Quotes About Literary

the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty.

Kafka, of course, would be in a unique position to appreciate the irony of submitting his short stories to this kind of high-efficiency critical machine, the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty.

None of the other famous phallocrats of Updike's generation—not Mailer, not Exley or Roth or even Bukowski—excites such violent dislike.

Despite Lowell's determination to be 'surrounded by Catholics,' the couple instantly got swept up into the fast, loud current of atheist-Jewish-Marxist-hard-drinking-fast-talking literary New York. Philip Rahv and Nathalie Swan took a shine to Lowell and Stafford, and soon they were getting invited to the Rahv's combative, whiskey-soaked parties.

I love this landscape, the literary man began while they were walking through an irregular forest of pillars. The only things here are /things/. The paint of meaning is peeled off. The things here have refused to be of any assistance at all to men.

Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy—it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.

I gather sentences round, quotations, the literary equivalent of a cheerleading squad. Except that analogy's screwy—cheerleaders cheer. I put up placards that make me feel bad.

Here's the funny thing about literary criticism: it hates its own times, only realizing their worth twenty years later. And then, twenty years after that, it wildly sentimentalizes them, out of nostalgia for a collective youth. Condemned cliques become halcyon "movements" annoying young men, august geniuses.

Now, another way to think about this is that Shakespeare's ego was so very insatiable he thought he could speak for everybody: a black duke, a transvestite girl, a carefree prince, a mad king. But we tend not to think of it that way, in Britain, instead we consider Shakespeare's breed of impersonality among the highest literary virtues.

The deeply satisfying aspect of the rediscovery of Zora Neale Hurston is that black women generated it primarily to establish a maternal literary ancestry.

Though attacked by Wright and virtually ignored by his literary heirs, Hurston's ideas about language and craft undergird many of the most successful contributions to Afro-American literature that followed.

When I read 'Absalom, Absalom!,' I remember being really excited about it and telling all my friends they had to read it, especially my writer friends.

Liberty is the possibility of doubting, of making a mistake,... of searching and experimenting,... of saying No to any authority — literary, artistic, philosophical, religious, social, and even political.

The word 'free-lance', I used to think, had a romantic ring; but sadly discovered, when I tried to be one, that its practice has little freedom, and the lance is a sorry weapon to tilt at literary windmills.

Verbose is not a synonym for literary.

The real test of whether Scripture or tradition is our fundamental authority lies in our willingness to test those preunderstandings by further study of the Scripture, examining its teachings again in a literary-historical manner.

Feeling he'd captured the throng, Trost decided to get literary. "Salus populi suprema lex esto." She looked at me. "What the fuck was that?" "Cicero—the welfare of the people is the ultimate law." Vic studied the telejournalists, all of them looking a little perplexed. "Think they'll subtitle him?

Life is the literary result of my passionate love affair between self and the universe...

Television, particularly as it becomes more and more serialised, comedies no longer have to tie the stories up neatly within 20-plus minutes. 'Arrested Development' had evolving storylines, as did both versions of 'The Office.' We're seeing that more and more. That allows it to be really, whatever the tone, almost literary.

In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality.

I get sent a lot of scripts which feature him as a kind of all-purpose Victorian literary character and really understand little, if anything, about him, his life or his books.

Let us emphasize instead that owing to complex, uneven material histories of colonization and the oppression of racialized groups within the United States, the sites of minority or colonized literary production are at different distances from the canonical nationalist project of reconciling constituencies to idealized forms of community and subjectivity.

I promise myself great pleasure from my visit to England. You know I am to stay with Dickens while in London; and beside his own very agreeable society, I shall enjoy that of the most noted literary men of the day, which will be a great gratification to me.

Just as the light and weightless vegetation of saltpeter floats over the old walls of houses as soon as the owner gets careless, so the literary vocation springs up in you.