That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.
J. M. Coetzee

The aim of literary ambition is to demonstrate one's greatness of soul.
Mason Cooley

The best source for finding an agent is called Literary Agents of North America. It's a complete list of agents, not only by name and address, but by type of book they represent and by what their submission criteria are.
Sara Paretsky

The Bible was written in several languages, embraces many literary forms, and reflects cultures very different from our own. These are important considerations for properly understanding the Bible in its context.
Troy Perry

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements.
Paul de Man

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.
Henry James

The first epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be read.
Lascelles Abercrombie

The great break of my literary career was going to law school.
Scott Turow

The greater the conceptual significance of a literary product, the more it should be assumed that it is based on an idea that determines the whole, and that the deeper consciousness of the time to which it belongs is reflected in it.
Ferdinand Christian Baur

The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work.
Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

The intercourse between the Mediterranean and the North or between the Atlantic and Central Europe was never purely economic or political; it also meant the exchange of knowledge and ideas and the influence of social institutions and artistic and literary forms.
Christopher Dawson

The literary culture, if you examine it, the high literary culture is that which preserves the government and you know it's really the talk for those who have.
Kathy Acker

The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's.
Jonathan Coe

The New Testament evinces its universal design in its very, style, which alone distinguishes it from all the literary productions of earlier and later times.
Philip Schaff

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.
Jose Saramago

The one thing I would like more credit for is being part of a movement which involves recognising the importance of plot and asserting that books of literary worth could be written that had plots.
Scott Turow

The period that I could consider the most important in my literary work came about beginning with the Revolution, and in a certain way, developed as a consequence of the Revolution. But it was also a result of the counterrevolutionary coup of November 1975.
Jose Saramago

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.
Clifford Geertz

The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all "bottom line" editors; everything depends on the money.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel.
Norman Spinrad