I'm only interested in science fiction that's used as a literary device, a shortcut into something more exploratory or universal about our experience. That's why I think it was invented and why mythology was invented; it's a tool, not an end to itsel...
Madly, futilely, I wrote novel after novel, eight in all, that failed to find a publisher. I persisted because for me the novel was the supreme literary form - not just one among many, not a relic of the past, but the way we communicate to one anothe...
The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact op...
Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.
Any one who chooses will set up for a literary critic, though he cannot tell us where he went to school, or how much time was spent in his education, and knows nothing about letters at all.
One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was p...
No highbrow literary type would ever say 'Moby Dick' is good but it's just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn't just writing about romantic relationships.
I couldn't speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British, and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligible for literary awards. But I still think I'm regarded as one of their own in Japan.
Since it is impossible to know what's really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.
On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.
Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying No to any authority - literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political.
So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.
I'm really not responsible for what mental operation people have when they're reading my books other than the ones which are created by literary effects.
It is the growth of advertising in this country which, more than any single element, has brought the American magazine to its present enviable position in points of literary, illustrative and mechanical excellence.
If any imagine from the literary tone of the preceding remarks that we are indifferent to the radical movement for the benefit of the masses which is the crowning glory of the nineteenth century, they will soon discover their egregious mistake.
Some Critics on the Hearth are not only good-natured, but have rather too high, or, if that is impossible, let us say too pronounced, an opinion of the abilities of their literary friends.
I think there are readers out there and I don't think the book is dead. And more importantly I don't think readers have to choose between literary and commercial fiction.
Dear Literary World, Sorry for breaking down your door...I'll pay for that!!! Since I'm here and planning to stay a while, let me tell you some stories!!
When I started writing seriously in high school, English was the language I had at my disposal - my Spanish was domestic, colloquial, and not particularly literary or sophisticated.
The problem with the literary hothouse of New York City is that people spend so much time looking in the mirror. They go to parties with people who are just like them, and they write novels about people who are just like them. It's limiting.
Whenever I read a contemporary literary novel that describes the world we're living in, I wait for the science fiction tools to come out. Because they have to - the material demands it.
