The literary trappings and moralizing of science fiction I find insufficiently compelling.
A. B. Yehoshua
You have to remember that I was a bright but simple fellow from Canada who seldom, if ever, met another writer, and then only a so-called literary type that occasionally sold a story and meanwhile worked in an office for a living.
A. E. van Vogt
I think literary theory has not been terribly good for English studies in a while. It's not that theory isn't interesting, but it isn't about books, or the idiosyncrasies and complexities of putting language together.
A. S. Byatt
If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.
Aaron Copland
I read a lot of science fiction, but I also mixed it up with a lot of other genres: crime, literary fiction, as well as nonfiction. Author-wise, I'm a fan of Stephen King, Lauren Beukes, Robert McCammon, Raymond Chandler, Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker and Gail Simone, among many others.
Adam Christopher
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
Being Jewish is a big part of my artistic sensibility and my humor... I think it gives me a certain take on the world on a literary level.
Adam Mansbach
I had definitely missed the literary development game with Paper Lantern Lit, and writing exclusively wasn't giving me complete fulfillment.
Adam Silvera
With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension.
Adrian McKinty
I use the language I use to my friends. They wouldn't believe me if I used some high-flown literary language. I want them to believe me.
Adrian Mitchell
'Luke Cage' came out in 1972 at the height of the blaxploitation era. It was a literary response to this notion of blaxploitation movies. It was the first time in American culture that Hollywood was embracing black movies.
Adrian Younge
Now that I think about it, maybe my own literary exploration of the dark secrets held by families could be traced back to V.C. Andrews.
Alafair Burke
There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'
Alain de Botton
I was a very un-literary child, which might reassure parents with kids who don't read.
Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.
Alan Furst
I've come to think of Dunnett as the literary equivalent of the Velvet Underground; Not many people bought the books, but everyone who did wrote a novel.
Alaya Dawn Johnson
As any competent student of literary composition knows, the more natural and casual a voice sounds in print, the more likely it is to have been edited time and again.
Albert Murray
I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
I have always loved really dense, complicated stories with lots of layers, tons of obscure literary references, and a plethora of inside jokes.
Alethea Kontis
My literary heroes were mostly women writers and thinkers - Joy Williams, Joan Didion, Anne Sexton, June Jordan, Sarah Schulman, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Christa Wolf - and much of this writing was political as well as literary.
'War and Peace' holds a strange place in literary history, participating in the crowning of realism as a substantial and serious literary mode in America, even as the novel also contributed to the argument that historical fiction could be by nature dangerous, illegitimate, and inaccurate.
We talk about characters in literature as though they were built on the model of the real person, but then I often think that the way we present ourselves as real people is based heavily on the way literary psychologies are stylized, and I wonder how the two forms of realistic personhood feed on or fulfill each other.
Ezekiel Boone's books, starting with 'The Hatching' series, are meant to be big, sprawling, smart, entertaining books that are fun above all else; the literary novels written under my real name, Alexi Zentner, are certainly a little more quiet.
But everything written has style. The list of ingredients on the side of a cornflakes box has style. And everything literary has literary style. And style is integral to a work. How something is told correlates with - more - makes what's being told. A story is its style.
I met an internationally esteemed writer at a literary party being given in her honor. She was wearing a beautiful pink, flouncy, frilly dress. I complimented her on it. She said, 'Ach, it's my nightgown. I couldn't decide what else to wear.'
We should have scant notion of the gardens of these New England colonists in the seventeenth century were it not for a cheerful traveller named John Josselyn, a man of everyday tastes and much inquisitiveness, and the pleasing literary style which comes from directness, and an absence of self-consciousness.
I try not to think about writers who came before me when I'm writing myself. If I did, given the abundance of literary talent Scotland - and Edinburgh in particular - has bestowed upon the world, I wouldn't be able to get as much as a sentence written.
New York offers a bubble out of the literary life that is very useful. We have more time for the children, for the cooking.
I'm well-read as far as literary fiction, but I wanted to make better decisions about my writing, to use words or phrases more confidently by learning how your words can be interpreted, the shades of meaning, the different connotations.
I had a little portable typewriter. I call it my Harlem Literary Fellowship.
Jimmy Baldwin was not only a writer, an international literary figure: he was a man, spirit, voice - old and black and terrible as that first ancestor.
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.
My father is a poet. He's a literary giant of this country - writes in Hindi - and also quite unique because he has a Ph.D. in English Literature. He taught at Harvard University, which is one of the most prominent universities in the country.
I didn't know V. S. Naipaul very well, and to a large extent, my acquaintance with him was limited to meetings at literary festivals.
Authenticity does matter, but only as it serves the novel's more traditional literary demands: that the fault lines be drawn where the internal life and the larger world meet.
I read contrived memoirs by presidential candidates. For every 'Dreams From My Father' - Barack Obama's honest, literary portrayal of his biracial upbringing - there were a dozen cautious, formulaic vanity projects by politicians.
Ideally, I'd love to write poems that intrigued humans across the board: literary folk and academics as well as... dog-walkers, doctors, plumbers, chefs, math professors, jugglers, etc.
No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.
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.
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
I think what matters most in literary work is the context, not the text.
Every literary culture has among its first bearings the 'blether' of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.
I had always been literary, in the sense of loving poetry and discovering novels, but I found my voice, as they say, in an office full of elderly people who looked after blind ex-servicemen.
I don't read literary blogs. I used to read them, but it was upsetting when they would talk, in a snarky way, about my friends.
I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.
As I said earlier, there are no writers who could create a literary vision of the new reality.
I'm a huge fan of the book and Stephen King is one of my big heroes, literary heroes, and I am a fan, and I want to see a movie of 'It.'
Bent Literary Agency had a Q&A on Twitter, and I took a chance and asked if the Black Lives Matter movement was an appropriate topic for a YA novel. Brooks Sherman, who is now my agent, responded that he didn't think any topics were inappropriate for YA. I remember being so terrified even just sending the tweet.
I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.
