Top 1200 Literary Characters Quotes & Sayings - Page 18

I often pray, though I'm not really sure Anyone's listening; and I phrase it carefully, just in case He's literary.

rummaging in the storehouses of religious or literary history for myth-matter for ideational uses is of the nature of spiritual vulgarity.

Don't go around asking the question, 'Is this character likeable?' and expect that to be compatible with serious literary endeavours. That's not what it's about.

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

Drama school introduced me to a world I had no idea about. I wasn't brought up in a literary household at all.

I don't think I ever relinquish a person I have known, and surely not my fictional characters. I see them, I hear them, with a clarity that I would call hallucinatory if hallucination didn't mean something else ... A character whom we create can never die, any more than a friend can die ... Through [my characters] I've lived many parallel lives.

The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature.

There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.

The only characters I ever don't like are ones that leave no impression on me. And I don't write characters that leave no impression on me.

'Brooklyn Nine-Nine' is an idealized, fun comedy world in which feminism is an underlying value that all the characters have. Equality is a value all the characters have. I mean, I want to live in that world. I'd like to make the world feel more like that, but I understand that it's a fantasy.

I'm trying to move a little more toward literary fiction while still retaining a popular feel.

A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.

A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!

I like stories that begin with characters. I like to be engaged and moved by the characters in the story. I want to be moved. I want to leave the cinema and think about what I've seen. My sensibility is quite eclectic and it doesn't matter if they are small or large films, I just want to make good films.

Being an author means, almost by definition, that you make up characters and then complicate their lives. That's it, really. You make up characters and give them problem after problem after problem.

I didn't know V. S. Naipaul very well, and to a large extent, my acquaintance with him was limited to meetings at literary festivals.

The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.

You are going to love some of your characters because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason.

I think, when I'm writing, I have a more clinical view than I do when I'm reading. I like pretending to be God and basically determining the fate of my characters. But as a reader, I'm a sucker. I'm very sentimental. I get upset when people that I like die. And yet I have killed off characters in my books quite heartlessly, and sometimes found that readers were very upset by it.

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

The representation of gay characters on screen is important for us all to think about because there are sadly too few representations of gay characters on screen in mainstream cinema. If Marvel starts making movies about gay superheroes, then we'll be in a really great place. We're not at that place.

The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism.

Most of my characters are an amalgamation of people that I've met, my family, or myself. Being a writer, you can draw only from what you know. I am lucky to have really rich and interesting people in my family for, you know, interesting family nights and great characters.

Every movie has three things you have to do - you have to have a compelling story that keeps people on the edge of their seats; you have to populate that story with memorable and appealing characters; and you have to put that story and those characters in a believable world. Those three things are so vitally important.

Now we really like to put people in boxes. As men, we do it because we don't understand characters that aren't ourselves and we aren't willing to put ourselves in the skin of those characters and women, I think, terrify us. We tend not to write women as human beings. It's cartoons we're making now. And that's a shame.

One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality.

I love the idea of the literary salons in France where artists and writers would all come and talk and drink absinthe.

I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.

Mostly the natural landscapes work as a sounding board for my characters, so they can understand themselves, and it acts as a mirror in which we readers see ourselves. The natural world is the place into which all my characters have to situate themselves in order to be who they really are, and that makes my rural fiction feel different from a lot of urban fiction.

A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull.

In all literary history there is no such figure as Dante, no such homogeneousness of life and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition of the unessential.

You can write a great book and be ignored. Literary history is full of classics that were under-appreciated in their own time.

Those of us who had a perfectly happy childhood should be able to sue for deprivation of literary royalties.

How dare anyone, parent, schoolteacher, or merely literary critic, tell me not to act colored.

When you write a book, you want to have fidelity to the character. Characters and their emotions guide the structure of the novel. The author is aware that there's a certain amount of information she/he has to provide in order to satisfy the reader, knowing that she/he has set something up that must be paid off, but this payment must be made while maintaining fidelity to the characters.

The kind of acting that's wholly literary or cerebral is wrong. It's useless for me to have actors so much in their heads that they can't be organic.

I approach poetry and spirituality like literary nitroglycerin -- a little can do a lot and you better damn well be careful with it.

I don't know who they are[my characters] . They're entirely invented characters. Maybe that's how I've been able to write so many books, because there are no boundaries for me. I can write a completely fantastical story like "Swept Away" or "Blinded by the Light" and then a non-comic drama like "Chicxulub" or something like "Birnam Wood" that has autobiographical underpinnings. Why not?

Regardless of the popular literary trend of the times, write the thing which lies close to your heart.

If I can get the audience to connect with the characters emotionally - and they love who they are, they love the larger-than-life situation that they're in, but most of all get the audience invested in the characters - then I always feel like I can sort of put them in the most outrageous circumstances, and the audience is okay to go with that.

I hear so many writers say - and these are writers that I trust completely - 'I just started hearing a voice', or, 'The characters came to life'. I am filled with loathing for my own characters when I hear that because they do nothing of the sort. Left to their own devices, they do nothing but drink coffee and complain about their lives.

None of the male characters are as powerful or as interesting as the four central female characters. The men work best as representations of the current stage of a particular female’s psyche. The men function as catalysts, and are certainly important to the development of the story, but the relationships are not the goal. I do not see romance as being what’s central to the success of PRETTY LITTLE LIARS.

Men should be able to see themselves in female characters and female strength, just as much as women are able to see themselves in male characters.

In our society, most of us wear protective masks of various kinds and for various reasons. Very often the end result is that the masks grow to us, displacing our original characters with our assumed characters.

I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.

I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there.

I still write in literary Arabic but I try to rid it of the rhetoric, the symbolism, and the stuff that ordinary people don't understand.

With all of the qualities of the scene-setting, the dialogue, the place and time and the time and place in which your characters move. And I want to move with the characters, move with them and describe the world in which they are living.

No publisher should ever express an opinion of the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide.

Characters are so important to a story that they actually decide where the story is going. When I write, I know my characters. I know how things are going to end, and I know some important incidents along the way.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

Poetry lies at the centre of the literary experience because it is the form that most clearly asserts the specificity of literature.

A linguist deaf to the poetic functions of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistics are equally flagrant anachronisms.

I'd love to play characters that are so similar to me that it would be crossing limits, and then at the same time I would love to play characters that are so different from me that it would be that kind of challenge as well.

My American accent is really, really good. I started out in the theater, doing all different characters with all different accents. When I first came to America, I thought I would be playing American, all the time. It was just weird how it worked out that I played more international characters.

I sometimes think young people are not given nearly enough credit for their ability to appreciate literary flourish.

I think up to this point, it's been difficult to suggest a world where Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman and others could exist in the same universe. That was one of the things I really wanted to try and get at. Not to mention, the amazing opportunity to bring those characters and have those characters tell an important story, their own story, within the confines of a film.

There is something underwhelming about scholarly hate mail - the sad literary allusions, the refusal to use contractions.

One of my favorite things about the DC Universe, growing up as a reader, was just how big it was and just how many characters and superheroes there were. And how many odd characters there were.