Top 1200 Literary Love Quotes & Sayings

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

I'm not sure that the culture of literary prizes is always a good thing, but while there are literary prizes, it's nice to be nominated.

It remains a mystery to me why some of that [pulp] fiction should be judged inferior to the rafts and rafts of bad social [literary] fiction which continues to be treated by literary editors as if it were somehow superior, or at least worthier of our attention. The careerist literary imperialism of the Bloomsbury years did a lot to produce fiction's present unseemly polarities.

I read a ton of fiction - historical, contemporary, literary, commercial, I love it all.

it never really occurred to her that literary men, if they like women at all, do not want literary women but girls.

Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.

The Booker thing was a catalyst for me in a bizarre way. It’s perceived as an accolade to be published as a ‘literary’ writer, but, actually, it’s pompous and it’s fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself. I’d always read omnivorously and often thought much literary fiction is read by young men and women in their 20s, as substitutes for experience.

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

In so many ways, being a literary agent is an irresistible job to me. Not only does it involve all the things I love - being an advocate for others, problem solving, and going to meetings - yes, that's true, I love meetings, though everyone says it's bizarre! - but most importantly, I love working with people whose writing excites me.

'War and Peace' holds a strange place in literary history, participating in the crowning of realism as a substantial and serious literary mode in America, even as the novel also contributed to the argument that historical fiction could be by nature dangerous, illegitimate, and inaccurate.

I can't change overnight into a serious literary author. You can't compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.

For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary.

I will not allow people to impose rules on me that don't make sense to me. And I live and work very much outside the literary world and the literary system. What they think and what they believe and what their rules are mean nothing to me.

Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I’m telling a story! Oh, that can’t be the case, because I’m a clever person. I’m a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I’ll write Ulysses.”

The short story is not as restrictive as the sonnet, but, of all the literary forms, it is possibly the most single-minded. ...at the end there has to be the literary equivalent of the magician's puff of smoke, an outcome that is both startling and anticipated.

If Carl Hiaasen and Donald Westlake had a literary love child, he would be Timothy Hallinan.

The literary artist lends verbal depth to the visual. The visual artist provides visible articulation for the literary.

There are characters in some short stories who exist as people, and there are other characters in different short stories who exist as purely literary constructs. You know, the young man in "Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire" - I probably got that right - is a literary construct, and enjoys being a literary construct. He has no life off stage, whereas the young men in "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" were as near to being real human beings as I could possibly get them.

This is how I understand literature - as a kind of remix or echo chamber. What's going on in a literary work are other literary things disinterred, cannibalized, and recombined.

There are so many new young poets, novelists, and playwrights who are much less politically committed than the former generations. The trend is to be totally concentrated on the literary aesthetic and to consider politics to be something dirty that shouldn't be mixed with an artistic or a literary vocation.

Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them-almost all women; a vast number of clever, hardheaded men.

The provincial intellectual is doomed to arguing at low level... there is still no Australian literary world, not in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide. It is some consolation to realise that there is no literary world in Birmingham or Los Angeles either. I have heard there is one in Montreal, but I don't believe it. The literary world is in London and New York, the only cities big enough to sustain magazines which can afford to reject copy.

I have always loved reading, so was interested in the literary world, and took many literary portraits.

There's literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn't otherwise have.

The book I'm working on next, which will be my fifth, returns to literary history. I really do love literary history, and I have plenty more ideas on it.

With literary fiction, generally a film maker falls in love with a book. In commercial fiction, it's a producer or studio falling in love with a book they can make into a movie with worldwide appeal.

Put your hand on your heart to keep it from flying off to the lovely magical literary island Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows have created in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. This novel is a delightful mix of fine writing, powerful emotions, glorious settings and amazing characters who deal with life in a way that will have readers falling in love on every single page.

But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is.

In order to read one must sit down, usually indoors. I am restless and would rather sail a boat than crack a book. I've never had a very lively literary curiosity, and it has sometimes seemed to me that I am not really a literary fellow at all. Except that I write for a living.

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.

I don't know that I've gotten much feedback directly from the literary world; sometimes I doubt even the notion that there is a literary world, though I guess there is or was.

I love writing literary stuff. My favorite writer is definitely Edgar Allan Poe - so imaginative and prolific. My second favorite writer would have to be Shakespeare - I love the emotion and human truths he touches on so beautifully.

Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself.

Science fiction is the characteristic literary genre of the century. It is the genre that stands in opposition to literary modernism.

Probably because I really love this bookmaking and storytelling world, I'd been thinking for years about the possibility of becoming a literary agent.

Certainly professionally, yes [I was interested more in history]. And literary criticism, the structure of poetry. But it is primarily as a historian that I work, although text criticism and literary criticism are very much a part of my interests.

Women need to become literary "criminals," break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives.

For me the path to the literary goes through the non - literary. For this reason it surprises me that I am a writer, or that people speak of me as a writer. I'm flattered, but I don't quite believe it.

My literary heroes were mostly women writers and thinkers - Joy Williams, Joan Didion, Anne Sexton, June Jordan, Sarah Schulman, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Christa Wolf - and much of this writing was political as well as literary.

Of course Nebraska is a storehouse of literary material. Everywhere is a storehouse of literary material. If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see.

The greatness of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.

That the question of likability even exists in literary conversations is odd. It implies that we are engaging in a courtship. When characters are unlikable, they don’t meet our mutable, varying standards. Certainly we can find kinship in fiction, but literary merit shouldn’t be dictated by whether we want to be friends or lovers with those about whom we read.

I also encourage my students to read literary criticism that is deeply personal yet formally inventive and intellectually expansive... books that offer unorthodox ways of doing double duty as literary criticism and as love letters to the power of literature per se.

I don't have traceable literary models because I haven't had great literary influences in my life.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent wasa youthful effervescence which we have now lost.

The moment in the account of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis is when they realize they're naked and try and cover themselves with fig leaves. That seemed to me a perfect allegory of what happened in the 20th century with regard to literary modernism. Literary modernism grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I'm telling a story! Oh, that can't be the case, because I'm a clever person. I'm a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself?...a lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller.

[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.

It's perceived as an accolade to be published as a 'literary' writer, but, actually, it's pompous and it's fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself.

Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.

My literary criticism has become less specifically academic. I was really writing literary history in The New Poetic, but my general practice of writing literary criticism is pretty much what it always has been. And there has always been a strong connection between being a writer - I feel as though I know what it feels like inside and I can say I've experienced similar problems and solutions from the inside. And I think that's a great advantage as a critic, because you know what the writer is feeling.

I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story.

There's definitely been a focus on the literary aspects of my music, and I always get a little cringey because I don't feel like I'm particularly literary. There's a sort of academic label that's put on me that seems inaccurate.

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.

I’m not club-able, you see. I don’t like literary parties and literary gatherings and literary identities. I’d hate to join anything, however loosely.

A female writer does definitely get more attention if she writes about male characters. It's true. It's considered somehow more literary, in the same way that it's more literary to write about supposedly male subjects, such as war. You're considered more seriously by the literary establishment.

A literary influence is never just a literary influence. It's also an influence in the way you see everything - in the way you feel your life.

Women excel more in literary judgment than in literary production,--they are better critics than authors.

I think poems belong as much in the news pages as the literary pages. A lot of people throw aside the literary pages! Whereas everybody looks at the news section.