If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

A melody is not merely something you can hum.

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer would be, "Yes." And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be, "No."

So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down... some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No.'

The melody is generally what the piece is all about.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

Sex in a woman's world has the same currency a penny has in a man's. Every penny saved is a penny earned in one world and in the next every sexual adventure is a literary experience.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

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

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.

It must inquire not merely about the circumstances of the time in general, but in particular about the writer's position with regard to these things, the interests and motives, the leading ideas of his literary activity.

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.

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.

The period that I could consider the most important in my literary work came about beginning with the Revolution, and in a certain way, developed as a consequence of the Revolution. But it was also a result of the counterrevolutionary coup of November 1975.

Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.

The great break of my literary career was going to law school.

Ever since my youth it has disturbed me that of the literary works that survived their own epoch, so many dealt with historical rather than contemporary subjects.

Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single.

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.

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.

Bridget Jones is part of literary lore now and actually to be a part of it is enormously flattering.

I might have simply settled down into an armchair literary life. I really don't know exactly why I didn't.

So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We'll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

I'm not against asking the audience to work, but I think what you have now is a sort of gratuitous deconstruction as a result of a fashion of literary deconstructionism indicating that there are no meanings.

I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.

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.

But it's not just a game of finding literary references.

My literary success meant nothing to me.

The best source for finding an agent is called Literary Agents of North America. It's a complete list of agents, not only by name and address, but by type of book they represent and by what their submission criteria are.

In England, literary pretence is more universal than elsewhere from our method of education.

I have been told by a member of the board of one of Canada's most prominent literary magazines that a submission of mine once caused a great deal of controversy.

Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking.