62 Literary Genre Quotes
Following is our list of literary genre quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about .
Famous Literary Genre Quotes
The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. — Jose Saramago
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions. — Iris Murdoch
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture. — Juan Ramon Jimenez
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. — Theodore Sturgeon
Literature is the question minus the answer. — Roland Barthes
Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being. — Paul De Man
A Christian philosophy of literature begins with the same agenda of issues that any philosophy of literature addresses. Its distinctive feature is that it relates these issues to the Christian faith. — Leland Ryken
Literature provides us with the opportunity to escape into fictional worlds that are ultimately rooted in human universals shaped by common biological forces. — Gad Saad
We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it. — F. Sionil José
For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application -- why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again. — Howard Nemerov
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez
There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about. — Raymond Carver
A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can. — Edith Hamilton
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing. — Anthony Burgess
Literary Style Quotes
What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. — Joseph Pulitzer
A contemporary artist can use the findings of all epochs and all styles, from the most primitive literary expressions up to the most refined products of the baroque. — Juan Goytisolo
Fine writing is a distinct disadvantage. So is unique literary style. They take attention from the subject — Claude C. Hopkins
I no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house, thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist. — Harriet Beecher Stowe
I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits. It is the style of all the writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean to and more than they feel. It is the style of most artists and all humbug. — Cyril Connolly
The New Testament evinces its universal design in its very, style, which alone distinguishes it from all the literary productions of earlier and later times. — Philip Schaff
To my mind, Death in Venice represents an enormous advance in Mann's literary development, not simply for the commonly appreciated reason that he crafted a superbly supple and elegant style, apparently well suited to the kind of prose Aschenbach is supposed to write. — Philip Kitcher
I should say that I'm not conscious of any particular style or any particular literary device when I am writing. I have written 22 books, and they are all very different. I have tried all kinds of genres. — Isabel Allende
All literary style, especially national style, is made up of such coincidences, which are a spiritual sort of puns. That is why style is untranslatable. — Gilbert K. Chesterton
The beat literary movement is strong because of those very challenging and individual relationships and styles and contention and so on. So I just feel blessed by this kind of opportunity that came from it. It was a kind of seed. — Anne Waldman
People Writing About Literary Genre
| Name | Quotes | Likes |
|---|---|---|
 Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
334 | 3608 |
 Jose Saramago |
206 | 954 |
 Iris Murdoch |
183 | 962 |
 Juan Ramon Jimenez |
19 | 165 |
 Theodore Sturgeon |
75 | 291 |
 Roland Barthes |
154 | 943 |
More Literary Genre Quotes
I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner. — Pope Francis
I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre. — Ben Lerner
Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem. — Rick Moody
I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one. — Mark Haddon
The crime genre's always been regarded very well by the literary end of the book world, whereas horror, although it had that spell in the late eighties, by and large, it's sort of ghetto-ized, and considered to be exploited literature. — Peter James
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. — Marilyn Hacker
Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish. — Dean Koontz
I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form. — Sue Grafton
On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story. — J. K. Rowling
A scientific autobiography belongs to a most awkward literary genre. If the difficulties facing a man trying to record his life are great - and few have overcome them successfully - they are compounded in the case of scientists, of whom many lead monotonous and uneventful lives and who, besides, often do not know how to write . . . — Erwin Chargaff
I think suspense should be like any other color on a writers palette. I suppose Im in the minority but I think its crazy for literary fiction to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto. — Jess Walter
Science fiction is the characteristic literary genre of the century. It is the genre that stands in opposition to literary modernism. — David G. Hartwell
Considering that "literary fiction" is a sub-genre that's not quite the same as "literature," either, it follows that the short, semi-humorous bits posted online for all to see are something absolutely other, uniquely themselves compared to canonical short stories, for example, and so it'd probably be best to call it something other than "online lit" since I honestly think very little of it can compare to so-called "literature." — Lee Klein
Blogging has helped create an expanded awareness of the creative nonfiction genre, generally. But I suspect many bloggers continue to be unaware that they are (or have the potential to be) "literary" or "artful." — Lee Gutkind
