My literary heroes all wrote about L.A.: Joseph Wambaugh, Ross Macdonald, and Raymond Chandler were the three writers that made me want to be a writer.
A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate.
Back in the 1980s, when I was a lowly editorial assistant by day and trying to be a novelist by night, no god reigned so supreme as the god of literary prose.
Since it is impossible to know what's really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.
When I write plays, I'm already seeing the shapes on stage, of the actors and their interaction, and so on and so forth. I don't think I've ever written one play as an abstract piece, as a literary piece, floating in the air somewhere, to be flushed out later on.
As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.
There can be no literary equivalent to truth.
I was a businessman for 16 years of my life, so when I started writing, I wanted to keep my literary identity separate.
Sometimes there's a snobbery among literary types that these people don't really get it, but in a lot of ways they get it more than the literati. There's a culture in the background that they understand and know. They get that deeper level.
All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.
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.
You don't have to know people personally for them to be role models. Some of my most important role models were historical or literary figures that I only read about - never actually met.
Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.
Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.
I was an English major at the University of Minnesota, and I was very shy, which many people misinterpreted as intelligence. On the basis of that wrong impression, I became the editor of the campus literary magazine.
There's nothing quite as exciting or moving as the very finest literary non-fiction.
I guess the two Manifesto, Communicating Vessels, Mad Love, and some of his poetry made a significant mark on me but as far as bringing a literary element into the music I see it as a much broader assimilation.
Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.
Reading 'Moby-Dick' was really a sort of transformative literary experience for me.
German writers in the late 18th century were the first to uphold a prickly, literary nationalism, in reaction to the then dominance and prestige of French literature.
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.
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.
The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.
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.
Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.
'The Dublin Magazine' has been edited with good taste, and it is very agreeable reading, but to speak quite candidly, I do not believe in the future of any literary journal any more than I believe in the future of the Trinity.
In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality.
I am in the Master of Professional Writing program teaching Humor Writing, Literary and Dramatic.
I have a really good idea for a novel and would like to just kind of try my hand at fiction. I'm starting to kind of get a really good body of work going from a literary standpoint. As long as the audience is there, man, I'll keep cranking them out.
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.
Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.
There's something very misleading about the literary culture that looks at writers in their 30s and calls them 'budding' or 'promising', when in fact they're peaking.
Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.
But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now.
I don't think that my films are 'literary'; they are based on the most ordinary things of life.
Local markets for literary fiction remain underdeveloped; the metropolis often holds out the only real possibility of a professional writing career.
