Subtropics Literary Quotes

I sit on a foldaway chair at the lakeside, sipping hot cocoa and admiring the sunset behind distant clouds, pondering my next novel, which will be more truth than fiction. More memoir than tale. It will begin at the Third Garden and end here at Little Loch Broom, floating on a leaf over clear water, a bared soul visible to all those who would desire a glimpse of a childhood most extraordinary. ~ I.J. Sarfeh

Would it be anything like a literary disaster if Gore Vidal were to fall silent? Easy. No. In fact, there is something to be said for the idea. ~ Lance Morrow

A poem is a small machine made of words ... Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. ~ William Carlos Williams

The great majority of interpretations of Apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near. Consequently the historical allegory is always having to be revised; time discredits it. And this is important. Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited. This is part of its extraordinary resilience. It can also absorb changing interests, rival apocalypses, such as the Sibylline writings. It is patient of change and of historiographical sophistications. It allows itself to be diffused, blended with other varieties of fiction--tragedy, for example, myths of Empire and of Decadence--and yet it can survive in very naïve forms. Probably the most sophisticated of us is capable at times of naïve reactions to the End. ~ Frank Kermode

A scientific autobiography belongs to a most awkward literary genre. If the difficulties facing a man trying to record his life are great - and few have overcome them successfully - they are compounded in the case of scientists, of whom many lead monotonous and uneventful lives and who, besides, often do not know how to write ... ~ Erwin Chargaff

So much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum. ~ Karen Russell

Anuj Bahari has always been a really good literary agent for me. What a good agent does is that he manages many of your business aspects so you can keep your time free for writing. ~ Amish Tripathi

I don't think you can dial 911 for a literary emergency. ~ John Connolly

You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living
of every statesman
every literary, and every scientific authority, without in the least changing the social situation. Artists, of course, disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church. Corporations are not elevators, but levellers, as I see them. ~ Henry Adams

All my big heroes are literary, writers. ~ Henry Rollins

In matters of literary and historical appraisement, one cannot operate with the methods of a laboratory or furnish the proof to be demanded in a court of law. The best is only the probable. Any who raise complaint have an easy remedy: to offer something better, something coherent and constructive. ~ Ronald Syme

This is why, when we have been particularly impressed by a book, we feel the need to talk about it; we do not want to get away from it by talking about it - we simply want to understand more clearly what it is in which we have been entangled. We have undergone an experience, and now we want to know consciously what we have experienced. Perhaps this is the prime usefulness of literary criticism - it helps to make conscious those aspects of the text which would otherwise remain concealed in the subconscious; it satisfies (or helps to satisfy) our desire to talk about what we have read. ~ Wolfgang Iser

There is a difference between dramatizing your sensibility and your personality. The literary works which we think of as classicsdid the former. Much modern writing does the latter, and so has an affinity with, say, night-club acts in all their shoddy immediacy. ~ Paul Horgan

All Renaissance drama, especially the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, is profoundly concerned with shifting power relations within society. The individual was a new force in relation to the state. The threat of rebellion, of the overturning of established order, was forcefully brought home to the Elizabethan public by the revolt of the Earl of Essex, once the Queen's favourite. The contemporary debate questioned the relationship between individual life, the power and authority of the state, and the establishing of moral absolutes. Where mediaeval drama was largely used as a means of showing God's designs, drama in Renaissance England focuses on man, and becomes a way of exploring his weaknesses, depravities, flaws - and qualities. ~ Ronald Carter

I don't divide my reading into demographic categories, any more than I'd divide my friends into groups along ethnic or sexual lines. The thing I look for most is a sense of literary rawness - bareback fiction, if you will. ~ Christopher Fowler

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. ~ Sandra Cisneros

A literary influence is never just a literary influence. It's also an influence in the way you see everything - in the way you feel your life. ~ Thom Gunn

A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity. ~ Rebecca West

Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that. ~ Siri Hustvedt

On the page, 'Gone Girl' was a literary game: a tennis match of alternating chapters from Nick and Amy, with the reader offering to take each character's side every few pages. ~ Richard Corliss

If you fall into water, you may still be saved. But if you fall down in literary matters, there is no life left for you. ~ Donna Jo Napoli

If literary terms were about artistic merit and not the rules of convenience, about achievement and not safety, the term 'realism' would be an honorary one, conferred only on work that actually builds unsentimental reality on the page, that matches the complexity of life with an equally rich arrangement in language. ~ Charles J. Shields

When you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don't mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met and spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to feel any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel I ought to - like the Labour M.P.s who get patted on the back by dukes and are lost forever more. ~ George Orwell

His distaste was palpable. Although he cultivated ideas that embraced the perverse and forbidden, Stephen was squeamish, and his adventures were strictly of the fashionable, literary sort. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Ego, id, and superego are terms familiar to all, but for many years, Freud's psychoanalytic theory has thrived in English departments around the country as a tool for interpreting literary texts but has rarely, if ever, been discussed in science departments. ~ Siri Hustvedt

He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four. ~ G.K. Chesterton

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

You can trust in nothing. Nothing is always there, holding all. ~ Orna Ross

I learned a little of beauty
enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth ... ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

For decades, as literary editor, I have followed the growth of our creative writing in English. In my Solidaridad Bookshop, half of my stock consists of Filipino books written in English and in the native languages. ~ F. Sionil Jose

Vimes hung up the tube. Trolls with a message. It was unlikely to be an invitation to a literary lunch. ~ Terry Pratchett

It's marvelous to know another person's entire literary canon by heart. It's like knowing their secret personal language. ~ Lauren Groff

Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world. ~ Charles Frazier

The party at the bar was for an Internet literary journal that prints a hard copy version that was famous in the world of Internet literary journals that prints hard copy versions. What that means, I do not know. ~ Noah Cicero

We who have seen the truth will reshape the world, and Ireland shall be our entrance to this world beyond words. ~ Orna Ross

History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated. ~ Henry Adams

I stopped typing and started having a conversation about the blog post with my boyfriend. He said he'd liked the part where the narrator had explained that, while she was disturbed by the revelation that the Internet writer had a girlfriend – because that meant he wasn't the pure ethical person she'd perceived him to be via reading his literary criticism (which, !) –she was flattered and aroused that he was overcoming his principles in order to be with her.

Keith said, "It's like he can do no wrong. I thought that was nice."

I surprised myself by turning to him and shouting. "It's a SLAVE MENTALITY. IT'S A SLAVE MENTALITY!!!"

I tried to explain what I meant.

I talked about how Ellen Willis had a theory that women didn't know what their true sexuality was like, because they'd been conditioned to develop fantasies that enable them to act in a way that conforms to what men want from them, or what they think men want from them. And I thought about how Eileen Myles described the difference between having sex with men and having sex with women, how having sex with men was more about forcing yourself into what their idea of what sex was supposed to be. I told him that in my experience men do not often become suddenly charmed or intrigued by aspects of women that they have also perceived as off-putting or scary. Men, heterosexual men, don't tend to make excuses for women and find reasons to admire them despite and even slightly because of t ~ Emily Gould

Can you imagine how many people got laid in here? Abby said, walking to the other side of the Jacuzzi. ~ J.C. Joranco