Good writing is good writing. In many ways, it’s the audience and their expectations that define a genre. A reader of literary fiction expects the writing to illuminate the human condition, some aspect of our world and our role in it. A reader of genre fiction likes that, too, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the story. — Rosemary Clement-Moore
Mystery, investigation, false leads, solution - we associate that structure with genre fiction, but it exists in our real lives, too. There's no reason why literary fiction shouldn't be able to acknowledge that and make it fresh. — Ned Beauman
With every literary genre or form come some conventional expectations that the biblical authors either follow or deviate from. — Craig Blomberg
I would not be surprised to see interesting new forms of expression and literary genres develop as the e-book movement matures. — Tom Peters
I may be the person who put "dieselpunk" into the conversation. I have always been a reader who reads in a really broad way. I read genre writers and I read literary fiction and I read books by dead people. — Emily Barton
When Christians speak of the authority of Scripture, because Christians believe that this word, even though it's mediated through many different human authors, nevertheless is God breathed and is revealed by God and is utterly reliable and all that it says, with all of its different literary genres, it's trustworthy and without mistake or distortion. It is trustworthy and therefore, because it is from God it has God's authority. — D. A. Carson
I was always creatively stubborn, adverse to editing by others, and wanted to use the kind of Ukrainian we spoke among ourselves rather than the more artificial prescribed literary Ukrainian. The problem was the greatest in prose, where editors would change my language because "it sounded better this way." My poetry they left alone probably out of deference to that hallowed genre. — Yuriy Tarnawsky
Downtown New York, I'm within certain styles of music and I'm also within certain cultural, you know, and literary context. So DJ Spooky was meant to be a kind of ironic take on that. It was always meant to be kind of a criticism and critique of how downtown culture would separate genres and styles because it was ambiguous. You couldn't fit it into anything and that was the point. — DJ Spooky
I love outsider stories. And I also like a lot of genre fiction, too. So I wanted to write a literary book that flirted with thriller and fantasy and even science fiction. I wanted the coming-of-age story and the love story to be about "outsiderdom" - one of the themes I am most interested in. — Porochista Khakpour
I hate to see great works of literature ghettoized, whereas others that conform to the rules, conventions, and procedures of the genre we call literary fiction get accorded greater esteem and privilege. I also have a problem with how books are marketed, with certain cover designs and typefaces. They're often stamped with an identity that has nothing to do with their effect on the reader. — Michael Chabon
Only idiots or snobs ever really thought less of 'genre books' of course. There are stupid books and there are smart books. There are well-written books and badly written books. There are fun books and boring books. All of these distinctions are vastly more important than the distinction between the literary and the non-literary. — Stephen Marche
The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction. — Susan Sontag
Arnold Rampersad's stunningly revealing biography has, at long last, unveiled-in magisterial prose-the very complex and vulnerable man behind Ralph Ellison's own masks and myths. One of the nation's most brilliant writers emerges as all the more fascinating precisely because he was so very human. Painstakingly researched and compellingly written, Ralph Ellison is a masterwork of the genre of literary biography. — Henry Louis Gates
I have always liked reading biographies. It is the ideal literary genre for someone too prim, like me, to acknowledge a gossipy interest in the living - don't you hate gossips, aren't they too awful? - but avid for any nuggets from the private lives of the dead because that is perfectly respectable, an altogether worthy and informative way of spending one's time. — Jill Tweedie
What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism . — Terry Eagleton
People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy. — Gary Saul Morson
Somehow this literary genre, which most people condemned, acted as a sort of counterbalance to Charles's soul; it was the ballast that prevented him from lurching into the serious or melancholy, unlike Andrew, who had been unable to adopt his cousin's casual attitude to life, and to whom everything seemed so achingly profound, imbed with that absurd solemnity that the transience of of existence conferred upon even the smallest act. — Félix J. Palma
The Booker thing was a catalyst for me in a bizarre way. It’s perceived as an accolade to be published as a ‘literary’ writer, but, actually, it’s pompous and it’s fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself. 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. — Neil Cross
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
I do not know what might be the most fitting description.... I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner. And this is what I said when they asked me if I would accept my election as pontiff: I am a sinner, but I trust in the infinite mercy and patience of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I accept in a spirit of penance. — Pope Francis
Literary genres and techniques tend to take form in one's mind somewhat the way computer templates provide form for different computer tasks. — Aberjhani
In Conclusion
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