#literary

Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore. ↗

— Stendhal

#gun #however #ignore #impossible #like

I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house. ↗

— Amy Tan

#book #books #day #did #family

So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#entire #environment #faulkner #held #i

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. ↗

— Robert Hall

#biography #composed #composition #concentrated #delightful

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center. ↗

— Adam Johnson

#book #center #character #imagine #literary

Old English poetry also contained a wide range of conventional poetic diction, many of the words being created to allow alliterative patterns to be made. There are therefore numerous alternatives for key words like battle, warrior, horse, ship, the sea, prince, and so on. Some are decorative periphrases: a king can be a 'giver of rings' or a 'giver of treasure' (literally, a king was expected to provide his warriors with gifts after they had fought for him). ↗

— Ronald Carter

#literary-criticism

I love pop culture -- the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That's why I said I don't like elitism. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#literary-references #pop-culture #reading #writing #love

Reality is shaped by the forces that destroy it. ↗

— D. Harlan Wilson

#fantasy #horror #humor #literary #postmodern

I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life," Hughes wrote in a letter to the Independent in April, 1989, when he had been goaded by a particularly intrusive article. But, of course, as everyone knows who has ever heard a piece of gossip, we do not "own" the facts of our lives at all. This ownership passes out of our hands at birth, at the moment we are first observed. The organs of publicity that have proliferated in our time are only an extension and a magnification of society's fundamental and incorrigible nosiness. Our business is everybody's business, should anybody wish to make it so. The concept of privacy is a sort of screen to hide the fact that almost none is possible in a social universe. In any struggle between the public's inviolable right to be diverted and an individual's wish to be left alone, the public almost always prevails. After we are dead, the pretense that we may somehow be protected against the world's careless malice is abandoned. The branch of the law that putatively protects our good name against libel and slander withdraws from us indifferently. The dead cannot be libelled or slandered. They are without legal recourse. ↗

— Janet Malcolm

#business

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#literary-criticism #literary-theory #narrative #nineteenth-century #novels