It must inquire not merely about the circumstances of the time in general, but in particular about the writer's position with regard to these things, the interests and motives, the leading ideas of his literary activity.
Ferdinand Christian Baur

It took me fifty years to deal with the Holocaust at all. And I did it in a literary way.
Leonard Baskin

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.
Robert Morgan

It's too bad for us 'literary' enthusiasts, but it's the truth nevertheless - pictures tell any story more effectively than words.
William Moulton Marston

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least.
Horace

Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying No to any authority - literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political.
Ignazio Silone

Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself.
Robertson Davies

Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.
Dean Koontz

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Gaston Bachelard

Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life.
Rick Moody

Me, my literary reputation is mostly abroad, but I am anchored here in New York. I can't think of any other place I'd rather die than here.
Harold Brodkey

Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.
Dan Simmons

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.
John Kenneth Galbraith

My literary success meant nothing to me.
Taylor Caldwell

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.
Amy Tan

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.
H. G. Wells

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

Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking.
Gertrude Stein

One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.
Naguib Mahfouz

One learns little more about a man from the feats of his literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.
Frank Moore Colby