fiction. In fact, as a kid, when I was reading science fiction, I thought ‘I can’t wait for the future when the special effects are good’ to represent what was in these books by Arthur C. Clarke, Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Jack Vance.
Notoriety and public confession in the literary form is a frazzler of the heart you were born with, believe me.
I once set myself a deadline: half a chapter a week, 20 minutes a day. The thought froze me instantly, like literary Botox. I returned to my non-schedule: sleeping, writing 20 minutes, and then back to sleep. Breakfast in bed, with juice congealing on the sill: pages and pages began to pour out again.
I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.
I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
I just want people to get lost in the story and at the end kind of sag and say, ‘That was fun.’ It’s hardly my desire for them to sit and think, ‘What a great literary image.’
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.
Some people, especially literary people, they think, ‘I’ll write this original script, and it will be full of ideas. I’ll submit it, and they’ll hire me for television.’ That’s not the case.
One of the most widely read novels by a black American is Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man.’ It is his masterwork – it won the National Book Award in 1953 and catapulted my man to the highest levels of literary esteem.
I was the only child, and I know my father had certain thoughts about me. He was a lawyer and extremely literary, but he would have been much happier if I had wanted to be a lawyer, a scientist, an engineer. But what I wanted to do was read.
Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.
The hoary joke in the literary world, based on ‘Dreams From My Father,’ was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer.
I don’t know that I’ve gotten much feedback directly from the literary world; sometimes I doubt even the notion that there is a literary world, though I guess there is or was.
I am not a contest-enterer by nature. But contests – and their entry fees – are often the main way literary journals raise money to, you know, publish their issues. So entering contests helps support the journal, which also helps support the writers they publish.
