When you read the Koran, you give up. At least the Bible is very beautiful because Jews have an extraordinary literary talent.
Anytime an African-American writes an unconventional novel, the writer gets compared to Ellison. But that’s O.K. I am working in the African-American literary tradition. That’s my aim and what I see as my mission.
I guess I’m drawn to artists and literary people and want to learn about them.
The running joke about the Premio Cervantes, the most coveted literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, which was established by Spain’s Ministry of Culture in 1976, is that Cervantes himself wouldn’t have received it. This is because he was, in his heart, the most anti-Spanish of Spanish writers.
I became aesthetically obsessed with language. And ‘literary artist’ – poet and novelist – is a calling. You are called to it the way preachers are called to preaching the gospel.
Any one who chooses will set up for a literary critic, though he cannot tell us where he went to school, or how much time was spent in his education, and knows nothing about letters at all.
I’m like a unicorn; I’m a midlist writer who hasn’t done anything else but write. But because I wasn’t amazingly famous, I didn’t become Stephanie Meyer, or even a huge literary name like a Jonathan Franzen or a Joshua Ferris.
It’s perceived as an accolade to be published as a ‘literary’ writer, but, actually, it’s pompous and it’s fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself.
There can be no literary equivalent to truth.
Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.
I don’t believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.
There’s such a wealth of literature from the 18th century and 19th century, George Eliot… Jane Austen… that’s all about a genteel high society, relationships, all of that stuff. There wasn’t ever really, apart from Dickens, a literary evocation of working class life.
If fantasy is done well, it has both serious content in a literary fashion and is a really good read as well – and children and young adults won’t suffer anything else.
I have always loved really dense, complicated stories with lots of layers, tons of obscure literary references, and a plethora of inside jokes.
I don’t think in terms of that bizarre tautology ‘value for money’ in my literary and journalistic work – and nor will I in my academic role. However, if I don’t believe I’m helping my students towards a fuller and more empowering relationship with the world, then I’ll resign.
There’s this long history of colonialism and the colonial gaze when applied to matters related to China. So a lot of conceptions about China in literary representations in the West are things you can’t even fight against because they’ve been there so long that they’ve become part of the Western imagination of China.
I can’t name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I’m told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don’t print them in ‘The New York Times.’
‘Freeing’ a literary work into the public domain is less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth from the families of American writers to the executives and stockholders of various businesses who will continue to profit from, for example, ‘The Garden Party,’ while the descendants of Katherine Mansfield will not.
Probably because I really love this bookmaking and storytelling world, I’d been thinking for years about the possibility of becoming a literary agent.
At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language.
If you want to be traditionally published, then you most likely want to get a literary agent. To sign with an agent, you need to send them a query letter, but agents can get up to 20,000 query letters a year. With numbers like that, it helps to get in front of agents with every opportunity you have.
A contemporary artist can use the findings of all epochs and all styles, from the most primitive literary expressions up to the most refined products of the baroque.
I was a bit of a delinquent growing up, a very poor student – I nearly failed several grades before dropping out of high school and getting a G.E.D. But I still read a lot. Thrillers and war novels, mostly, along with the occasional literary novel from my parents’ bookshelf.
I do have the sense that, although there may be no one way to write a novel, there are many novelists who are in fact part of some sort of larger literary community, whether in the form of a writing group or an MFA program, to name two of the more common forms.
Historians are the consummate hairdressers of the literary world: cooing in public, catty in private.
‘War and Peace’ holds a strange place in literary history, participating in the crowning of realism as a substantial and serious literary mode in America, even as the novel also contributed to the argument that historical fiction could be by nature dangerous, illegitimate, and inaccurate.
My mom and dad were actors when they were younger and had a horrible experience of it. My dad became a literary agent and my mom a casting director.
I don’t know what to say about literary critics. I think it’s probably best to say nothing.
The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear – and even, in certain respects, would be – the most modern of critical movements.
‘Doctor Who’ is not as literary as ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Hobbit’ is – books have come out, but they are from the television episodes. So there is that difference… it’s more scholastic.
For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one’s literary education very incomplete.
Young gentlemen with literary aspirations usually start a new university magazine, which for wit and pungency is designed to eclipse all such previous efforts, and I was no exception in the matter of this popular gambit.
I wasn’t very academically inclined, growing up as a child, and the only subject I was good at was English. I had a flair for it, since I came from a literary background.
It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation… discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.
In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.
The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer ‘How should novels be?’ but ‘Why write novels at all?’
A writer must face up to the test of reality, including political reality, and that can’t be done if he keeps his distance. A literary style cultivated like a hothouse plant may show a certain artificial purity, but it won’t really be pure.
I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks’ ‘Reading for the Plot. ‘
For me it’s a remarkable thing that there is a prize celebrating and honouring and making for a brief moment short fiction the centre of the literary universe.
I think it’s always a challenge to adapt a beautiful literary work into a fresh and alive film.
There are all kinds of under-represented groups in the literary establishment.
If you do approach a comics publisher, make sure it’s one that publishes the kind of book you want to make. Don’t take your literary fiction to Marvel or DC; don’t pitch your Spider-Man epic to Image.
I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.
First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.
If you call it a romance, it will never be reviewed by the ‘New York Times’ or any other respectable literary venue. And that’s okay. I can live with that.
I don’t think of literary novels as self-help documents, although literature undoubtedly saved my life when I was young, enabling me to disappear into all manner of stories, to recognise feelings that I felt alone in.
I didn’t know children were expected to have literary heroes, but I certainly had one, and I even identified with him at one time: Doctor Dolittle, whom I now half identify with the Charles Darwin of Beagle days.
In ‘Open City,’ there is a passage that any reader of Joyce will immediately recognise as a very close, formal analogue of one the stories in ‘Dubliners.’ That is because a novel is also a literary conversation.
I’m beyond thrilled to be working with Faber, whose literary history is second to none. And I’m even more excited to bring my books to a wider audience in the U.K.
I realise that a novel and a film are different mediums. As artistes, we need to respect other artistes. It also needs a lot of courage to take risks to experiment and interpret known literary works.
God bless my father, but he always spoke in this continental, literary accent, probably because he was a professor of comparative literature and he made the decision to speak with distinction.
