Top 1200 Literary Works Quotes & Sayings - Page 18

You should prefer a good scientist without literary abilities than a literate one without scientific skills

My literary heroes all wrote about L.A.: Joseph Wambaugh, Ross Macdonald, and Raymond Chandler were the three writers that made me want to be a writer.

For writers from working-class families, the making of art is cultural disenfranchisement, for we do not belong in literary circles and our writing rarely makes it back home.

Literary critics, like a herd of cows or a school of fish, always face in the same direction, obeying that love for unity that every critic requires.

Phooey, I say, on all white-shoe college boys who edit their campus literary magazines. Give me an honest con man any day.

I suspect that most playgoers don't understand how inexact a science literary translation is. Even the simplest of lines may lend itself to multiple renderings.

I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely.

The Festival of Books is indeed a well-oiled machine, one which leaves most of the other literary festivals in America, including vaunted Brooklyn's, in the dust.

The well-nurtured youth is one who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he became a man of gentle heart.

When I spoke at the St. Lawrence Seaway ceremonies in 1969, I borrowed some words from the monument there which I had joined Queen Elizabeth in dedicating just 10 years before. That monument, as its inscription puts it, 'bears witness to the common purpose of two nations whose frontiers are the frontiers of friendship, whose ways are the ways of freedom, whose works are the works of peace'.

I like to think I've grown as a writer and taken some risks, but I still consider myself to be a literary writer.

The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.

The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live.

The literary aspect of the film business excites me, but show business in general doesn't take any mental giant.

What is said in James 2:14 ff. is like a two-coupon train or bus ticket. One coupon says, "Not good if detached" and the other says, "Not good for passage". Works are not good for passage; but faith detached from works is not saving faith.

Our literary culture is marinated in deep traditions of the fantastic and the supernatural, and we export those rich qualities in films and books on a spectacular industrial scale.

I say quotations are literary. They are good only when dealing with ideas, not with experience. Experience should be pure, unique.

Works of art are not so much finished as abandoned. Perhaps poems can be perfect. A short-short story might even be perfectible, as effective and enjoyable for one reader as the next. But novels and other book-length narratives are great rambling things that always contain some flaws. For works of any length, there comes a point when your continued tinkering won't improve the whole, but will just trade one set of problems for another.

I think my sensibility is very literary; all my books were built as books, and I wasn't thinking about them being movies.

Whenever I read a contemporary literary novel that describes the world we're living in, I wait for the science fiction tools to come out. Because they have to - the material demands it.

For me writing isn't a mental exercise, it's barely even a literary exercise, it feels like a spiritual experience.

The dilemma for women - writing after everything else was finished - has prevented women from reaching their literary potential for centuries.

I can't help but to write, I have a inner need for it. If I'm not in the middle of some literary project, I'm utterly lost, unhappy and distressed. As soon as I get started, I calm down.

America's revolutionary deists saw themselves as - and they were - participants in an international movement that drew on most of the same literary sources across the civilized world.

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.

When my novels are packaged as exclusively for women, I'm not only cut off from a vital portion of my audience but clearly labelled as an author the literary establishment is free to dismiss.

In the broad spectrum of the arts, two worlds rarely overlap - the literary world and the world of rock music.

I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. It was making me angry.

British people have a really sophisticated sense of humour, because we're exposed to much more than Europeans and Americans, not least in our literary heritage.

Any biographer must of necessity become a pilgrim a peripatetic, obsessed literary pilgrim, a traveler with four eyes.

Blogging has helped create an expanded awareness of the creative nonfiction genre, generally. But I suspect many bloggers continue to be unaware that they are (or have the potential to be) "literary" or "artful."

He who comes from the kitchen, smells of its smoke; and he who adheres to a sect, has something of its cant; the college air pursues the student; and dry inhumanity him who herds with literary pedants.

Like an unexpected wet mop in the face of tired complacency, The Sovereignty Solution works on the receptive mind as a pry bar works on a tightly sealed box. Written with courage and passion, this is a book whose often counterintuitive clarity shakes entombed assumptions like an earthquake. Whether you end up convinced or not, you will never think about American national security the same way ever again.

I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.

Christopher Hitchens was a writer and an orator with a matchless style, commanding a vocabulary and a range of literary and historical allusion far wider than anybody I know.

Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.

Literary detection and firearms don't really go hand in hand; pen mighter than the sword and so forth.

There's as much great authorship in the filmmaker community as in the literary community, and I'd love to welcome more filmmakers into the fold.

I don't read literary blogs. I used to read them, but it was upsetting when they would talk, in a snarky way, about my friends.

Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.

I’m a huge fan of the books myself, so to know that I got to play Clary – who’s a literary heroine to me – was a huge honour.

If there's any literary ability in a feller, getting fired out of a good government job will bring it out.

The more you put out there, the more you have to resolve. 'Air' is the most literary comic I've written so far, and that poses problems.

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike - and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two - are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats.

The literary depiction of life and its moral dilemmas compel us to use our conscience, to make those infallible distinctions between right and wrong.

So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.

Regardless of the criticisms I receive from the left, the right and the middle, I think it's important to maintain a prolific writing jab, as long as my literary legs hold up.

I watched a lot of movies from all over the world. The Russians were very good at editing. They were specialists in editing. The Man with a Camera, if you know that movie, is incredible. I still don't understand how it works. It's a movie with no script, no actors and still it works. It's really good. It's really about editing.

I want to talk about God in a literary way. But I think I would have a very hard time praying to God.

What is to be done about these literary people, who will never understand that painting is a craft and that the material side comes first? The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.

There might be a different model for a literary community that's quicker, more real-time, and involves more spontaneity.

The old days of screenwriting, and myths about screenwriting, are maybe over. It's a literary form, if you can wake up to it.

The most important thing for me is realism. I don't like writing which does somersaults on the page, and I'm no great fan of the hard work literary novel.

Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.

In fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it's one of the few kinds of writing that doesn't tell us what to think or what to buy or what to wear. We're surrounded by advertising.

German writers in the late 18th century were the first to uphold a prickly, literary nationalism, in reaction to the then dominance and prestige of French literature.

Every country should have a strong literary tradition of its own at the center, but it should also have an interest in other countries.

Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did.

Trauma reflected upon in tranquility can produce morally stunning insights - literary light! It can also produce maudlin rubbish.