#literary

We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it. ↗

— Kevin Ayers

#books #could #explain #had #knew

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#irony #literary #qualities #two

Life, of course, never gets anyone's entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us. As sleep is necessary to our physiology, so depression seems necessary to our psychic economy. In some secret way, Thanatos nourishes Eros as well as opposes it. The two principles work in covert concert; though in most of us Eros dominates, in none of us is Thanatos completely subdued. However-and this is the paradox of suicide-to take one's life is to behave in a more active, assertive, "erotic" way than to helplessly watch as one's life is taken away from one by inevitable mortality. Suicide thus engages with both the death-hating and the death-loving parts of us: on some level, perhaps, we may envy the suicide even as we pity him. It has frequently been asked whether the poetry of Plath would have so aroused the attention of the world if Plath had not killed herself. I would agree with those who say no. The death-ridden poems move us and electrify us because of our knowledge of what happened. Alvarez has observed that the late poems read as if they were written posthumously, but they do so only because a death actually took place. "When I am talking about the weather / I know what I am talking about," Kurt Schwitters writes in a Dada poem (which I have quoted in its entirety). When Plath is talking about the death wish, she knows what she is talking about. In 1966, Anne Sexton, who committed suicide eleven years after Plath, wrote a poem entitled "Wanting to Die," in which these startlingly informative lines appear: But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. When, in the opening of "Lady Lazarus," Plath triumphantly exclaims, "I have done it again," and, later in the poem, writes, Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call, we can only share her elation. We know we are in the presence of a master builder. ↗

— Janet Malcolm

#art

First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory. ↗

— Mason Cooley

#first #itself #literary #literature #only

The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective. ↗

— Harold Bloom

#corrective #current #does #drab #either

It is the growth of advertising in this country which, more than any single element, has brought the American magazine to its present enviable position in points of literary, illustrative and mechanical excellence. ↗

— Edward Bok

#american #any #brought #country #element

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

#always #art #art form #been #belief

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide. ↗

— Erma Bombeck

#literary #never #seriously #start #suicide

One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#had #i #like #literary #more

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge. ↗

— H. G. Wells

#knowledge #leads #literary #nothing #straight