There are three difficulties in authorship: – to write anything worth publishing - to find honest men to publish it - and to get sensible men to read it. — Caleb C. Colton [1780-1832]
The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.
What is a man? What is a woman? Why are men and women attracted to each other? Why do they desire each other? Love...what is it?
Only an obstinate prejudice about this period (which I will presently try to account for) could blind us to a certain change which comes over the merely literary texts as we pass from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century.
The linguistic and literary reality of the biblical tradition is folkloristic in essence. The concept of a benei Israel ... is a reflection of no sociopolitical entity of the historical state of Israel of the Assyrian period
In reality there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is "good". Nor is there any way of definitely proving that--for instance--Warwick Beeping is "bad". Ultimately there is no test of litera...
In employing the long sentence the inexperienced writer should not strain after the heavy, ponderous type. Johnson and used such a type, but remember, an ordinary mortal cannot wield the sledge hammer of a giant. Johnson and were intellectual giants ...
He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that tw...
The Told shone brightly. They truly stood out among the Inhabitants for their life and love, and the power to rebrand words went with them. They employed every type of literary term to form new passages of powerful change, and they rose above the ten...
I like the idea of people who've had some success in one form secretly wanting to be something else; I have some of that myself. I look for it in other people who've established themselves in some particular art form, and then you find out that they ...
I learned that it's okay to feel the way I do: that my life has no meaning unless I have a boyfriend. A real man is like the perfect vampire-boy and all the perfect guys in Twue Wuv.
As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana...
No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist.
I read reviews and consider myself pretty 'plugged in' to the literary cosmos, yet one of the things I love best about book-touring is the opportunity to compare notes with favorite booksellers around the country. I always come home with books by aut...
The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play ...
Let's get right to it: On page 5 of Paul Murray's dazzling new novel, 'Skippy Dies,'... Skippy dies. If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go sounds audacious, it's nothing compared with the literary feats Murray pulls off in this h...
I went to graduate school with zero expectation. I kind of backed into it. I wanted to go back to school because I felt gaps in my literary background. I studied mostly twentieth-century English literature in college, so I thought, 'Maybe I'll go bac...
As with many teens, my first jobs included babysitting and mopping floors at McDonald's. Since then, I've held jobs a diverse as selling used cars, selling apparel, cosmetics, and real-estate, substitute-teaching six graders, teaching undergraduate c...
I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go far...
When you're a mass-market writer, people think that you can just decide 'this happens, this happens, this happens', whereas with literary writers it's coming from their soul and their core. But with me it does come from my soul and my core, and my so...
The lawyer refused to tell me my brother's name, and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James - someone more talented than I: someone brilliant without even ...
