Quotes About Literary

My father was among the first of his generation to look into writers who've become part of the American lit. canon. When he wrote his master's thesis on William Faulkner in the Forties, he couldn't find anybody on the faculty at Columbia University to oversee it because they didn't read Faulkner.

One of the best and most challenging books about Orwell is by the socialist literary critic Raymond Williams. As a critic - and, in some ways, as a figure, at least within the academy - Williams was what England had in the generation after Orwell, and toward the end of his life, he became more critical of his predecessor.

Following graduation from Amherst, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship enabled me to test the depth of my interest in literary scholarship by beginning graduate studies at Harvard University.

I like people like Andre Malraux, Edmund Wilson, Willa Cather, Robert Graves, Erik Erikson, and Francis Steegmuller.

I never actually sought out an agent or a publishing house. A friend of mine named David Simmer got wind of what I was doing, and he sent one of my books to a literary lawyer in Los Angeles. He loved it, and he sent it to other people, including an agent, and he picked me up, and that's how 'Bird Box' got to where it is now.

Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.

People aren't used to thinking of cultural forms spreading out across the full range of formal interactions - or what is called the 'text' in literary terms.

For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.

My claim is simply that the literary approach is one necessary way to read and interpret the Bible, an approach that has been unjustifiably neglected. Despite that neglect, the literary approach builds at every turn on what biblical scholars have done to recover the original, intended meaning of the biblical text.

The period that I could consider the most important in my literary work came about beginning with the Revolution, and in a certain way, developed as a consequence of the Revolution. But it was also a result of the counterrevolutionary coup of November 1975.

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.'

The one thing I would like more credit for is being part of a movement which involves recognising the importance of plot and asserting that books of literary worth could be written that had plots.

The problem with the literary hothouse of New York City is that people spend so much time looking in the mirror. They go to parties with people who are just like them, and they write novels about people who are just like them. It's limiting.

English dialogues are always just what you need and nothing more - like something out of Hemingway. In Italian and in French, dialogues are always theatrical, literary. You can do more with it.

Jis vert? mane skaityti Prust?, Tostoj?, ir Dostojevsk?,- pareišk? vargšel?, nužvelgusi mus šird? verian?iu žvilgsniu. - Kas gi su manim dabar bus?

Who's to say what a 'literary life' is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don't need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!

Here was a demonstration of what Howells maintained—at just about this time—was his most liberating literary strength, his "single-minded use of words, which he employs as Grant did to express the plain, straight meaning their common acceptance has given them . . . He writes English as if it were a primitive and not a derivative language, without Gothic or Latin or Greek behind it."13

In matters of literary and historical appraisement, one cannot operate with the methods of a laboratory or furnish the proof to be demanded in a court of law. The best is only the probable. Any who raise complaint have an easy remedy: to offer something better, something coherent and constructive.

There was hardly an eminent writer in Paris who was unacquainted with the inside of the Conciergerie or the Bastille.

Literary friendship is a sympathy not of manners, but of feelings.

He thinks about his teacher in his literary class, he's staring at her legs.

Reviewers, critics, guest editors... Such people may have an eye for literary conventions and contrivances, allusions and innovations on the art. But what are their tastes based on? Do they tend to choose work that most resembles theirs?

I realized that for me it is only and always the "literary" appeal that people and places make. The reality is void of interest. Flat.

For some foolish reason, that desperateness seems to act on him better than your literary needs (of communication etc.). It is the more obvious need, and other writers put that forward.