Top 1200 Literary Theory Quotes & Sayings - Page 16

I have no doubts that the Devil grins, As seas of ink I spatter. Ye gods, forgive my “literary” sins – The other kind don’t matter.

In the literary as well as military world, most powerful abilities will often be found concealed under a rustic garb.

To converse at the distance of the Indes by means of sympathetic contrivances may be as natural to future times as to us is a literary correspondence.

My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.'

Apostolic preaching is not marked by its beautiful diction, or literary polish, or Cleverness of expression, but Operates “in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.

I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.

I didn't start publishing literary texts until I had left Iraq. At the Academy [of Cinematic Arts] I was busy with short films.

Every literary culture has among its first bearings the 'blether' of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.

I can usually find my own way out of whatever dicey literary or linguistic situations I wander into, but I have to work much harder at the science.

People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.

SATIRE, n. An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author's enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness.

I grew up in a literary home and majored in French, English, and sociology. They all have served me well over the years.

The English literary movement at the end of the 18th century was obviously due in great part, if not mainly, to the renewed practice of walking.

There's a socialist bias to the consensus of the literary world: a '30s mentality that says factory workers are more worthy of our attention.

'Pride and Prejudice' - perhaps more than any other Jane Austen book - is engrained in our literary consciousness.

I sometimes think there is nothing really to be said about a novel but 'read the book.' I have a jaundiced view of literary critics.

I've often taken important classical, biblical or literary stories and interrogated them. I have tried to reinvigorate Lot by interpreting it differently.

The Llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat, with an indolent expression and an undulating throat; like an unsuccessful literary man.

It is the theory that decides what can be observed.

I was writing fiction steadily, but I found that the stark determinisms of code were a welcome relief from the ambiguities of literary narrative.

Since I make my living as a literary journalist, not a book scout, I spend inordinate amounts of time either reading or writing.

Without theory, there are no questions.

The modern essay has regained a good deal of its literary status in our time, much to the credit of Joseph Epstein.

In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.

When you read the Koran, you give up. At least the Bible is very beautiful because Jews have an extraordinary literary talent.

I have a strange relationship with influences because mine are mostly literary or painters or poets, who I'll even quote. I don't do tributes to cinema.

I did actually sit down with a blank sheet of paper once. I think the phone rang and that was the end of my literary career.

A public role endures for the literary high-command, as sages and seers, speaking out on social and political issues.

I really enjoyed reading 'The Da Vinci Code,' but from a literary standpoint, the book did not live up to the hype.

There is no knowledge without theory.

I think that literary forms are losing their capacity to connect people to issues, to the experiences that feel most meaningful to them.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

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

I don't know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering.

The only good thing about religion is the music. Because nature is filled with balances and opposites, there are always exceptions to the overall rules, whether the overall rules are bleak or otherwise. If you propound a joyous theory of existence, I will find an exception to that. If I propound a bleak theory, someone will find a joyous exception. That's just nature being nature, I think, and I don't think it offers a lot of hope. It's sort of a respite along the way.

Theory can blind observation.

We now open our mail with gloves and mask, though I can't imagine why anyone would target a literary agency!

I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.'

For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.

Bengali and Malayalam industries are driven by sensible and subtle stories that people can relate to due to the states' literary and cultural heritage.

There's a lot of funding of the media and film in particular, literary publishing gets recognized as culture. I think fashion should too.

Life is so unlike theory.

Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem. That theory has been endorsed by dozens of prominent experts, has inspired school programs designed to get kids to feel better about themselves, and in the late 1980s led the California legislature to form a Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem. Yet Baumeister has shown that the theory could not be more spectacularly, hilariously, achingly wrong. Violence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too much, particularly when it is unearned.

It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.

Literary commercialism is lowering the intellectual standard to accommodate the purse and to meet a frivolous demand for amusement instead of for improvement.

Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press.

I’ve often taken important classical, biblical or literary stories and interrogated them. I have tried to reinvigorate Lot by interpreting it differently.

Pride and Prejudice' - perhaps more than any other Jane Austen book - is engrained in our literary consciousness.

My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.

I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.

The literary gift is a mere accident - is as often bestowed on idiots who have nothing to say worth hearing as it is denied to strenuous sages.

There is much else in the literary idiom of nature-philosophy: nothing-buttery, for example, always part of the minor symptomatology of the bogus.

My childhood was spent embracing one literary heroine after another. I identified passionately with each one and would slavishly imitate them.

Everybody has a theory.

For the last half of my life I have had the doubtful benefit of a brother whose literary reputation is much greater than my own.

Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.

Emerson was the chief figure in the American transcendental movement, a fact that complicates all accounts of him in literary or cultural history.

For me it's a remarkable thing that there is a prize celebrating and honouring and making for a brief moment short fiction the centre of the literary universe.

The asymmetries of power that have shaped relations between the West and the rest of the world also exist in the realm of literary criticism.

I will remark in the way of general information, that in California, that land of felicitous nomenclature, the literary name of this sort of stuff is "hogwash"