Literary Genius Quotes

He [Wallace] sent a quick note to his friend [Franzen] explaining his behavior. "the bold fact is that I'm a little afraid of you right now,"[ ... ] "all I can tell you is that I may have been that [a worthy opponent] for you a couple/ three years ago, and maybe 16 months or tow or 5 or 10 years hence, but right now I am a pathetic and very confused man, a failed writer at 28, who is so jealous, so sickly searing envious of you and Vollmann and Mark Leyner and even David Fuckward Leavitt and any young man who is right now producing pages with which he can live and even approving them off some base-clause of conviction about the entrprise's meaning and end that I consider suicide a reasonable- if not at this point a desirable- option with respect to the whole wretched problem. ~ D.T. Max

I was in full digression! far from the subject! ... my colonel was losing track ... rapidly, of my story! my story! ... my own story! ... the gifts that I had personally received from Heaven! ... yet I had insisted, every time! truly extraordinary gifts! ... I'd made him repeat them a hundred times! ... enough so he'd remember! that I was the only true genius! the century's only writer! the proof: that no one ever spoke of me! ... everyone was jealous! Nobel! no Nobel! they had all joined forces to have me executed! ... they could just go fuck off! ... drop dead! since it was a question of death between me and them! I'll send their readers packing! all their readers! I'll make the public grow sick of their books! cabal! no cabal! since there was no room for two styles! ... it was mine or theirs! ... crawl or breastroke! ... you understand! ... the only inventor of the century! is me! me! me right here! the only genius, you might say! damned or not! ... ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull. ~ Louis Auchincloss

Write the book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready. ~ Hilary Mantel

A man of genuine literary genius, since he possesses a temperament whose susceptibilities are of wider area than those of any other, is inevitably of all people the one most variously affected by his surroundings. And it is he, in consequence, who of all people most faithfully and compactly exhibits the impress of his times and his times' tendencies, not merely in his writings where it conceivably might be just predetermined affectation but in his personality. ~ James Branch Cabell

Whatever happened to Trump Airlines? How about Trump University? And then there's Trump Magazine and Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks, and Trump Mortgage?A business genius he [Donald Trump] is not. ~ Mitt Romney

Me having a stalker is like Donald Trump having a sense of humility. It's not a match.
~From LIBERTY & MEANS ~ Kristin Dow

I think every genius person has a bit of insanity. ~ Allyson Felix

At that moment in her life, Elisa was, he realized, almost pathologically attracted not to status or money or good looks but to literary and intellectual potential. ~ Adelle Waldman

Skill is fine, and genius is splendid, but the right contacts are more valuable than either. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

I ... have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny - that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted
into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

By the close of the nineteenth century her studies with her father were being supplemented by tuition in the classics from Dr Warr of King's College, Kensington, and from Clara Pater, sister of the English essayist and
critic Walter Pater (1839–94). Woolf was very fond of Clara and an exchange between them later became the basis for her short story 'Moments of Being: Slater's Pins Have No Points' (1928). Thoby boarded at Clifton College,
Bristol, Adrian was a dayboy at Westminster School, and Vanessa attended Cope's School of Art. Thoby, and later Adrian, eventually went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and Vanessa undertook training in the visual arts (attending the Slade School of Fine Art for a while). From 1902 Virginia's tuition in classics passed from Clara Pater to the very capable Janet Case, one of the first graduates from Girton College, Cambridge, and a committed feminist. The sisters visited Cambridge a number of times to meet Thoby, whose friends there included Clive Bell 1881–1964), Lytton Strachey (1880– 1932), Leonard Woolf (1880–1969) and Saxon Sydney-Turner. ~ Jane Goldman

What then, is time?" asks the saint. "If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not." Neither the past nor the future, argues Augustine, truly exists - and the present is merely an instant. "The present of things past is memory," he writes; "the present of things present is perception; and the present of things future is expectation." Augustine's conclusion - never fully stated, but unmistakably implied - is that time is subjective. It exists in the mind alone, and nowhere else. ~ John Wray

Then a genius has been born! ~ Napoleon Hill

The tenure of a literary reputation is the most uncertain and fluctuating of all. ~ Charles Dudley Warner

