It may be time for serious literary novelists to take back some of the subject matter we abandoned to hack novelists and the movies.
When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.
I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.
Drama school introduced me to a world I had no idea about. I wasn’t brought up in a literary household at all.
Now that I think about it, maybe my own literary exploration of the dark secrets held by families could be traced back to V.C. Andrews.
I have no idea how people think of literary agents. Truthfully, I don’t think they think of them very often.
As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.
There might be a different model for a literary community that’s quicker, more real-time, and involves more spontaneity.
Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It’s literary suicide.
Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character – even its films, it’s argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.
Lyrical poetry is not a big part of most people’s lives. Twitter now becomes an interesting way of getting cared for language into people’s space. Because there is something deep inside of us that responds to cared for language, whether it’s literary, poetry, or really good lyrics in a song.
White writers in many cases choose not to populate their fiction with people of color. A lot of what I’m doing is trying to write against that, not about race but against the avoidance of race that’s such a dominant model in white literary discourse.
Local markets for literary fiction remain underdeveloped; the metropolis often holds out the only real possibility of a professional writing career.
‘Parable of the Sower’ is capital-I Important. Put it on the literary fiction shelf. Put it on the Holy Crap fiction shelf. Put it on every shelf. This is one of the all-time great American novels.
I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.
Audience participation can often inject a dose of adrenalin into your average dial-tone literary reading, especially if a handful of audience-members are mentally unhinged, and let’s face it – you can always depend on at least one crackpot at these things.
To my ear, the term ‘comic novelist’ is as redundant and off-putting as the term ‘literary novelist’.
The great break of my literary career was going to law school.
Creatively, most of my influences come from the literary world: Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara. Writers are my heroes.
If a nation allows its literary culture to die, it’s a sign that it doesn’t fundamentally care.
The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all ‘bottom line’ editors; everything depends on the money.
If Art relates itself to an Object, it becomes descriptive, divisionist, literary.
That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.
Certainly the highest posthumous praise that can be conferred upon any writer is the assertion that his or her writing permanently altered the literary landscape for the better, opening new textual doors and engaging new readers. That the author’s oeuvre was essential and irreplaceable and transformative.
German writers in the late 18th century were the first to uphold a prickly, literary nationalism, in reaction to the then dominance and prestige of French literature.
When I put together a graphic novel, I don’t think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.
Literature has been a treacherous site for black Americans because literary production has been so tied with the project of proving our humanity through the act of writing.
I try not to think about writers who came before me when I’m writing myself. If I did, given the abundance of literary talent Scotland – and Edinburgh in particular – has bestowed upon the world, I wouldn’t be able to get as much as a sentence written.
I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there.
I’ve got more in common with a three-toed sloth than I have with Winston Churchill. There is no easy comparison with any modern politician. The more you read about him, the more completely amazed you are about what he did – his energy, his literary fecundity, his ability to work – just unbelievable energy.
I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.
I felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there.
I had definitely missed the literary development game with Paper Lantern Lit, and writing exclusively wasn’t giving me complete fulfillment.
I will not allow people to impose rules on me that don’t make sense to me. And I live and work very much outside the literary world and the literary system. What they think and what they believe and what their rules are mean nothing to me.
Like most genres of literary expression, science fiction in China was subject to instrumentalist impulses and had to serve practical goals.
Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they’re whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they’ve got. I can’t possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.
There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.
I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form.
I was interned in Auschwitz for one year. I didn’t bring back anything, except for a few jokes, and that filled me with shame. Then again, I didn’t know what to do with this fresh experience. For this experience was no literary awakening, no occasion for professional or artistic introspection.
If I’d stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.
Some Critics on the Hearth are not only good-natured, but have rather too high, or, if that is impossible, let us say too pronounced, an opinion of the abilities of their literary friends.
Something is missing in our culture. We can’t quite celebrate the scientific literary tradition.
