I think literary theory has not been terribly good for English studies in a while. It’s not that theory isn’t interesting, but it isn’t about books, or the idiosyncrasies and complexities of putting language together.
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.
I sat with myself one day and asked, ‘Who is in those prestigious literary circles? Do they represent me? Do they appreciate the topics I write about and the style in which I write? Do those gatekeepers let a demographic like mine through the door?’ And the answer was no.
Many Scandinavian writers who had made their name in literary fiction felt they wanted to have a go at the crime novel to show they could compete with the best. If Salman Rushdie had been Norwegian, he would definitely have written at least one thriller.
Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition. I’m not entirely at ease with that self-description.
Indeed, ‘The Second Plane’ is such a weak, risible, and often objectionable volume that the reader finishes it convinced that Mr. Amis should stick to writing fiction and literary criticism, as he’s thoroughly discredited himself with these essays as any sort of political or social commentator.
One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality.
I found literary idols in Adrienne Kennedy, Nella Larsen, and Ntozake Shange, writers who’d dared to locate a sanctioned, forbidden space between white vulnerability and black invincibility.
First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.
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.
Fiction is lies; we’re writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.
There is a quiet revolution going on in the study of the Bible. At its center is a growing awareness that the Bible is a work of literature and that the methods of literary scholarship are a necessary part of any complete study of the Bible.
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.
One’s politics are part of one even when one is writing. But if I want to say anything about the state of civil society, I will write an essay. The responsibilities you feel as a novelist are literary ones, I think, not civic ones. And I think politicians are interesting to write about.
It is from him, from Beolco Ruzzante, that I’ve learned to free myself from conventional literary writing and to express myself with words that you can chew, with unusual sounds, with various techniques of rhythm and breathing, even with the rambling nonsense-speech of the ‘grammelot.’
I don’t know if nature is a direct literary influence on my writing, but it is certainly important to me. I take great joy in writing about it. It is something I have taken with me from my childhood; the body exposed to the threat of the physical world and at the same time being at home in it.
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.
Ever since ‘Single White Female,’ the 1990 novel which was turned into a supremely scary film, the idea of a seemingly normal woman who will stop at nothing to get what she wants has become an abiding literary trope.
I quickly realized I live the least interesting literary life imaginable. My parents are happily married. There haven’t been any major traumas. I’m not sure that the story of my life would be much fun to read.
The way ‘The Icarus Girl’ came about was by me just basically bragging it with a literary agent and telling him I’d written 150 pages when I’d only written 20. And I think it was when the agent e-mailed me back right the very next day after sending him the 20 pages and asking to see the other 130.
I like to tell students, ‘I didn’t burst on to the literary scene.’ I’m never good at things at the beginning. I was terrible at the start. I need to work and work.
Literary life used to be quite different in Britain in the years I lived there, from 1971 to 1989, because money was not a factor – no one made very much except from U.S. sales and the occasional windfall.
New York offers a bubble out of the literary life that is very useful. We have more time for the children, for the cooking.
I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it’s not simply telling a story.
Ideally, I’d love to write poems that intrigued humans across the board: literary folk and academics as well as… dog-walkers, doctors, plumbers, chefs, math professors, jugglers, etc.
Reading ‘Youth in Revolt’ might have ruined my career because suddenly I wanted to abandon all the emotional truth of something and just go out far on a literary limb with completely implausible things that relied completely on voice and humor. And what saved me is realizing that I couldn’t do that very well.
Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors’ houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that’s not the way the novelistic ecology works.
People should have literary and cultural taste and should not bomb hotels.
In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since.
Cruelty is not a literary value.
I was working at the ‘Evening Standard’ when I heard that there was a job going as deputy literary editor on the ‘New Statesman.’ I remember thinking, ‘That’s perfect.’ It was three days a week, and I had children, but I could make that work – so I applied for it and got it.
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.
I’ll bet you $10 right now that there are an awful lot of literary writers who started a long time ago and now they find themselves in this place where secretly they feel trapped. And you know what they really read for fun? They read crime fiction.
I read everything I could find in English – Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that’s how it got started. After that, graduate school didn’t seem very important.
Whenever I read a contemporary literary novel that describes the world we’re living in, I wait for the science fiction tools to come out. Because they have to – the material demands it.
My dad’s got a brilliant eye for scripts ‘cos he’s a literary agent. He and my agent read a load of scripts and filter them.
I hope Gunter Grass will continue helping the SPD in campaigns and that he will otherwise remain with us as a provocative literary figure, as well.
I think there are more good sportswriters doing more good sportswriting than ever before. But I also believe that the one thing that’s largely gone out is what made sport such fertile literary territory – the characters, the tales, the humor, the pain, what Hollywood calls ‘the arc.’
Emerson was such an important figure in our literary history, and in the moral and religious development of our people, that attention cannot be directed to him too often.
One of our fundamental human needs is finding our partner that we hope we will stay with for the rest of our lives. You often find the same search in other genres. The mystery novel has a romance subplot. Literary novels often focus on that relationship but do not often end well.
I wouldn’t call myself a ‘literary critic,’ just a book reviewer.
I am obsessed with story. I had a late awakening in life. In college was the first time that I understood what you could do with a story and what a good novel is – literary value and subtext and irony and everything.
When our systematic knowledge of human expressive behavior is more advanced, it will be possible to study the literary and historical documents of the past and to determine the expressed and implied views of personality that determined the behavior of our ancestors.
I can’t change overnight into a serious literary author. You can’t compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.
