#literary

Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. ↗

— Theodore Sturgeon

#field #limits #literary #only #outside

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

Join us. Play the game. It will bring you an untold number of rewards and you will finally have some direction and purpose in your lives. Take control of yourselves and those around you. Bend them to your will and all worldly pleasures will be yours... ↗

— Martin Hopkins

#addiction #crime #edinburgh #erotica #homelessness

The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite; if you say, I believe in God, you have already suggested the possibility of not believing in him. [p.250] ↗

— Northrop Frye

#poetic-theory #world-culture #mythology

Phaedra keeps saying she's being selfish. That she hates herself for it, but she does it anyway. She can't deny herself what she wants, even if it brings about her downfall and his." "And have you learned anything from our literary parallel?" "Not really, I keep thinking that she would do it all over again if there were a chance...a chance that it could go right. Even if 99 times out of a 100 the story ends badly, it's worth it if only once she gets a happy ending. ↗

— Cora Carmack

#chance-and-fortune #desire #garrick #guilt #hope

Revolution was the great nightmare of eighteenth-century British society, and when first the American Revolution of 1776, then the French Revolution of 1789 overturned the accepted order, the United Kingdom exercised all its power so that revolution would not damage its own hardwon security and growing prosperity. Eighteenth-century writing is full of pride in England as the land of liberty (far ahead of France, the great rival, in political maturity), and saw a corresponding growth in national self-confidence accompanying the expansion of empire. ↗

— Ronald Carter

#literary-criticism

Anything that doesn't fit this mode has been shoved into an area of lesser solemnity called 'genre fiction,' and it is here that the spy thriller and the crime story and the adventure story and the supernatural tale and the science fiction, however excellently written, must reside, sent to their rooms, as it were, for the misdemeanor of being enjoyable in what is considered a meretricious way. They invent, and we all know they invent, at least up to a point, and they are, therefore, not about 'real life,' which ought to lack coincidences and weirdness and action-adventure, unless the adventure story is about war, of course, where anything goes, and they are, therefore, not solid. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#literary-snobbery #nonfiction #imagination