Literary Quotes
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Literary detection and firearms don't really go hand in hand; pen mighter than the sword and so forth.
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Michael Chabon is arguing in favor of what is at the same time an old-fashioned and very forward-thinking opening up - of taking off the class associations with those labels, because we grew up, or I certainly grew up, feeling that, "Oh, there's literary fiction, and beneath that, there's these other things." He's actually saying that they're all of equal merit, and in many cases, that work in the genres, or work that draws from the genres is more entertaining for readers, since it is our job to entertain people.
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'I never feel the need to discuss my work with anyone. No, I am too busy writing it. It has got to please me and if it does I don't need to talk about it. If it doesn't please me, talking about it won't improve it, since the only thing to improve it is to work on it some more. I am not a literary man but only a writer. I don't get any pleasure from talking shop.
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That is why the ideal literary diet consists of trash and classics; all that has survived, and all that has no reason to survive - books you can read without thinking, and books you have to read if you want to think at all.
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Regardless of the popular literary trend of the times, write the thing which lies close to your heart.
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'Doctor Who' is not as literary as 'The Lord of the Rings' and 'The Hobbit' is - books have come out, but they are from the television episodes. So there is that difference... it's more scholastic.
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Most of those people who saw themselves as literary types at university became bank managers.
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I read many wonderful novels, though I now find the idea of literary fiction obsolete.
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I was immediately struck by the fact that he had all these literary quarterlies that you couldn't get anywhere else.
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A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.
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Michael Chabon, who is himself a brash and playful and ebullient genre-bender, writes about how our idea of what constitutes literary fiction is a very narrow idea that, world-historically, evolved over the last sixty or seventy years or so - that until the rise of that kind of third-person-limited, middle-aged-white-guy-experiencing-enlightenment story as in some way the epitome of literary fiction - before that all kinds of crazy things that we would now define as belonging to genre were part of the literary canon.
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I don't think that my films are 'literary'; they are based on the most ordinary things of life.
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One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.
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When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.
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Theres always an anxiety about playing literary characters because one of the great joys of reading books is that you can create your own vision of things.
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I've summarized dozens of books in my literary career; it's become rather second nature.
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Literary men now routinely tell their readers about their divorces. One literary man who reviews books wrote, in reviewing a study of Ruskin, that he had never read a book by Ruskin but that the study confirmed him in his belief that he didn't want to read a book by Ruskin. This man very often writes about his family life.
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I have not wasted my life trifling with literary fools in taverns, as Johnson did, when he should have been shaking England with the thunder of his spirit...
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A literary woman's best critic is her husband.
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I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.
