Quotes About Literary

Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent.

I wrote a query letter to an editor - a friend of a friend. The editor called me an idiot, told me never to contact an editor directly, and then recommended three literary agents he had worked with before. Laurie Fox was one of them, and I've never looked back.

Dostoevsky was my literary idol for a long time.

I don't think you can ever assess your work. I don't think Turgenev could assess his any more than I can assess mine, and his didn't have a social impact as much as great literary impact.

I always thought that life is full of stories and characters that feel like literary stories and characters. So when I started making documentaries, they weren't humble empirical things, just following people around. I was always trying to impose a story.

I'm always really impressed when a movie can function like a novel does - that's so hard to do.

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.

The Festival of Books is indeed a well-oiled machine, one which leaves most of the other literary festivals in America, including vaunted Brooklyn's, in the dust.

Slang is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage carts on their way to the dumps.

Shakespeare, Dickens

I'm a girl, so I've experienced dismissal because I was a girl or because I write about girls: my book with a guy protagonist is treated as more literary and worthy than my other books with girl protagonists.

I don't have a favorite author; I have favorite books. 'Moby Dick' is a favorite book, but Melville was a drunk who beat his wife. 'Moveable Feast' by Hemingway, but I would not like him personally. He was a stupid macho person who believed in shooting animals for fun, but that book was incredible!

In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering.

If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.

You have to remember that I was a bright but simple fellow from Canada who seldom, if ever, met another writer, and then only a so-called literary type that occasionally sold a story and meanwhile worked in an office for a living.

Long before I was a writer, when I was just a haphazard reader and a dreamer of stories, I learnt about an influential book by Harold Bloom. 'The Anxiety of Influence', published in 1973 when I was five years old, is taken up with the terrifying influence of poets on each other.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

Jimmy Baldwin was not only a writer, an international literary figure: he was a man, spirit, voice - old and black and terrible as that first ancestor.

I think suspense should be like any other color on a writer's palette. I suppose I'm in the minority but I think it's crazy for 'literary fiction' to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto.

The laws of literary creation are unique; they don't change, and they are the same for everyone everywhere. I mean that you can tell a story that covers three hours of human life or three centuries - it comes to the same thing. Each writer who creates something authentic in a natural way instinctively also creates the technique that suits him.

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.

Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single.

When I got to Grinnell College, I was part of the black turtleneck sweater and Camel cigarette crowd of poets and writers.

There are many Latino writers as talented as I am, but because we are published through small presses, our books don't count. We are still the illegal aliens of the literary world.