The headlights of parked cars shone through the rain, and the sidewalks extended, empty, into the darkness. Underground, the sewers surged like rivers, and a few blocks away, sirens blared. He was no longer aware of his heart or thoughts, only the image of a sunken face staring up from a well, the paleness rising through the water like polished bone. A ringed hand reached toward it, but as the fingers approached, the face would sink away, its eyes opening, closing, and the droplets of red falling like leaves. He was a child running through an autumn cemetery, leaping over cast iron fences, the rain bleeding into the tombstones and the roofs of the mausoleums, his legs following the wings of a crow, flapping to the north. A hedge of withered roses stood between him and his childhood house. He tripped and grazed his cheek on a manhole, his red blooming in the water. The sun set behind the hill; the house turned black - abandoned and derelict - and Chris knew he had to keep running, ahead, into the unknown. ~ Cory Ingram

First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory. ~ Mason Cooley

I'm not expecting the American literary community to welcome me with open arms. To them I'm just some schmuck kid who wrote some book. ~ Macaulay Culkin

If I always appear prepared, it is because before entering an undertaking, I have meditated long and have foreseen what might occur. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly and secretly what I should do in circumstances unexpected by others; it is thought and preparation ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Talent helps mankind leap years.
Brilliance helps mankind leap decades.
Genius helps mankind leap centuries. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Life is a very brief candle especially when you burn it at both ends ~ Josh Stern

Despair and Genius are too oft connected ~ George Gordon Byron

What most readers do not realize is that it takes a particular genius to write funny, to satirize. ~ F. Sionil Jose

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

As Baudelaire said it so beautifully, Emma Bovary is an androgynous character. She cannot be reduced to a gender or a sociological type. She represents something bigger than herself. That was the genius of Flaubert: the ability to combine the general and the particular. ~ Sophie Barthes

If you're speaking of a fantasy player, then it has to be Leo Messi as he's so unpredictable. He's an absolute genius. ~ Fabio Capello

Morphy was probably the greatest genius of them all ~ Bobby Fischer

If a man can have only one kind of sense, let him have common sense. If he has that and uncommon sense too, he is not far from genius. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

With genius, as with beauty
all, well almost all, is forgiven. ~ Susan Sontag

A person of genius should marry a person of character. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

A critical assumption is sometimes made that [Grisham, Clancey, Crichton & myself] have access to some mystical vulgate that other (and often better) writers cannot find or will not deign to use. I doubt if this is true. Nor do I believe the contention of some popular novelists ... that thier success is based on literary merit
that the public understands true greatness in ways the tight-a**ed, consumed-by-jealousy literary establishment cannot. This idea is ridiculous, a product of vanity and insecurity. ~ Stephen King

Cyrus is the meat and potatoes of my life, but Prudence was a cupcake I could enjoy just for the sheer sweetness of being with her. ~ Bette Lee Crosby

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

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. ~ Taylor Hackford

Anybody who writes a book is an optimist. First of all, they think they're going to finish it. Second, they think somebody's going to publish it. Third, they think somebody's going to read it. Fourth, they think somebody's going to like it. How optimistic is that? ~ Margaret Atwood

In this world no one rules by love; if you are but amiable, you are no hero; to be powerful, you must be strong, and to have dominion you must have a genius for organizing. ~ John Henry Newman

Standard languages are inventions, most of them confined to a recent period in human history. They are codes that give access not to clear thinking and basic decency but to the structured parts of our lives such as job interviews, political speeches, literary essays, novels, and the like. They signal education and learning, but they are not the same thing as education and learning. ~ Robert Lane Greene

But I've always been a genius of secrecy, I thought, quite unlike Wertheimer who basically couldn't keep anything a secret, had to talk about everything, had to get everything out in the open as long as he lived. But naturally unlike most others we were lucky not to have to earn a cent because we had enough from the very beginning. Whereas ~ Thomas Bernhard

Every single person in the world could be a genius at something, if they practiced it daily for at least ten years (as confirmed by the research of Anders Ericsson and others). ~ Robin Sharma

Nor did it go unnoticed by the latest litter of Archimboldians, recent graduates, boys and girls, their doctorates tucked still warm under their arms, who planned, by any means necessary, to impose their particular readings of Archimboldi, like missionaries ready to instill faith in God, even if to do so meant signing a pact with the devil, for most were what you might call rationalists, not in the philosophical sense but in the pejorative literal sense, denoting people less interested in literature than in literary criticism, the one field, according to them - some of them, anyway - where revolution was still possible, and in some way they behaved not like youths but like nouveaux youths, in the sense that there are the rich and the nouveaux riches, all of them generally rational thinkers, let us repeat, although often incapable of telling their asses from their elbows, ~ Roberto Bolano