Top 1200 Literary Works Quotes & Sayings - Page 19

It's no accident that Op. 111 attracts literary attention. Though it's music, it doesn't quite behave like it. It seems to be charged with meaning, to communicate in symbols, ciphers, clues.

Literary readings aren't going to shake their reputation as the added-fibre of our entertainment diet until the people who organize and participate in them snap out of this mentality.

I see myself as the literary equivalent of a skilled lathe-operator, or a basket-weaver; a potter, maybe: I make mildly diverting objects that people want to buy.

But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now.

I feel that there's a lot of would-be guardians of the culture who think that high-minded literary purpose and the life that gets chronicled in the gossip columns, that these two things are incompatible.

In literary history, generation follows generation in a rage.

Some literary types subscribe to the notion that being a writer like Salinger entitles a person to remain free of the standards that might apply to mere mortals.

Authenticity does matter, but only as it serves the novel's more traditional literary demands: that the fault lines be drawn where the internal life and the larger world meet.

Slavery is the parent of ignorance, and ignorance begets a whole brood of follies and vices; and every one of these is inevitably hostile to literary culture.

The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer 'How should novels be?' but 'Why write novels at all?'

There's increasing consciousness that a "command and control" style of management which one associates with a male model isn't necessarily what works anymore, especially with small to medium sized companies. There's increasing evidence that a more flexible management style, where responsibility is distributed up and down the line, is what works best. And that kind of management style is one that will allow individual workers more flexibility - men and women.

One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.

The poem is the literary form of the 21st century. It's able to connect young people in a deep way to language... it's language as play.

That rewriting of literary history is most obvious in the case of The Yage Letters, where I was able to show that the true history inverts the official one.

I have introduced my daughter to the literary classics and landmark Bengali films. I want her to be well-versed in English but not at the cost of Bengali.

I always assumed I could never make a living out of literary fiction, and I was right. When I did try, it took four years before being published.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all 'bottom line' editors; everything depends on the money.

I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself

Many of the characters who appear in the pages of the Fourth Gospel are literary creations of its author and were never intended to be understood as real people, who actually lived in history.

I can't name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I'm told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don't print them in 'The New York Times.'

Even someone who works with me, like this girl who works with me, her name is Sue. She lives with me and holds the fort; she takes care of all these little things. She takes care of the money situation, and I would not be able to live without someone like that.

I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit...

We are not saved by good works; we are saved for good works. The Christian lifestyle is to be a lifestyle of goodness.

I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit.

Much of the wisdom of the world is not wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers.

There are many Latino writers as talented as I am, but because we are published through small presses, our books don't count. We are still the illegal aliens of the literary world.

When you've finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers.

I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.

Many people go into the wilderness to experience it, and if they experience it in comfort, there's very little in a literary sense for them to write about.

Why should there be only one sort of photography? I want to create images with elements of my choosing, narrative or evocative... I give myself a literary frame, I tell a story.

No one is obliged to take a position on the urgent issues of the day, but there are times when our impoverished public sphere could do with some occasional assertions of literary and moral authority.

With the Red Sox, you have more of a literary interest in it. You know they're going to lose; you're just interested in how the plot is going to unfold.

Following graduation from Amherst, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship enabled me to test the depth of my interest in literary scholarship by beginning graduate studies at Harvard University.

The greater the conceptual significance of a literary product, the more it should be assumed that it is based on an idea that determines the whole, and that the deeper consciousness of the time to which it belongs is reflected in it.

Nothing like an arcane literary debate with your tyrannical master while you pass the time leading to your execution.

In a country lacking leaders, in Africa, for instance, how could a native educated in Europe refuse to become a professor, even at the price of his literary vocation?

There was never one who came into the world with such loving compassion and who entered into all the needs of the people as did the Lord Jesus. And he declares to us, 'Verily, verily, I say unto you he that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do, because I go unto my father.' [Jn 14.12] God wants us all to have an audacity of faith that dares to believe for all that is set forth in the word.

I'm very anxious not to fall into archaism or 'literary' diction. I want my vocabulary to have a very large range, but the words must be alive.

Libertarianism is the simple morality we learned as children: Don’t strike first, don’t steal or cheat, keep your promises. If you inadvertently fail to live up to these standards, make it up to the person you’ve harmed. If someone harms you, you may defend yourself as needed to stop the aggressor and obtain reparations. This simple morality works group-to-group just as it works one-to-one to bring about a peaceful and prosperous world.

Part of the reasons I have lived the life I have is because I wanted to have an adventurous life. But my best adventures are more literary than political.

Often you've read another poem that you think is so beautiful that you'd like to make something like that. And so you try to make a sonnet that works in a certain kind of way, or you try to make something that's songlike, or you create a refrain, or you love the way a poem works in two line stanzas and you try to do that.

It's never really easy to be successful as a writer when you're trying to write literary fiction. You've already limited your readership limited by that choice.

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.

Your literary style reflects your personality.

The best crime novels are not about how a detective works on a case; they are about how a case works on a detective.

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself.

There are fewer and fewer Jews in Ireland, but we still have one of the most famous Jewish characters in literary history, of course, in Leopold Bloom.

Crude at first [the short story] received a literary polish in the press, but its dominant quality remained. It was concise and condense, yet suggestive. It was delightfully extravagant - or a miracle of understatement

I am an artist, and, through my eye, must confess to a tremendous bias. In my purely literary voyages my eye is always my compass.

People should not worry as much about what they do but rather about what they are. If they and their ways are good, then their deeds are radiant. If you are righteous, then what you do will also be righteous. We should not think that holiness is based on what we do but rather on what we are, for it is not our works which sanctify us but we who sanctify our works.

Just as the light and weightless vegetation of saltpeter floats over the old walls of houses as soon as the owner gets careless, so the literary vocation springs up in you.

[Documentary photography] is unwittingly literary, because it is nothing other than an observation of contemporary life apprehended at the right moment by an artist capable of seizing it. (1928)

Most of us do know we have no immortality. And when you've found a genius, someone who has already purchased his immortality in musical or literary terms, it's maddening.

Because Fascism is a lie, it is condemned to literary sterility. And when it is past, it will have no history, except the bloody history of murder.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.

Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and has lived selflessly for the art

It may be time for serious literary novelists to take back some of the subject matter we abandoned to hack novelists and the movies.