Quotes About Literary

The Booker thing was a catalyst for me in a bizarre way. It's perceived as an accolade to be published as a 'literary' writer, but, actually, it's pompous and it's fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself. I'd always read omnivorously and often thought much literary fiction is read by young men and women in their 20s, as substitutes for experience.

They had the magic pill, the solution to the inertia and frustration that has plagued the great literary protagonists I'd related to all my life—be it Leopold Bloom, Alex Portnoy, or Piglet from Winnie the Pooh. As

I'm not against sentimentality. I think you need it. I mean, I don't think you get a true picture of people without it in writing... It's a kind of poetry, it's an emotional poetry, and, to bring it back to the literary scene, I don't think anything is true that doesn't have it, that doesn't have poetry in it.

Machiavelli was undoubtedly a man of great observation, acuteness, and industry; noting with appreciative eye whatever passed before him, and with his supreme literary gift turning it to account in his enforced retirement from affairs.

All the literary techniques of the humanist are brought to bear, but one of the chief casualties is intended to be humanism itself.

The conceit of literary intellectuals is to imagine that other people don't have ideas so that they can assume a superior status by having their own...

Denise Mina is probably one of the most gifted writers out there, whether it's mystery or literary or whatever label you want to give it.

I have some role models. In Brazil, they are mostly writers. A writer named Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto is my favorite. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is also a very important figure for me.

Those of us who had a perfectly happy childhood should be able to sue for deprivation of literary royalties.

I hadn't even the necessary credentials for schoolmastering - that last refuge of the unsuccessful literary man

I have kept this diary doggedly, day by day, because I believe a continuous record, no matter how full of trivialities, will always gradually reveal something of the subconscious mind behind it. I've never regretted keeping a diary yet. There are always a few nuggets of literary value under all that sand.

For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete.

The style in which I express myself, poetically, is one of appreciable literary inspiration.

Books were heavy shit. Next time he offered to move someone, he'd make sure the person was less of an intellectual.

The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain.

If female liberation is to happen, if the reservoir of real female love is to be tapped, this sterile self-deception must be counteracted. The only literary form which could outsell romantic trash on the female market is hard-core pornography.

Two well-known French writers and thinkers, Françoise Giroud and Bernard-Henri Lévy, developed an entire book from a series of conversations concerning love, desire, seduction, jealousy, infidelity, marriage, and falling out of love. They discuss these themes using literary and historical references as well as personal observations and experiences. This type of discourse can trace its lineage back to the Courts of Love of the Middle Ages.

Publishing can be a cliquish and incestuous business; it is not uncommon for writers from the same agencies and publishers to review each other.

My advice for finding a literary agent would be first, put your work out there as much as possible and hopefully someone will find you, because I still have literary agents writing to me after they find my site. You want someone who understands your work and is going to be your cheerleader from day one.

It's not unfair, I think, to describe boxers as a demographic little given to literary entanglement. In general, with exceptions, they prefer movies.

I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.

I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously.

I have a really good idea for a novel and would like to just kind of try my hand at fiction. I'm starting to kind of get a really good body of work going from a literary standpoint. As long as the audience is there, man, I'll keep cranking them out.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.