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Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.

Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life.

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

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 use the language I use to my friends. They wouldn't believe me if I used some high-flown literary language. I want them to believe me.

Adrian Mitchell

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

Slobodan Milosevic

I'm not against asking the audience to work, but I think what you have now is a sort of gratuitous deconstruction as a result of a fashion of literary deconstructionism indicating that there are no meanings.

Jonathan Miller

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

Some literary types subscribe to the notion that being a writer like Salinger entitles a person to remain free of the standards that might apply to mere mortals.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements.

One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.