A Quote by Kazuo Ishiguro

There's something very misleading about the literary culture that looks at writers in their 30s and calls them 'budding' or 'promising', when in fact they're peaking.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Quote Topics

About Budding Calls Culture Fact In Fact Literary Looks Misleading Peaking Promising Something Them Very Writers

Quote Author

Kazuo Ishiguro
Japanese - Novelist
Born: November 8, 1954

Literary dementia seems dated now, but there was a time when a month in the funny farm was as de rigueur for budding writers as an M.F.A. is now. To be sent away was a badge of honor; to undergo electroshock, a glorious martyrdom.

Walter Kirn

If you look at any institution in history - look at the Roman Empire - anything in history, and what it looks like when it's peaking. Look at Apple, and how can you say it's not peaking? ... The thing is, it may take another year or two before it starts to decline, but it has to - everything does.

Trip Hawkins

You have to be kind of alerted to the fact that clowns are scary and then you can't look at them the same way again. There's something very sinister about them... There's something very tragic about them as well. The last thing they are is funny.

Reece Shearsmith

I would advise budding writers some other kind of job, unless they think they're very, very lucky.

Terry Pratchett

The true experimenters are there but no-one hears about them - the critical/review system tends to concentrate on the handful of 'major' writers and their promising successors; bookshops tend not to sell them; publishers don't promote them. It's the same fate as has befallen poetry.

John Scott

First one gets works of art, then criticism of them, then criticism of the criticism, and, finally, a book on The Literary Situation , a book which tells you all about writers, critics, publishing, paperbacked books, the tendencies of the (literary) time, what sells and how much, what writers wear and drink and want, what their wives wear and drink and want, and so on.

Randall Jarrell

Poetry is often very critical of the culture from which it emerges. Quite often literary critics of a nationalist bent talk up the national culture, in a way that the literary texts don't. Poetry can bring out areas of denial and repression.

Edna Longley

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

Douglas Adams

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 stories for them.

Tom Perrotta

The literary culture, if you examine it, the high literary culture is that which preserves the government and you know it's really the talk for those who have.

Kathy Acker

It's fascinating to imagine two successful writers in one house. But when you think about it, it isn't very unusual. In fact, so many writers have writer spouses.

Heidi Julavits

The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology.

Nick Harkaway

The nation as the horizon of an identity that you want to come into being as a fundamental absence of something that is compromised, something that needs to be rescued or made - these matters preoccupy the third world writer. It is seductive for a Marxist understanding of literary practice and production in the sense that it says that material culture determines literary output.

Mark McMorris

You know how misleading an image is. You see an image in the newspaper, if they left the caption off, good luck knowing what's going on. There is something inherently misleading about images, so they need annotation.