My favorite book is anything by Kurt Vonnegut – he’s my literary hero. I got to meet him several times, which was a great thrill for me. I don’t really remember what we talked about.
Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.
Reading ‘Moby-Dick’ was really a sort of transformative literary experience for me.
I went to graduate school with zero expectation. I kind of backed into it. I wanted to go back to school because I felt gaps in my literary background. I studied mostly twentieth-century English literature in college, so I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll go back for my writing.’
In Bangkok’s budding literary scene, Prabda Yoon sits at the centre.
It’s not unfair, I think, to describe boxers as a demographic little given to literary entanglement. In general, with exceptions, they prefer movies.
A script is a unique literary form, because it’s not the end product; it’s a blueprint. If you’re not thinking of that end product, there’s going to be a disconnect.
I wasn’t the classic comedy type; I wasn’t bullied or extrovert. I was more the ambitious literary one who wanted to write clever little plays.
Authors don’t tend to stay with the same agents and editors over their entire lifetimes, but Grafton worked with Marian Wood, her editor at Putnam, from Kinsey’s first outing, and signed with Molly Friedrich, still her literary agent, with the publication of ‘B Is for Burglar.’
I’m a huge fan of the book and Stephen King is one of my big heroes, literary heroes, and I am a fan, and I want to see a movie of ‘It.’
The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it’s sent out towards some future reader, and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text.
Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.
I think there are readers out there and I don’t think the book is dead. And more importantly I don’t think readers have to choose between literary and commercial fiction.
I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought.
I’d been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn’t like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to ‘The Paris Review’ – the highest publication I could think of – and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.
You don’t have to be dead to write a classic, and you don’t have to be literary to be smart.
I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.
I don’t care about being a literary personality – that doesn’t appeal to me, especially because the literary world doesn’t appeal to me. I actually don’t feel like I even belong in it. If this was high school, I would be sitting with the Goths, looking at everyone, being like, ‘Whatever.’
Over the years, I had something in principle against autobiographical writing altogether because memory plays tricks on us, and we also tend to reinvent ourselves. But there comes an age when one begins to observe life, and there are things that need time to mature, also in terms of literary form.
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. Every two weeks, he’d take me to our local branch library and pull books off the shelf for me, stacking them up in my arms – ‘Have you read this? And this? And this?’
Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.
Don’t get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It’s faux literary fiction I can’t stand.
Literary fiction – if we must use the term – is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.
For the last half of my life I have had the doubtful benefit of a brother whose literary reputation is much greater than my own.
In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven’t seen before.
I had a little portable typewriter. I call it my Harlem Literary Fellowship.
The word ‘western’ usually refers to movies, of course, but there is a literary tradition of the same name that pre-dates the moving picture and retains its vitality yet.
I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet’s life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.
Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.
All of our lives are enriched by our culture, from blockbuster films, best-selling video games, independent music, and internationally-renowned museums and art collections, to theatre, opera, ballet, literary festivals and performance poetry.
I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.
A book doesn’t have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever.
Leftism has influenced the literary, academic, media, and, therefore, the political elite far more than any other religion. It has taken over Western schools from elementary through graduate.
Literary dementia seems dated now, but there was a time when a month in the funny farm was as de rigueur for budding writers as an M.F.A. is now. To be sent away was a badge of honor; to undergo electroshock, a glorious martyrdom.
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.
Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.
I’m not literary, and I’m not academic, and I don’t think like a poet, so my stuff will never be like that.
I enjoyed reading and learning at school, and at university I enjoyed extending my reading and learning. Once I left Cambridge, I went to Yale as a fellow. I spent two years there. After that, George Gale made me literary editor of ‘The Spectator.’
Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least.
Pu La was like a father figure to people of my generation. I thank him for the characters his literary works offered us. They personify full-fledged human beings and have always given me company.
Bent Literary Agency had a Q&A on Twitter, and I took a chance and asked if the Black Lives Matter movement was an appropriate topic for a YA novel. Brooks Sherman, who is now my agent, responded that he didn’t think any topics were inappropriate for YA. I remember being so terrified even just sending the tweet.
I suspect that most playgoers don’t understand how inexact a science literary translation is. Even the simplest of lines may lend itself to multiple renderings.
All attempts at gaining literary polish must begin with judicious reading, and the learner must never cease to hold this phase uppermost. In many cases, the usage of good authors will be found a more effective guide than any amount of precept.
A fierce literary woman with a penchant for married men, Margaret Fuller was ultimately torn between motherhood and her final career as a political reporter.
I have a really good idea for a novel and would like to just kind of try my hand at fiction. I’m starting to kind of get a really good body of work going from a literary standpoint. As long as the audience is there, man, I’ll keep cranking them out.
I adore Kate Atkinson, her literary as well as her crime output.
I feel that there’s a lot of would-be guardians of the culture who think that high-minded literary purpose and the life that gets chronicled in the gossip columns, that these two things are incompatible.
When my novels are packaged as exclusively for women, I’m not only cut off from a vital portion of my audience but clearly labelled as an author the literary establishment is free to dismiss.
Since it is impossible to know what’s really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.
When you’re a mass-market writer, people think that you can just decide ‘this happens, this happens, this happens’, whereas with literary writers it’s coming from their soul and their core. But with me it does come from my soul and my core, and my soul and my core often go AWOL, and then I’ve nothing to write.
A public role endures for the literary high-command, as sages and seers, speaking out on social and political issues.
What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation, and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy!
