All literary men are Red Sox fans – to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.
I wanted to be a literary writer, so I wrote story after story and sent them to ‘The New Yorker.’
I have said it somewhere – our literary lived lives are as important as our literally lived lives.
All my big heroes are literary, writers.
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.
Tragedy is a literary concept.
When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it’s not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.
You have to remember that in addition to running a literary agency, I am also an ebook publisher.
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.
People have been predicting the death of philosophy since the 17th century. When I was a student, people were saying, ‘We’re in the last days of philosophy.’ Then we were told in the ’60s it would be replaced by sociology, then by literary criticism.
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.
I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. It was making me angry.
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.
For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.
I had always been literary, in the sense of loving poetry and discovering novels, but I found my voice, as they say, in an office full of elderly people who looked after blind ex-servicemen.
There is a disconnect between the film Bond and the literary Bond which is their contemporaneity. I don’t suffer from that.
The poem is the literary form of the 21st century. It’s able to connect young people in a deep way to language… it’s language as play.
My liking for Scandinavian crime fiction led me into exploring literary writers from the same countries.
I don’t have a whole bunch of literary connections. I don’t write reviews or attend writer’s conferences. I’m kind of shy and don’t want to go to a party. I just want to stay home and read my murder mysteries and try to write and cook dinner.
I love poetry; it’s my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems – close reading – can carry over into how you read other things.
The literary world is filled with good and generous people. But then that’s what writing is all about – empathy.
Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.
I always loved to read, and I wanted to be part of the project of literature. My physical longevity is due to luck, and my literary longevity is due to my physical longevity.
I see myself as the literary equivalent of a skilled lathe-operator, or a basket-weaver; a potter, maybe: I make mildly diverting objects that people want to buy.
Since I make my living as a literary journalist, not a book scout, I spend inordinate amounts of time either reading or writing.
Any biographer must of necessity become a pilgrim a peripatetic, obsessed literary pilgrim, a traveler with four eyes.
I’ve always read broadly: literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, chick lit, historical, dystopian, nonfiction, memoir. I’ve even read Westerns. I prefer female protagonists.
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.
In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned – or the very brilliant – dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person’s work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of satire and ridicule.
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.
Authenticity does matter, but only as it serves the novel’s more traditional literary demands: that the fault lines be drawn where the internal life and the larger world meet.
When it comes to music, movies, literature, paintings, and even Bikram yoga, it’s pretty easy to have an opinion about whether something has been copied. Software, on the other hand, was an awkward late addition to the original Copyright Act of 1976, shoehorned into section 102(a) as a ‘literary work.’
What is a literary festival? Imagine a sort of cross between school and church. There are no actual festivities; what there are is a lot of public readings.
A good part of ‘The Information’ is about the transition from an oral to a literary culture. Books effected such a great transformation in the way we think about the world, our history, our logic, mathematics, you name it. I think we would be greatly diminished as a people and as a culture if the book became obsolete.
With the Red Sox, you have more of a literary interest in it. You know they’re going to lose; you’re just interested in how the plot is going to unfold.
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.
Japan, Germany, and India seem to me to have serious writers, readers, and book buyers, but the Netherlands has struck me as the most robust literary culture in the world.
It’s hard to judge literary merit.
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.
We don’t genuinely need more literary geniuses. One can only read so many books in a lifetime.
The problem with the literary hothouse of New York City is that people spend so much time looking in the mirror. They go to parties with people who are just like them, and they write novels about people who are just like them. It’s limiting.
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.
I get invited to many more literary festivals than I used to because I’m associated with ‘Slumdog Millionaire,’ the brand. Many more doors have opened up for me as a result of the global success of the film, although I believe that I’m the same person that existed before it.
I don’t think I found my voice until I reached New York. I suppose it’s possible I would have had some kind of different literary career if I had not discovered New York.
A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate.
The book I’m working on next, which will be my fifth, returns to literary history. I really do love literary history, and I have plenty more ideas on it.
I think poems belong as much in the news pages as the literary pages. A lot of people throw aside the literary pages! Whereas everybody looks at the news section.
Let’s get right to it: On page 5 of Paul Murray’s dazzling new novel, ‘Skippy Dies,’… Skippy dies. If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go sounds audacious, it’s nothing compared with the literary feats Murray pulls off in this hilarious, moving and wise book.
It seems that every generation needs its public, tweedy, literary personality to sell its consumer electronics. To whatever degree I can live up to the Plimptonian legacy, I am humble and proud.
The thriller is the most popular literary genre of the 20th century.
Ezekiel Boone’s books, starting with ‘The Hatching’ series, are meant to be big, sprawling, smart, entertaining books that are fun above all else; the literary novels written under my real name, Alexi Zentner, are certainly a little more quiet.
There’s that unwritten schism that literary writers get all the awards and commericals writers get all the success.
I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can’t do anything anyway.
I write literary, not commercial, fiction – or so I’ve been told by my publishers who are proud I write literary fiction but secretly wish I wrote commercial.
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.
My belief is that nothing that can be expressed by mathematics cannot be expressed by careful use of literary words.
If you’ve been around as long as I have, watching the literary scene, then you know that who’s in and who’s out changes by the year. It’s really a very fluid situation that requires that the person who is having the good luck now isn’t having it a year or two from now.
