Quotes About Literary

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 think British journalists do well in America because the newspaper culture there is so strong - telling stories and presenting them readably is in their DNA. British newspapers get a terrible rap, but they are brilliant in their presentation, most of them, so full of vitality and literary wit.

Extremists often derive their inspiration from literal interpretations of texts that should rightly be read not as Associated Press reports from the ancient world, but as theological and literary enterprises requiring independent intellectual assessment.

When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.

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. '

I had always been literary, in the sense of loving poetry and discovering novels, but I found my voice, as they say, in an office full of elderly people who looked after blind ex-servicemen.

Penelope Fitzgerald's nine novels are thin enough that if you were so inclined, you could take her entire literary output down from the shelf with a single stretched hand. You'd be holding an eclectic bunch.

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'

My parents were reasoned and deep thinkers. My dad is an intellectual and a literary man.

I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.

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.

Good writing is good writing. In many ways, it's the audience and their expectations that define a genre. A reader of literary fiction expects the writing to illuminate the human condition, some aspect of our world and our role in it. A reader of genre fiction likes that, too, as long as it doesn't get in the way of the story.

As George Russell defined a literary movement: "Five or six men who live in the same town and hate each other.

I began to think that my life, although profoundly boring on the surface, was quite interesting in literary terms.

From my point of view, a book is a literary prescription put up for the benefit of someone who needs it.

What was going on at the time? What were the circumstances that the author addressed? What did the author's words and allusions mean in their ancient historical and literary setting? Without context, one can imagine that a text means almost anything.

There's a certain kind of conversation you have from time to time at parties in New York about a new book. The word banal sometimes rears its by-now banal head; you say underedited, I say derivative. The conversation goes around and around various literary criticisms, and by the time it moves on one thing is clear: No one read the book; we just read the reviews.

Reading a favorite book to your child is one of the most pleasurable forms of rereading, provided the child's enthusiasm is equal to yours and thus gratifyingly validates your literary taste, your parental competence, and your own former self.

There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.

The persecution of Judaism by Epiphanes, the attack on Alexandrian Jewry by the mob, and the destruction of the temple by Titus were each caused by local factors and not by some deep-rooted "anti-Judaism." Nevertheless, the literary propaganda spawned by these conflicts helped shape the "anti-Semitic" image of the Jew of later generations.

yet, I have spent my literary career writing loving odes to my drunken and unreliable father. I have, in a spectacular show of hypocrisy, let my father off the hook for his lifetime of carelessness. That is completely unfair to my mother.

Psmith is the only thing in my literary career which was handed to me on a plate with watercress round it, thus enabling me to avoid the blood, sweat and tears inseparable from an author's life.

There's literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn't otherwise have.

You cannot live this life anymore without the ability to read.