Literary Works Quotes

• All great literary works influence us as writers, not their stories as much as their storytelling ability.

  Michael Scott

  Stories, Influence, Storytelling

  Source: emunderwood.com

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• Ever since my youth it has disturbed me that of the literary works that survived their own epoch, so many dealt with historical rather than contemporary subjects.

  Lion Feuchtwanger

  Historical, Youth, Disturbed

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• SERIAL, n. A literary work, usually a story that is not true, creeping through several issues of a newspaper or magazine.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Work, Issues, Stories

  Ambrose Bierce (2012). “The Devil's Dictionary”, p.117, Courier Corporation

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• Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.

  Bertolt Brecht

  Taken, Writing, Reality

  Bertolt Brecht, John Willett (1964). “Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic”

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• A great literary work can be completely, completely unpredictable. Which can sometimes make them very hard to read, but it gives them a great originality.

  Yann Martel

  Giving, Originality, Sometimes

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• During half a century of literary work, I have endeavoured to introduce the philosophy of evolution into the sphere of literature, and to inspire my readers to think in evolutionary terms.

  Johannes V. Jensen

  Philosophy, Thinking, Inspire

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• The same tantalizing guile and sublime skill....[The series is] reinforced in its claim to be one of the major literary works of this century....Only two other writers that this reviewer can think of have each created an entire, discrete and compelling world, a totally believable entity which one might wish to inhabit, and they are Joyce and Proust. It is not pretentious to place Patrick O'Brian in the first canon of literature.

  Kevin Myers

  Thinking, Skills, Two

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• Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.

  Milan Kundera

  Reason, Fragments, Existence

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• A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts - for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work.

  Andrei Tarkovsky

  Emotional, Perception, Cinema

  "Sculpting in Time" by Andrei Tarkovsky, (p. 176), 1986.

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• I can't do no literary work for the rest of this year because I'm meditating another lawsuit and looking around for a defendant.

  Mark Twain

  Work, Writing, Years

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• 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 V. Jensen

  Examination, Trends, Medical

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• We are deceiving ourselves if we believe that a literary work written and published in a country where 70 per cent of the population is illiterate, can change the political and social life of the country..it is up to political organization..and not to romantic literature.. to change the present situation.

  Zakaria Tamer

  Country, Believe, Organization

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• I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.

  Marcel Proust

  Pain, Past, Survival

  Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.4860, Delphi Classics

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• No man has an appreciation so various that his judgment is good upon all varieties of literary work.

  Mark Twain

  Appreciation, Men, Editors

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.219, Courier Corporation

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• Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.

  Harold Bloom

  Pain, Memories, Struggle

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• Autobiographical writings, essays, interviews, various other things... All the non-fiction prose I wanted to keep, that was the idea behind this collected volume, which came out about few years ago. I didn't think of Winter Journal, for example, as an autobiography, or a memoir. What it is is a literary work, composed of autobiographical fragments, but trying to attain, I hope, the effect of music.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Winter, Thinking

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy, Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

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• We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent wasa youthful effervescence which we have now lost.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Writing, Skills, One Day

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1971). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude”, p.161, Harvard University Press

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• I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely.

  Vivian Gornick

  Order, Firsts, Produce

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• This is how I understand literature - as a kind of remix or echo chamber. What's going on in a literary work are other literary things disinterred, cannibalized, and recombined.

  Tommy McCarthy

  Echoes, Literature, Kind

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Writing and making films aren't different things to me. Or maybe it has become so, now. Making film is a very long process and you have to be physically strong. The literary work is more mystical, because it's only the writer, and connected to something inside.

  Abdellah Taia

  Strong, Writing, Long

  "No one is capable of freeing oneself from society". Interview with Rebecka Bülow, logger.believermag.com. October 7, 2014.

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• Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.

  Julian Barnes

  Book, Literature, Hawthorne

  "Conversation: Julian Barnes, Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize". "Art Beat" with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. November 8, 2011.

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• My books are my tools, and the greater their variety and perfection the greater the help to my literary work.

  Tryon Edwards

  Book, Perfection, Tools

  Tryon Edwards (2015). “The New Dictionary of Thoughts”, p.765, Ravenio Books

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• I use biography, I use literary connections (as with Platen - this seems to me extremely helpful for appreciating the nuances of Mann's and Aschenbach's sexuality), I use philosophical sources (but not in the way many Mann critics do, where the philosophical theses and concepts seem to be counters to be pushed around rather than ideas to be probed), and I use juxtapositions with other literary works (including Mann's other fiction) and with works of music.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophical, Ideas, Appreciate

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Sometime during the 1990s, when I was teaching philosophy at UCSD, my friend, colleague, and music teacher, Carol Plantamura, discussed the possibility of teaching a course together looking at ways in which various literary works (plays, stories, novels) had been treated as operas, and how different themes emerged in the opera and in its original. One of the pairings we planned to use was Mann's great novella and Britten's opera. Unfortunately, the course was never taught, but the idea remained with me.

  Philip Kitcher

  Teacher, Philosophy, Teaching

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I don't think Roger Ebert has ever mentioned a screenplay. He assigns every auctorial move to the director, which makes some sense since the director has run a one-off game, but if Hamlet were written last year and had been only performed once as a film, and it didn't come off well on screen for whatever reason, it would be gone forever as a literary work, and never would have been considered as one.

  William Monahan

  Running, Moving, Thinking

  Source: collider.com

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