PLAGIARISM, n. A literary coincidence compounded of a discreditable priority and an honorable subsequence. - Ambrose Bierce
The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
You can't live with literary characters no matter how much you might like to. You can have them as imaginary friends that you can call up when you need to. One of the tasks of art is to provide people with companions. - Henning Mankell
Our thoughts of literary renaissance should always center themselves on the removal of superstition, meanness, indignity and ignorance. - Periyar E.V. Ramasamy
Martial (the main character of LOCUS SOLUS) has a very interesting conception of literary beauty: the work must contain nothing real, no observations about the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary constructions. These are in themselves ideas from an extrahuman world. - Pierre Janet
The spread of secondary and latterly of tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought. - Peter Medawar
...stories break silence and nourish those who work, feel, and dream.From Costa Rica: A Traveler's Literary Companion - Carmen Naranjo
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it. - George Bernard Shaw
...the pleasures of literary fiction are the pleasures of orientation; the pleasures of literature are the pleasures of bewilderment. - Toby Litt
By now, we're all familiar with the literary post-apocalyptic world's metaphors. The zombies are our anxieties. The vampires are our greed. Our fairies are hope. Our werewolves are … what again? Something - Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Excessive literary production is a social offense. - George Eliot
In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. - George Orwell
Novelists and the literary world play an important part in shaping languages. The Swahili they write influence the readers and their languages. The literary obstacle in Tanzania is not that people do not read, but that they don’t read because there are no interesting writers. - Enock Maregesi
Carry out your literary dream, no matter how unlikely it may seem... - Terry A. O'Neal
Narration, after all, isn’t just a literary function. It represents the human capacity to tell stories in such a manner that they yield meaning. Television replaced this concerted quest for meaning with a frantic pursuit of wonder. - Steve Almond
Medora Manson, in her prosperous days, inaugurated a "literary salon"; but it had soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it. - Edith Wharton
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read."[As quoted in Literary Censorship in England (in Current Opinion, Vol. 55, No. 5, November 1913)] - George Bernard Shaw
Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel. - Fernando Pessoa
I grew up on a mixed diet of mass and class, and I still read that way. I hate it when people apologize for what they read. Some bestsellers aren't exactly literary. So what? They're fun and rip-roaring, Who instituted the book police and why do we have to answer them? Grrrrr! - Jennifer Donnelly
I write across several genres. I’m a slut for words. I can’t keep it in my literary pants. - Fierce Dolan
Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists. - Sara Sheridan
Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. - C.S. Lewis
A love letter can be very short or it can be long; it can be literary or non-literary; it can be bright or dark, cheerful or tragic. But above all, for a love letter to be a love letter it must be sincere! - Mehmet Murat ildan
Horror. I can't manage it. I become--well--horrified. Self-help books have a similar effect. When asked, "Any literary genre you simply can't be bothered with?" - (By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from the NYT Book Review, by Pamela Paul) - Emma Thompson
Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting,too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression. - Elizabeth Wurtzel
[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it! - Terry Pratchett
It was only much later that he was made flesh and blood [in the Gospels] on paper. Thus Christ was created as a literary creation. - Paul Louis Couchoud
Reading literary fiction stimulates cognition beyond the brain functions related to reading, say, magazine articles, interviews, or most online nonfiction reporting. - Susan Reynolds
One recalls the literary writer who, after grasping a story of a Mars voyage as a metaphor for isolation and the precariousness of relationships, realized that at a deeper, more subtle level it might even be a story about an actual trip to Mars! - Michael Flynn
Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear. - Patricia Fuller
I would have died, before a literary agent ever committed to my book. This is why I chose to empower myself by self publishing. - Mary Sage Nguyen
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've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary. - Sara Sheridan
The Llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat, with an indolent expression and an undulating throat; like an unsuccessful literary man. - Hilaire Belloc
Regardless of the popular literary trend of the times, write the thing which lies close to your heart. - Bess Streeter Aldrich
Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world. - Samuel Johnson
A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar. - Carolyn G. Heilbrun
In the literary world today, Christianity has pretty well replaced sex as the present pet taboo, not only because Christianity is so often distorted by Christians as well as non-Christians, but because it is too wild and free for the timid. - Madeleine L'Engle
You may not want to hear that or think of it as writing, but I’m telling you that the moving of information is a literary act in and of itself. Even when people aren’t reading it. - Kenneth Goldsmith
PUBLISH, n. In literary affairs, to become the fundamental element in a cone of critics. - Ambrose Bierce
...the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon. - Noam Chomsky
If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong. - Aaron Copland
As it stands there is a very strong argument that as the book trade becomes increasingly corporate it's our literary heritage that is at risk - a vital part of our culture. - Sara Sheridan
Even after making up one's mind to the sacrifices Ihad decided upon, there is always left a trace of envyfor those who have triumphed in the melancholystruggle for literary supremacy - Paul Bourget
DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work. - Ambrose Bierce
The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den. - Phillip Adams
Dear Literary World, Sorry for breaking down your door...I'll pay for that!!! Since I'm here and planning to stay a while, let me tell you some stories!! - C.K. Webb
When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature - Tzvetan Todorov
To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent. - Nelson Algren
USAGE, n. The First Person of the literary Trinity, the Second and Third being Custom and Conventionality. Imbued with a decent reverence for this Holy Triad an industrious writer may hope to produce books that will live as long as the fashion. - Ambrose Bierce
Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth. - Mark Twain
Having been an English literary graduate, I've been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity. I think media are at their most interesting before anybody's thought of calling them art, when people still think they're just a load of junk. - Douglas Adams
The reality is that there is nothing so vulgar left in human experience for which some educator from some institution cannot be found to justify it. In the name of literary license, anything passes off as permissible.
What I like most about the process of literary creation is gathering mundane facts and concepts, then clothing them with the ornate jewels and fine garments of imagination and fantasy, weaving a tale on the glittering edge of possibility. - Gregory Hamilton
If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all that contemporary, is it - Warren Ellis
I can't bear literary snobbery. - Sara Sheridan
The cultivation of literary pursuits forms the basis of all sciences, and in their perfection consist the reputation and prosperity of kingdoms. - Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo