Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Literary fiction is kept alive by women. Women read more fiction, period.
Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.
Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.
I read many wonderful novels, though I now find the idea of literary fiction obsolete.
I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.
I'm trying to move a little more toward literary fiction while still retaining a popular feel.
I think speculative fiction has fewer unspoken prerequisites than literary fiction for writers of color.
Summer is always a tricky time to recommend new literary fiction. The big releases do not hit until fall.
Yes - 90% of fantasy is crap. And so is 90% of science fiction and 90% of mystery fiction and 90% of literary fiction.
The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.
Literary fiction - if we must use the term - is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.
I resisted children's writing for a long time. I saw myself as a writer of literary fiction. But I had so much more fun writing kids' books.
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.
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.
I always assumed I could never make a living out of literary fiction, and I was right. When I did try, it took four years before being published.
As a teenager, I read a lot of science-fiction, but then I read 'Catch-22' and 'The Catcher in the Rye' and started reading more literary fiction.
Domestic realism has dominated the American marketplace for decades now. It leeches into literary fiction, and I don't think it's that rich a vein.
Local markets for literary fiction remain underdeveloped; the metropolis often holds out the only real possibility of a professional writing career.
When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.
I write literary, not commercial, fiction - or so I've been told by my publishers who are proud I write literary fiction but secretly wish I wrote commercial.
It's never really easy to be successful as a writer when you're trying to write literary fiction. You've already limited your readership limited by that choice.
I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.
No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.
Why is it okay to write a work of literary fiction where horrible, explicit things happen, where you can't write a book of humor where silly, explicit things are happening?
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.
At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.
A lot of young-adult authors, great ones, have tried their hands at literary fiction, and not a lot of them have succeeded. Not even Roald Dahl could switch-hit, and not for lack of trying.
'Parable of the Sower' is capital-I Important. Put it on the literary fiction shelf. Put it on the Holy Crap fiction shelf. Put it on every shelf. This is one of the all-time great American novels.
I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.
With literary fiction, generally a film maker falls in love with a book. In commercial fiction, it's a producer or studio falling in love with a book they can make into a movie with worldwide appeal.
Action fiction is driven more by what than by who. Put that ticking nuclear suitcase under Manhattan, and it's relatively easy to create suspense. Literary fiction is driven more by who than by what.
If you do approach a comics publisher, make sure it's one that publishes the kind of book you want to make. Don't take your literary fiction to Marvel or DC; don't pitch your Spider-Man epic to Image.
I don't write literary fiction - I write books that are entertaining, but are also, I hope, well-constructed and thoughtful and funny and have things to say about men and women and families and children and life in America today.
I'm well-read as far as literary fiction, but I wanted to make better decisions about my writing, to use words or phrases more confidently by learning how your words can be interpreted, the shades of meaning, the different connotations.
With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension.
Many Scandinavian writers who had made their name in literary fiction felt they wanted to have a go at the crime novel to show they could compete with the best. If Salman Rushdie had been Norwegian, he would definitely have written at least one thriller.
One of the things that doesn't come up as much as it should, especially in literary fiction, is this idea of faith and God... I feel like those are things that should be wrestled with... because they are such an integral part of our community on every level.
I think suspense should be like any other color on a writer's palette. I suppose I'm in the minority but I think it's 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.
There are three things I look for in a story - it has to be a thriller; I cannot see myself writing literary fiction or a saga! There has to be a historical connection; otherwise, the adrenalin will not flow. And I will try to bridge the gap between 'Rozabal' and 'Chanakya'.
I read a lot of science fiction, but I also mixed it up with a lot of other genres: crime, literary fiction, as well as nonfiction. Author-wise, I'm a fan of Stephen King, Lauren Beukes, Robert McCammon, Raymond Chandler, Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker and Gail Simone, among many others.
In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.
Before my book, 'California,' came out, I had modest hopes for it. Or, let's put it this way - I had the same hopes that every literary fiction writer in America has: I wanted the novel to be well-received, critically. As for sales? I didn't want it to disappoint, but I didn't expect it to be a best-seller, either.
In general, fiction is divided into 'literary fiction' and 'commercial fiction.' Nobody can definitively say what separates one from the other, but that doesn't stop everybody (including me) from trying. Your book probably will be perceived as one or the other, and that will affect how it is read, packaged and marketed.
It seems to me that one of the things that happened with a lot of literary fiction in the 1980s and 1990s was that it became very concerned with the academy and less with how people live their lives. We got to a point where the crime novel stepped into the breach. It was also a time when the crime novel stopped being so metropolitan.