Literary Art Quotes

• We lose ourselves in stories; that's the beauty of literary art.

  Siri Hustvedt

  Art, Stories, Loses

  Source: www.harpersbazaar.com

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• An essay is a work of literary art which has a minimum of one anecdote and one universal idea.

  Carol Bly

  Art, Ideas, Anecdotes

  Carol Bly (1990). “The passionate, accurate story: making your heart's truth into literature”

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• The beauty of the literary art, the grappling with the black church, the wrestling with one's identity in the bosom of a complicated black community that was both bulwark to the larger white society as well as a threshing ground, so to speak, to hash out the differences that black people have among ourselves.

  Michael Eric Dyson

  Art, Wrestling, White

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• In literary art, as in the art of the architect, the painter, the musician, signs that the artist is thinking of his own achievement more than of his subject always offend me.

  Herbert Spencer

  Art, Thinking, Achievement

  Herbert Spencer (1902). “Facts and comments”

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• In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political -- especially that which pretends not to be.

  Edward Abbey

  Art, Political, World

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.34, RosettaBooks

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• The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things"-the norms of human action.

  Russell Kirk

  Art, Book, Taken

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• What care I if it be "wild and improbable" and "lacking in literary art"? I refuse to be any longer hampered by such canons of criticism. The one essential thing I demand of a book is that it should interest me. If it does, I forgive it every other fault.

  Lucy Maud Montgomery

  Art, Book, Forgiving

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• I may remind you that history is not a branch of literature. The facts of history, like the facts of geology or astronomy, can supply material for literary art; for manifest reasons they lend themselves to artistic representation far more readily than those of the natural sciences; but to clothe the story of human society in a literary dress is no more the part of a historian as a historian, than it is the part of an astronomer as an astronomer to present in an artistic shape the story of the stars.

  J. B. Bury

  Art, Stars, Dresses

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• Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in 'Deerslayer,' and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.

  Mark Twain

  Art, Two, Space

  Mark Twain (2014). “Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses”, p.4, The Floating Press

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• The visual and literary arts are of perennial interest to me, and these art forms have become more and more a part of my life; they have become companions of sorts. I cannot imagine my day to day experiences without the presence of these art forms. They're absolutely essential.

  Michael Hersch

  Art, Essentials, Imagine

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• The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art.

  Clement Greenberg

  Photography, Art, Historical

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• The laurels of an orator who is not a master of literary art wither quickly.

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich

  Art, Masters, Laurels

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1903). “Ponkapog Papers”

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• A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.

  Will Eisner

  Art, Thinking, Keys

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• Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.

  Terry Eagleton

  Art, Years, Ducks

  "A puritan at play" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. March 15, 2008.

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• In truth, the legitimate contention is, not of one age or school of literary art against another, but of all successive schools alike, against the stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the vulgarity which is dead to form.

  Walter Pater

  Art, School, Stupidity

  Walter Pater (2011). “The Works of Walter Pater”, p.261, Cambridge University Press

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• Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself.

  Robertson Davies

  Art, Suffering, Want

  "Somerset Maugham". 1982.

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• San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.

  William Saroyan

  Art, Block, Home

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• In Red Flags, Juris Jurjevics has brilliantly accomplished a feat that is becoming a major characteristic of 21st century literature: the seamless combining of a genre form with the deep resonance of literary art. This book is thrilling to read for both its narrative drive and its insight into the human heart.

  Robert Olen Butler

  Art, Book, Red Flags

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• Executive Severance, a laugh out loud comic mystery novel, epitomizes our current cultural moment in that it is born from the juxtaposition of authorial invention and technological communication innovation. Merging creative text with new electronic context, Robert K. Blechman's novel, which originally appeared as Twitter entries, can be read on a cell phone. His tweets which merge to form an entertaining novel can't be beat. Hold the phone; exalt in the mystery-engage with Blechman's story which signals the inception of a new literary art form.

  Marleen S. Barr

  Art, Communication, Cells

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• Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.

  Salman Rushdie

  Art, Lying, Self

  "I'm returning to India, deal with it - Salman Rushdie to NDTV". Interview with Barkha Dutt, www.ndtv.com. January 25, 2012.

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