Every literary culture has among its first bearings the 'blether' of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.
There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.
I don't want to promote my own image either. I don't like going on television or mixing in literary circles.
English dialogues are always just what you need and nothing more - like something out of Hemingway. In Italian and in French, dialogues are always theatrical, literary. You can do more with it.
Back in our apartment, lights out, The Professor emerged from beneath the bed." - from "The Professor Spends the Night," in issue 4 of Literary Orphans
I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.
I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.
Derrida… labels as ‘metaphysical’ any such thought system which depends on an unassailable foundation, a first principle or unimpeachable ground upon which a whole hierarchy of meanings may be constructed. It is not that he believes that we can...
The lady who works in the grocery store at the corner of my block is called Denise, and she's one of America's great unpublished novelists. Over the years she's written forty-two romantic novels, none of which have ever reached the bookstores. I, how...
I don't know as much about children as I would like to. I am godmother to a wonderful three-year-old boy named dominic, the son of my friend Sophie. They live in Scotland, near Oban, and I don't get to see him often. I am always astonished, when I do...
They came here on Sunday, 30th June, 1940, after bombing us two days before. They said they hadn't meant to bomb us; they mistook our tomato lorries on the pier for army trucks. How they came to think that strains the mind. They bombed us, killing so...
It was wonderful flirting with him, all the razor-edged literary banter, like Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. A battle of wit, and a test, too.
Attempts to connect men's circumstances too closely with their literary productions are usually, I believe, unsuccessful.
Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.
A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.
Short story collections are the literary equivalent of canapés, tapas and mezze in the world of gastronomy: Delightful assortments of tasty morsels to whet the reader's appetite.
Anyone who has actually been that sad can tell you that there's nothing beautiful or literary or mysterious about depression.
The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one...
Argot is both a literary and a social phenomenon. What is argot, properly speaking? Argot is the language of misery.
A distinguished clergyman told me that he chose the profession of a clergyman because it afforded the most leisure for literary pursuits. I would recommend to him the profession of a governor.
In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.
