Quotes About Literary

I changed my writing style deliberately. My first two novels were written in a very self-consciously literary way. After I embraced gay subject matter, which was then new, I didn't want to stand in its way. I wanted to make the style as transparent as possible so I could get on with it and tell the story, which was inherently interesting.

I can't complain that I've had a public all through my writing life, but people don't quite know what I've written. People don't read you too closely. Perhaps, after I've died, they'll look at my stuff, and read it through, and find there's more in it. That may be wrong, but that's what I comfort myself with.

I read all of the nonfiction that I could find on Chechnya, and all the while, I was searching for a novel that was set there. I couldn't find a single novel written in English that was set in the period of the two most recent Chechen wars.

The way 'The Icarus Girl' came about was by me just basically bragging it with a literary agent and telling him I'd written 150 pages when I'd only written 20. And I think it was when the agent e-mailed me back right the very next day after sending him the 20 pages and asking to see the other 130.

Many Scandinavian writers who had made their name in literary fiction felt they wanted to have a go at the crime novel to show they could compete with the best. If Salman Rushdie had been Norwegian, he would definitely have written at least one thriller.

I have written a lot about the fine arts, but I'd never written about the literary arts, and so on some level Dante really, you know, spoke to me, as new ground but also familiar ground.

Complex astronomical instruments like the Antikythera Mechanism and the Nebra Sky Disk were made by Pagans. Our Pagan intellectual heritage includes poets and scientists and literary intellectuals of every kind, especially including those who wrote some of the most important and influential books in all of Western history.

I have been called 'The American De Maupassant.' Well, I never wrote a filthy word in my life, and I don't like to be compared to a filthy writer.

I must be honest here; I don't think there's such a thing as 'unconventional' when it comes to YA. YA readers are the most open-minded in the literary world. They'll read anything.

When I was a kid, we had this great advantage of there being no YA books. You read kid books and then went on to adult books. When I was 12 or 13, I read all of Steinbeck and Hemingway. I thought I should read everything a writer writes.

Yeah, I loved Ray Bradbury.

Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works.

My education, according to the tradition of the Jesuit school which I attended, had been centered on the 'ancient humanities', and I was strongly attracted to the more literary branches.

As an American writer, the literary tradition that I draw on the most is the Anglo-American one, and when you are writing in this tradition, the Orientalizing Western gaze is something you have to constantly push against as well as compromise with.

Traditional autobiography has generally had a poor press. The novelist Daphne du Maurier condemned all examples of this literary form as self-indulgent. Others have quipped that autobiography reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.

Certainly there is abundant evidence of the early transmission by literary means of a considerable number of drolls and folk-tales from India about the time of the Crusaders.

We have found literary references in records from the last two centuries which seem to substantiate the idea of a Cailleach priestess cult of wise women. However, as is often the case these hints ask more questions than they answer, leaving the reader to make up their own mind.

I regarded it more as an honor than a disgrace to be permitted to share this fate of the complete destruction of literary existence in Germany with such eminent contemporaries as Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Werfel, Freud, Einstein, and many others whose work I consider incomparably more important than my own

This means the literary effect is not the main concern here; the author is more concerned with plot. And that plot must be relatively straightforward, must involve, if at all possible, a twist or two, and must bring resolution.

I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.

If what you write is true, it will not be so because of what you are as a writer but because of what you are as a being. There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

and yet the original Writers at Work volumes, especially the first three, possessed a magic all their own. As a teenager, I virtually memorized my paperback editions, greedy for insider tips about the literary life. Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Colette, Waugh—they were all there. What has stuck with me the most over the years is their almost universal insistence on the importance of revision, of revising and revising again.

It remains a mystery to me why some of that [pulp] fiction should be judged inferior to the rafts and rafts of bad social [literary] fiction which continues to be treated by literary editors as if it were somehow superior, or at least worthier of our attention. The careerist literary imperialism of the Bloomsbury years did a lot to produce fiction's present unseemly polarities.

I must confess I love female writers: Jane Austen, Isak Dinesen, Colette, Willa Cather, Dawn Powell, Joan Didion. I grew up on the Bronte sisters, and Daphne du Maurier.