#literary

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

— Erma Bombeck

#literary #never #seriously #start #suicide

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write. ↗

— Thomas Carlyle

#great #great discovery #literary #literary men #literature

The particular myth that's been organizing this talk, and in a way the whole series, is the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible. The civilization we live in at present is a gigantic technological structure, a skyscraper almost high enough to reach the moon. It looks like a single world-wide effort, but it's really a deadlock of rivalries; it looks very impressive, except that it has no genuine human dignity. For all its wonderful machinery, we know it's really a crazy ramshackle building, and at any time may crash around our ears. What the myth tells us is that the Tower of Babel is a work of human imagination, that its main elements are words, and that what will make it collapse is a confusion of tongues. All had originally one language, the myth says. The language is not English or Russian or Chinese or any common ancestor, if there was one. It is the language that makes Shakespeare and Pushkin authentic poets, that gives a social vision to both Lincoln and Gandhi. It never speaks unless we take the time to listen in leisure, and it speaks only in a voice too quiet for panic to hear. And then all it has to tell us, when we look over the edge of our leaning tower, is that we are not getting any nearer heaven, and that it is time to return to earth. [p.98] ↗

— Northrop Frye

#myth #education

You have to remember that in addition to running a literary agency, I am also an ebook publisher. ↗

— Richard Curtis

#agency #also #am #i #i am

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive. ↗

— Clifford Geertz

#criticism #find #how #literary #literary criticism

But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is. ↗

— Taylor Hackford

#cast #contribution #director #film #fit

There are two methods for the literary study of any book - the first being the study of its thought and emotion; the second only that of its workmanship. A student of literature should study some of the Bible from both points of view. ↗

— Lafcadio Hearn

#being #bible #book #both #emotion

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.' ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#both #contributions #criticism #feel #his

I did not win and in fact I was called into the principal's office for a consultation with my parents. But that was the beginning of my literary career. ↗

— William Joyce

#called #career #consultation #did #fact

They are the literary equivalent of sequins on an evening dress. ↗

— Stefan Kanfer

#equivalent #evening #literary #sequins