Quotes of: Literary-work Keyword

Yes - 90% of fantasy is crap. And so is 90% of science fiction and 90% of mystery fiction and 90% of literary fiction.

George R. R. Martin

There is a vast expanse of time before the Norman Conquest in 1066, from which fragments of literary texts remain, although these fragments make quite a substantial body of work. If we consider that the same expanse of time has passed between Shakesp...

The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland

Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things—like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale. One night in Hiroshima it occurred to me that the moon behind a certain ...

David Mitchell

Martial (the main character of LOCUS SOLUS) has a very interesting conception of literary beauty: the work must contain nothing real, no observations about the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary constructions. These are in themselves...

Pierre Janet

Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But hist...

Lev Grossman

I like people a lot, but I am not comfortable in literary New York situations. There is deep anxiety and tension around success here. I don't share problems I'm having about my work, and I think conversations around publishing are boring.

Elizabeth Strout

T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses

Maybe freedom means defining yourself any way you want to be.

Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society

Indeed a lie is often more plausible than the truth. "Almost" always. The truth, of course, is never very plausible.

Little Demon (Literary Monuments) / Melkiy Bes

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them s...

Mohsin Hamid

I was writing very early, like I was involved in our high school literary magazine, which was called 'Pariah.' The football team was the Bears, and the literary magazine was 'Pariah.' It was great. It was definitely a real sub-culture. But I wrote st...

Tom Perrotta

I don't know that I've gotten much feedback directly from the literary world; sometimes I doubt even the notion that there is a literary world, though I guess there is or was.

Jonathan Ames

Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!

Cities & Countries

Boredom is a powerful reason, and the prospect of fun is a powerful draw - especially when you are young.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

‎What a blight that woman is. Do you happen to know why? I lean toward a malignant fairy at her christening.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Then i imagined a lifetime of having to cry to get him to be kind, and I went back to no again.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

The party at the bar was for an Internet literary journal that prints a hard copy version that was famous in the world of Internet literary journals that prints hard copy versions. What that means, I do not know.

Best Behavior

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.

The Beautiful and Damned

Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself.

Robertson Davies

‎Theorists of journalism have long noted parallels to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in physics: by reporting on something, one subtly but irrevocably changes it.

The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism