The thing is, if you make best-sellerdom your goal, you're going to be in trouble. It's a very nice thing to have happen, but if one makes that a goal like, say, a literary writer has the goal of getting the Pulitzer Prize, that's so unpredictable.
Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying No to any authority - literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political.
Nathaniel Philbrick's 'In the Heart of the Sea' has rightfully taken its place as a classic for its literary merits. It has a special place in the cannibalism canon as well.
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.
Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.
I've spent my whole literary career blurring boundaries between genres and categories.
A book doesn't have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever.
I think what matters most in literary work is the context, not the text.
I don't know if nature is a direct literary influence on my writing, but it is certainly important to me. I take great joy in writing about it. It is something I have taken with me from my childhood; the body exposed to the threat of the physical world and at the same time being at home in it.
For the last half of my life I have had the doubtful benefit of a brother whose literary reputation is much greater than my own.
Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition. I'm not entirely at ease with that self-description.
The idea of a pseudonym had been flitting around my brain for a long time, along with its cognate, disappearance. In the 1980s, I published some poems under a pen name in a literary magazine to see what it would feel like. It was fun. It was even a little thrilling.
When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels.
I don't know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering.
I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.
Creatively, most of my influences come from the literary world: Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara. Writers are my heroes.
Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?
One's politics are part of one even when one is writing. But if I want to say anything about the state of civil society, I will write an essay. The responsibilities you feel as a novelist are literary ones, I think, not civic ones. And I think politicians are interesting to write about.
Since I make my living as a literary journalist, not a book scout, I spend inordinate amounts of time either reading or writing.
Drama school introduced me to a world I had no idea about. I wasn't brought up in a literary household at all.
I'd always read omnivorously and often thought much literary fiction is read by young men and women in their 20s as substitutes for experience.
America's revolutionary deists saw themselves as - and they were - participants in an international movement that drew on most of the same literary sources across the civilized world.
Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.
The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.
I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.
Being born at the tag-end of the baby boom, I was destined (or doomed, depending on how you look at it) to fall in love with sci-fi. It was one of my first literary loves, as a matter of fact.
I've been trying to... 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.
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.
I remember, when I was young, to have a literary or artistic vocation was really dramatic because you were so isolated from the common world. You felt that you were marginal, and if you dared to try to organise your life around your vocation, you knew you'd be completely segregated.
My belief is that nothing that can be expressed by mathematics cannot be expressed by careful use of literary words.
When you've finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers.
Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.
I was writing very early, like I was involved in our high school literary magazine, which was called 'Pariah.' The football team was the Bears, and the literary magazine was 'Pariah.' It was great. It was definitely a real sub-culture. But I wrote stories for them.
When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.
For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.
I read reviews and consider myself pretty 'plugged in' to the literary cosmos, yet one of the things I love best about book-touring is the opportunity to compare notes with favorite booksellers around the country. I always come home with books by authors I'd never heard of - or books I've read about but didn't realize I might love.
