Top 1200 Literary Characters Quotes & Sayings - Page 16

We don't genuinely need more literary geniuses. One can only read so many books in a lifetime.

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

I think it's always a challenge to adapt a beautiful literary work into a fresh and alive film.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

Literary influences are harder for me to point to, because mostly it's a mulch of all of my past reading.

In new work, we need to see the shadow, however faint, of previous literary effort.

Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.

In the Marvel world, some characters have similar powers. Initially some people might bump up against it, but if they really looked into the X-Men world they would see that characters do share similar powers.

I'm a big fan of Tarantino's work, and I think I'm fascinated by his evident sense of entitlement to use black characters and black material that he feels not simply comfortable with, but that it's his right and privilege - the apparent ease with which he handles black characters, fully aware that he's been criticized for that, too.

There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.

I always thought of myself as a kind of literary bureaucrat. And that was never going to be enough for me.

There are plenty of brilliant people who are too stressed out to read challenging literary novels.

Characters in Hollywood movies encounter a lot of car chases. Characters in novels rarely wash their hands or do their laundry. And in the work of moral psychologists, people deliberate and reflect a lot. They deliberate, one sometimes feels, whenever they perform an action, and certainly whenever they act for good reasons.

I've always kind of gravitated toward characters who are a bit distant from the narrator or the point-of-view characters, so that's kind of important to me, to set up a different character who would be the point-of-view character for the story.

You're more likely to finish a book you enjoy, than one that feels like literary drudgery.

In England, literary pretence is more universal than elsewhere from our method of education.

An idea has no worth at all without believable characters to implement it; a plot without characters is like a tennis court without players. Daffy Duck is to a Buck Rogers story what John McEnroe was to tennis. Personality. That is the key, the drum, the fife. Forget the plot.

When I write fiction, I have the illusion of being able to control these fictional worlds and these characters, and to make them say what I want them to say. Of course, the problem is that it is an illusion, and by the end of it you realize that you're not in control of it at all; the characters have taken over, and they're driving the vehicle.

Momentum, in literary mosaic, derives not from narrative but from the subtle, progressive buildup of thematic resonances.

I don't believe in pulling punches or being judicious, as the standard in literary criticism or academic musicology.

I've done movies that have mostly feminine characters and elements, and I think that both 'Heathers' and 'Truth About Cats and Dogs' are, in their own weird ways - they're different ends of the girl movie spectrum, but they're very much centered around the female characters, and I like those movies, and I like working with good actresses.

When it's between the covers of a book, content is perceived to have literary substance - or more so that it might otherwise.

The literary world is filled with good and generous people. But then that's what writing is all about - empathy.

Indignation at literary wrongs I leave to men born under happier stars. I cannot afford it.

There comes a point, in literary objectivity, when the author's self- effacement is hard to distinguish from moral cowardice.

A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

It became plain very soon after our marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership.

Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.

Some people tell me they would be afraid of my characters, but I tell those people [that] they meet these characters all the time. They just don't care about them when they meet them, at the gas station, the car wash, the post office even.

When appearance and reality coincide, philosophy and literary criticism find themselves with nothing to say.

All great literary works influence us as writers, not their stories as much as their storytelling ability.

Certainly, your characters - whether they are superheroes are not - should have foibles. They should have problems; they should have things that their powers can't solve. That's what makes them nuanced, interesting characters. They can have intense motivations. They should have intense motivations to do what they do.

Fine writing is a distinct disadvantage. So is unique literary style. They take attention from the subject

Anyone aspiring to literary greatness should read 'New Grub Street' and weep.

When I'm writing a script, I don't worry about plot as much as I do about people. I get to know the main characters - what they need, what they want, what they should do. That's what gets the story going. You can't just have action, you've got to find out what the characters want. And then they must grow, they must go somewhere.

Criticism even should not be without its charms. When quite devoid of all amenities, it is no longer literary.

To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers.

One of the things that I really love about doing a film is working with actors and the whole casting process. I feel I'm not looking for actors. I feel I'm looking for characters. If the characters come from Bollywood, fine. If they come from Indian theater, perfect.

If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.

Google and others truncate headlines at 70 characters. On the Manti Teo story, Deadspin's scoop fell down the Google search results, overtaken by copycat stories with simpler headlines. Deadspin's headline was 118 characters. Vital information - 'hoax' - was one of the words that was cut off.

I like Bret Easton Ellis' sense of humor. I feel like mine is sometimes similar to his. And how his characters sometimes seem really confused in a humorous manner. I like that. And I have that sometimes in my characters.

I've wondered, though, if one of the reasons we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life is because we don't want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgment. We don't want to be characters in a story because characters have to move and breathe and face conflict with courage. And if life isn't remarkable, then we don't have to do any of that; we can be unwilling victims instead of grateful participants.

Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.

Ive summarized dozens of books in my literary career; its become rather second nature.

I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.

Dictionary: a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic

Usually, people begin with very clear ideas of good movies, they begin with clear ideas about their characters, and then, as they do sequels, they seem to forget the characters more and more, and try to out-spectacle.

When I write a book, I don't have a plan or an outline. The characters move the action, and the action develops the characters. When I write a book, I become an actor, really, taking the role of the person who is speaking or acting at the time, and so their reactions to whatever they see are my reactions.

I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.

People are infinitely more interesting than characters that I come up with. Because the characters I come up with are basically combinations of people I've met. Combinations. You select certain details, that's all.

George Orwell is a pinnacle writer, for his combination of moral insight and literary writing.

Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?

As a reader, I try to love all the literary forms equally, but I probably read novels most often.

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations! Be sure not to discuss your hero's state of mind. Make it clear from his actions. Nor is it necessary to portray many main characters. Let two people be the center of gravity in your story: he and she.

In the early 1980s, I spent a year working as an assistant at the Elaine Markson Literary Agency.

To my mind, Guernica is the most important online intellectual and literary journal in America today.

The characters I tend to play are a little more interesting than the standard heroes. Romantic leads can be a little more straightforward, I guess. But it just seems to be the parts I get, I don't know what that says about me. I enjoy interesting characters and interesting people, I suppose.

I'm sort of murdered for selling books. The idea is, if you make money your work can't be literary.

As a woman, I don't feel like I have a responsibility to create better female characters. I feel like I have a responsibility to create good characters. Because the truth is, those kinds of things ghettoize us even more as writers.