Aghassi Literary Quotes

What of Thought? The Crew had developed a kind of shorthand whereby they could set forth any visions that might come their way. Conversations at the Spoon had become little more than proper nouns, literary allusions, critical or philosophical terms linked in certain ways. Depending on how you arranged the building blocks at your disposal, you were smart or stupid. Depending on how others reacted they were In or Out. The number of blocks, however, was finite.
"Mathematically, boy," he told himself, "if nobody else original comes along, they're bound to run out of arrangements someday. What then?" What indeed. This sort of arranging and rearranging was Decadence, but the exhaustion of all possible permutations and combinations was death.
It scared Eigenvalue, sometimes. He would go in back and look at the set of dentures. Teeth and metals endure. ~ Thomas Pynchon

[ ... ] as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out [ ... ] the literary novel has become extraordinarily privatistic of late. It's as if the big issues (Does God exist? from whence springs decency? what sort of species is Homo Sapiens?) were either settled or not worth discusssing, and serious writers should therefore confine themselves to their various ethnic heritages and interpersonal relationships. ~ James K. Morrow

I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word 'madness' to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. 'Madness' is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

Like James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Woolf 's first novel is a self-conscious meditation on the formation of an emergent intellectual and artist (a Ku¨nstlerroman). ~ Jane Goldman

Being a Negro writer these days is a racket and I'm going to make the most of it while it lasts. About twice a year I sell a story. It is acclaimed. I am a genius in the making. Thank God for this Negro literary renaissance. Long may it flourish ~ Wallace Thurman

Dan had discovered that he had been mistaken, that books did not exist outside of the body and only in mind, but that words were breath, that they were experienced and understood through the inseparability of mind and body, that words were the water and reading was swimming. Just as he had in water, he could lose himself in reading: mind and body became one. ~ Christos Tsiolkas

Our job, then, is two-fold: to focus on our own failings as writers. But also to speak more forcefully as advocates for literature. Books are a powerful antidote for loneliness, for the moral purposelessness of the leisure class. It's our job to convince the 95 percent of people who don't read books, who instead medicate themselves in front of screens, that literary art isn't some esoteric tradition, but a direct path to meaning, to an understanding of the terror that lives beneath our consumptive ennui. ~ Steve Almond

"Little magazines" are, for the most part, the mayflies of the literary world. ~ Frederick Crews

When tragedy established itself in England it did so in terms of plots and spectacle that had much more to do with medieval apocalypse than with the mythos and opsis of Aristotle. Later, tragedy itself succumbs to the pressure of 'demythologizing'; the End itself, in modern literary plotting loses its downbeat, tonic-and-dominant finality, and we think of it, as the theologians think of Apocalypse, as immanent rather than imminent. Thus, as we shall see, we think in terms of crisis rather than temporal ends; and make much of subtle disconfirmation and elaborate peripeteia. And we concern ourselves with the conflict between the deterministic pattern any plot suggests, and the freedom of persons within that plot to choose and so to alter the structure, the relation of beginning, middle, and end.

Naïvely predictive apocalypses implied a strict concordance between beginning, middle, and end. Thus the opening of the seals had to correspond to recorded historical events. Such a concordance remains a deeply desired object, but it is hard to achieve when the beginning is lost in the dark backward and abysm of time, and the end is known to be unpredictable. This changes our views of the patterns of time, and in so far as our plots honour the increased complexity of these ways of making sense, it complicates them also. If we ask for comfort from our plots it will be a more difficult comfort than that which the archangel offered Adam:

How soon hath thy prediction, ~ Frank Kermode

Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing. ~ Donald Hall

The novel has become the leading hero in the drama of literary development in our time precisely because it best of all reflects the tendencies of a new world still in the making; it is, after all, the only genre born of this new world and in total affinity with it. ~ Mikhail Bakhtin

First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Taste is the literary conscience of the soul. ~ Joseph Joubert

To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory "pipe dreams" is right also. ~ Harold Bloom

twenty years after McCauley's effort, I concluded that it was time to prove, once and for all, that the horror and suspense genre is a serious literary one. I had other reasons ~ Al Sarrantonio

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

It seems to me that one of the things that happened with a lot of literary fiction in the 1980s and 1990s was that it became very concerned with the academy and less with how people live their lives. We got to a point where the crime novel stepped into the breach. It was also a time when the crime novel stopped being so metropolitan. ~ Val McDermid

Here in the city she had gilded her nails. They shone. And she had put on a velvet dress, this soft red one, which was heavy. The buttons were in the form of seashells. ~ Saul Bellow

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success. ~ Raymond Chandler

Extremely self-conscious in its craft, in many ways The Hand of Ethelberta is an exploration of fiction as illusion, which involves parody of the conventions it employs; romance, melodrama and farce, and a rejection of realism for absurdist and surrealistic effects. The 'hand' of Ethelberta is an obvious, ironic allusion to courtship, and the sub-title, 'A Comedy in Chapters', suggests the novel's affinity with the conventions of Restoration and eighteenth-century comedy of manners. ~ Geoffrey Harvey

Male urination is a form of commentary. ~ Camille Paglia

The multiverse model offers an elegantly postmodern solution to character stasis in a market-driven serial publishing system which privileges constancy over major change. ~ Jose Alaniz

No highbrow literary type would ever say 'Moby Dick' is good but it's just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn't just writing about romantic relationships. ~ Sophie Hannah

The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified. ~ H.G.Wells

The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things"-the norms of human action. ~ Russell Kirk

It may be true that we all have a novel inside of us. Better in than out in the present case. Burning Ashes appears to have been typed rather than written. If so, it was a great deal easier to type than it is to read. Its tone is vulgar; it lacks invention. It is designed to thrill the repressed and soothe the subliterate, and no doubt they will be thrilled and soothed. Nature, I fear, did not intend Ms Lewis-Foster to write. ~ Rodney Ulyate

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. ~ Robert Harris

His fierce appreciation of female beauty, the unrelenting desire he felt for their company, the pleasure he both derived and sought to give, had led him in and out of quite a few bedroom doors. ~ Roy L. Pickering Jr.

The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's. ~ Jonathan Coe

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong. ~ Aaron Copland