Pastoral Resources

How dare anyone, parent, schoolteacher, or merely literary critic, tell me not to act colored.

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.

Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single.

They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?'

My literary success meant nothing to me.

I get sent a lot of scripts which feature him as a kind of all-purpose Victorian literary character and really understand little, if anything, about him, his life or his books.

So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We'll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

I might have simply settled down into an armchair literary life. I really don't know exactly why I didn't.

When I was in college, I was the editor of the literary magazine and insisted neither the editors nor the writers be specifically identified-only our student numbers appeared on the title page. I love that idea and still do.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

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

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.

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

As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.

People aren't used to thinking of cultural forms spreading out across the full range of formal interactions - or what is called the 'text' in literary terms.

To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.

Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.

First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.

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