Literary Terms Quotes

• There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is 'idiot'.

  Larry Niven

  Mistake, Character, Belief

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• The word "God" is used in most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, as a not fully grasped object of the speaker's consciousness -- a literary term, in short; and mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs.

  Matthew Arnold

  Mean, Different, Consciousness

  Matthew Arnold (1874). “Literature & Dogma: An Essay Towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible”, p.12

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• I think men can really get in the way when you are trying to sort your life out and get on with it. Because they just take up so much space. I'm not under any illusions that I could have been where I am now in literary terms if I had been heterosexual. I really believe I would not be.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Believe, Thinking, Men

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• There are in me, in literary terms, two distinct characters: one who is taken with roaring, with lyricism, with soaring aloft, with all the sonorities of phrase and summits of thought; and the other who digs and scratches for truth all he can, who is as interested in the little facts as the big ones, who would like to make you feel materially the things he reproduces.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Art, Taken, Character

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• Metaphor is not, and never has been, a mere literary term. It is an event.

  Mary Ruefle

  Events, Metaphor, Term

  Mary Ruefle (2012). “Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures”, p.131, Wave Books

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• The extraordinarily facile and in literary terms long lived works tend to be about ordinary people. Even Sappho writes about the utterly insignificant . What art can do is make the extraordinary more ordinary and ordinary more extraordinary.

  Robert Dessaix

  Art, Writing, Long

  Source: www.compulsivereader.com

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• I don't think comics necessarily think in literary terms. There is an element of developing your stage persona and your comedic voice, but I don't think comics see it like a character in a novel.

  Ted Alexandro

  Character, Thinking, Voice

  "Laughing at something is a form of accepting it, or at least making peace with it". Interview with Chris Cobb, logger.believermag.com. September 19, 2014.

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• Essentially, the scripts are not that different. Let's say, in literary terms, it's the difference between writing horizontally and writing vertically. In live television, you wrote much more vertically. You had to probe people because you didn't have money or sets or any of the physical dimensions that film will allow you. So you generally probed people a little bit more. Film writing is much more horizontal. You can insert anything you want: meadows, battlefields, the Taj Mahal, a cast of thousands. But essentially, writing a story is writing a story.

  Rod Serling

  Writing, Differences, People

  Source: www.rodserling.com

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