Quotes About Literary

One summer at the fag end of the nineties, I had to go out of London to talk to a literary society, of the sort that must have been old-fashioned when the previous century closed. When the day came, I wondered why I'd agreed to it; but yes is easier than no, and of course when you make a promise you think the time will never arrive: that there will be a nuclear holocaust, or something else diverting.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said, 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

You're mixing your metaphors. It gives me a headache.

They used to be particularly hideous if they'd recently won a literary prize. Their dialogue was so powerful and impenetrable it didn't require punctuation! So naturally they didn't require permission to slip-slide their hairy hands over the body of a young writer of genre fiction. In their minds, Frances virtually owed them sex in return for her unseemly mass-market sales of "airport trash.

A place of literary canon wasn't a guarantee unless you tapped into something deeper, and Jay's longing was drawn from the deepest well of all...

If you call it a romance, it will never be reviewed by the 'New York Times' or any other respectable literary venue. And that's okay. I can live with that.

His best work bore the stamp of John O'Hara and John P. Marquand.

Now I've given up any hope of lasting fame or literary perfection. I don't care if I write a great book anymore, but just one which, whatever its flaws, will leave a record of my impossible life.

She has never read any Gogol herself, but she is willing to place him on a shelf in her mind, along with Tennyson and Wordsworth

I can't do no literary work for the rest of this year because I'm meditating another lawsuit and looking around for a defendant.

One thing for sure is it will be written in the Icelandic language. All of my literary work is.

My books are my tools, and the greater their variety and perfection the greater the help to my literary work.

I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely.

When you realize my best selling books are 'Owl Moon,' the 'How Do Dinosaur' books, and 'Devil's Arithmetic,' how can the public make sense of that! I have fans who think I only write picture books or only write SF and fantasy. I have fanatics of my poetry and are stunned to find out I write prose, too!

What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation, and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy!

'Ruined' was a play which was somewhat of an anomaly in that I did not take a commission until it was finished because I really wanted to explore the subject matter unencumbered. Otherwise, I felt as though I'd have the voice of dramaturges and literary managers saying, 'This is great, but we'll never be able to produce it.'

The kind of stuff I usually read is a bit more on the literary side, like books that I think are influential in the sense that they're doing pulpy subject matter in a refined way. Like 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy; I loved that book.

'War and Peace' holds a strange place in literary history, participating in the crowning of realism as a substantial and serious literary mode in America, even as the novel also contributed to the argument that historical fiction could be by nature dangerous, illegitimate, and inaccurate.

Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

I try to see their moral relevance [in the Bible] and, of course, to admire the literary beauty of the text. Prophetic poetry: No one has written the way Isaiah does.

House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored

The careers of nineteenth-century woman writers, then, make for an illuminating test case in the history of aggression — of attack, counterattack, and only too often, more or less pathetic surrender to self-serving male verdicts. They are illuminating, too, because it is virtually impossible to disentangle the constructive from the destructive elements in the progress of Victorian women in the literary profession.

He adored talking about the rich…. But his real wealth was literary. He had read many thousands of books. He said that history was a nightmare during which he was trying to get a good night's rest. Insomnia made him more learned.

Dane lived above a greengrocer's shop at 26 Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, with her secretary, Olwen Bowen, herself a writer of children's books, but who now devoted herself to the care of her companion. 'One climbed up a rickety staircase and there was Winifred, surrounded by her paintings, sculptures, a piano and goodness knows how many books, where she would give many after-the-theatre parties . . .