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.
I think playing the glamour card is a disastrous error as a literary writer.
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.
I mean, I knew of Jane Austen’s work, and I guess I’m a fan at a distance insofar as from a literary point of view, it’s beautifully written.
I think my sensibility is very literary; all my books were built as books, and I wasn’t thinking about them being movies.
Don’t go around asking the question, ‘Is this character likeable?’ and expect that to be compatible with serious literary endeavours. That’s not what it’s about.
I research the role, and if it’s a literary character, I read the book, and if it’s an historical figure, I research documents and biographies. If it’s a fictional character, I work off the script.
I think British journalists do well in America because the newspaper culture there is so strong – telling stories and presenting them readably is in their DNA. British newspapers get a terrible rap, but they are brilliant in their presentation, most of them, so full of vitality and literary wit.
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.
It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.
Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent.
You cannot predict literary success; the only way you can possibly aim for it is to do your thing and do it well.
British people have a really sophisticated sense of humour, because we’re exposed to much more than Europeans and Americans, not least in our literary heritage.
‘The Dublin Magazine’ has been edited with good taste, and it is very agreeable reading, but to speak quite candidly, I do not believe in the future of any literary journal any more than I believe in the future of the Trinity.
Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.
I still think ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is the greatest literary achievement in my lifetime. Like so many other people, I couldn’t wait for the second and then the third book. Nothing like it had ever been written.
We should have scant notion of the gardens of these New England colonists in the seventeenth century were it not for a cheerful traveller named John Josselyn, a man of everyday tastes and much inquisitiveness, and the pleasing literary style which comes from directness, and an absence of self-consciousness.
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.
I’m very keenly aware that there aren’t very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.
As a writer, I’m not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.
I’m really not responsible for what mental operation people have when they’re reading my books other than the ones which are created by literary effects.
The shores of the Black Sea lend themselves to the literary genre that may be classified as ‘cultural pilgrimage,’ which is not just a higher form of travel writing but which has the further mission of reporting on present conditions and supplying neglected knowledge.
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.
As an American writer, the literary tradition that I draw on the most is the Anglo-American one, and when you are writing in this tradition, the Orientalizing Western gaze is something you have to constantly push against as well as compromise with.
Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?
Food is a great literary theme. Food in eternity, food and sex, food and lust. Food is a part of the whole of life. Food is not separate.
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.
Ego, id, and superego are terms familiar to all, but for many years, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory has thrived in English departments around the country as a tool for interpreting literary texts but has rarely, if ever, been discussed in science departments.
I want to reveal in a simple way the usual – and unusual – life of the city; the corporation workman, the busmen, policemen, the civil servants, the theatres, Moore Street and also, what occupies so large a place in Dublin’s life, the literary and artistic.
‘Cerebus’ is my attempt at a literary work.
It took me fifty years to deal with the Holocaust at all. And I did it in a literary way.
I am well aware that the writers of New York, London, and Toronto are more readily noticed, though the shadowy and potent Ozarks Literary Cabal does what it can for me, then nightly joins me for dinner and calls me ‘honey.’
I’ll be happy if I can gain even the smallest place inside the literary imagination of U.S. readers.
The film culture has no room for ideas. The literary culture has some room, but not less than they should, and the academic culture has a lot, but there’s no way to communicate it in a wide way.
I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction – they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.
In general, fiction is divided into ‘literary fiction’ and ‘commercial fiction.’ Nobody can definitively say what separates one from the other, but that doesn’t stop everybody (including me) from trying. Your book probably will be perceived as one or the other, and that will affect how it is read, packaged and marketed.
Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.
I have introduced my daughter to the literary classics and landmark Bengali films. I want her to be well-versed in English but not at the cost of Bengali.
There are people who say, ‘Oh this guy is quite thick.’ I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don’t mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, ‘No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.’
When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn’t know enough about things. They haven’t been around enough – novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things – books like ‘How To Run a Company’ – I stopped reading novels.
I’ve always viewed myself as a brand. When I started 10 years ago, that was very controversial. ‘Marketing’ and ‘PR’ were dirty words for the literary world, but that has changed. Once the book is finished, I want as many people as possible to read it.
A book makes claims of literary art.
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.
Doesn’t all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?
The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. But it’s beginning to happen.
I don’t think that my films are ‘literary’; they are based on the most ordinary things of life.
There are many Latino writers as talented as I am, but because we are published through small presses, our books don’t count. We are still the illegal aliens of the literary world.
It might be an idea for all literary critics to read the books they analyse aloud – it certainly helps to fix them in the mind, while providing a readymade seminar with your audience.
Living in New York City is one constant, ongoing literary pilgrimage. For 20 years, I lived among the ghosts of great writers and walked where they had walked.
The literary aspect of the film business excites me, but show business in general doesn’t take any mental giant.
Science fiction is a literary field crowded with strong opinions, and no SF novelist delivered himself more memorably of his views – on politics, sexuality, religion, and many other contentious topics – than Robert Heinlein.
I read a lot of science fiction, but I also mixed it up with a lot of other genres: crime, literary fiction, as well as nonfiction. Author-wise, I’m a fan of Stephen King, Lauren Beukes, Robert McCammon, Raymond Chandler, Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker and Gail Simone, among many others.
