A Quote by Brian Reynolds Myers

People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.

Brian Reynolds Myers

Quote Topics

Any Cleverness Deepen Display Expect Experience Happy Literary Living Novels Now People Sustained Used

Quote Author

Brian Reynolds Myers
American - Author
Born: 1963

I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way.

Dana Spiotta

It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".

Richard Stallman

I often say to my students in workshops that if they are trying to find literary inspiration, they should not go and read novels, because novels are more appropriate for series. Where as they should read short stories - that's the right format for you to be able to actually display the narrative in a film.

Abbas Kiarostami

Now that cleverness was the fashion most people were clever - even perfect fools; and cleverness after all was often only a bore: all head and no body

Walter de La Mare

All I am in private life is a literary critic and historian, that's my job...And I'm prepared to say on that basis if anyone thinks the Gospels are either legends or novels, then that person is simply showing his incompetence as a literary critic. I've read a great many novels and I know a fair amount about the legends that grew up among early people, and I know perfectly well the Gospels are not that kind of stuff.

C. S. Lewis

You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.

Chuck Palahniuk

I would trade any writerly success if it would mean my children would be happy.

Mary Gordon

I read many wonderful novels, though I now find the idea of literary fiction obsolete.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

At conventions, one of the standard questions I get is, 'Are you writing any new novels?' To which I used to respond, in my smart-[alec] fashion, 'No, I've decided to write only old novels.'

Peter David

The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer 'How should novels be?' but 'Why write novels at all?'

Garth Risk Hallberg

I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns

Anne Tyler

I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns.

Anne Tyler

Living in Korea as a girl meant living under a lot of discrimination and limitation. It was the same in my university and in the Korean literary world I am involved in now.

Kim Hyesoon

Whether as living humans or as mythological figures, ancestors have always played an important role in the African popular and literary imagination. Sometimes, as in Amos Tutuola's famous short novels, they directly influence events. More often, as in the works of Chinua Achebe, both living and dead ancestors are sages offering valuable advice.