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Quotations on Literary 93 Quotes Found 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. A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull. Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one. We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it. These were all middle-class kids from literary backgrounds, joining this sort of train going by, this pop train, jumping on. Whereas the rest of the rock scene, you'll find that there's mostly working-class people. Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books. It must inquire not merely about the circumstances of the time in general, but in particular about the writer's position with regard to these things, the interests and motives, the leading ideas of his literary activity. I am in the Master of Professional Writing program teaching Humor Writing, Literary and Dramatic. I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States. I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene. It is the growth of advertising in this country which, more than any single element, has brought the American magazine to its present enviable position in points of literary, illustrative and mechanical excellence. Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single. They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?' My literary success meant nothing to me. So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We'll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world. There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write. When I was in college, I was the editor of the literary magazine and insisted neither the editors nor the writers be specifically identified-only our student numbers appeared on the title page. I love that idea and still do. All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life. That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world. One learns little more about a man from the feats of his literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal. As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook. People aren't used to thinking of cultural forms spreading out across the full range of formal interactions - or what is called the "text" in literary terms. Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word. First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory. If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong. Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to. 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. Any biographer must of necessity become a pilgrim a peripatetic, obsessed literary pilgrim, a traveler with four eyes. A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two. I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence. Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express. The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive. When I became more involved in music, I had to give up some of my writing in the literary sense. However, on occasion, I would write something for my own pleasure or I would write notes and introductory remarks in the songbooks I put together. Sex in a woman's world has the same currency a penny has in a man's. Every penny saved is a penny earned in one world and in the next every sexual adventure is a literary experience. I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form. I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself. Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it. 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. At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks. Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history. There are two methods for the literary study of any book - the first being the study of its thought and emotion; the second only that of its workmanship. A student of literature should study some of the Bible from both points of view. At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language. For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete. Books on horse racing subjects have never done well, and I am told that publishers had come to think of them as the literary version of box office poison. Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least. 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. 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. The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master. 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. The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work.
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