Literary Categories Quotes

If you write in category, you write knowing there's a framework, there are reader expectations.

In many cases, the line between a thriller and a crime novel has become too blurred to be useful.

Literature precedes genre.

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

I didn't know what the word 'genre' meant till I was twenty years old.

When I started in the business, there was a thing called adult fantasy, but nobody quite knew what it was, and most publishers didn't have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists, which they stuck a little bit of fantasy into.

Don't make a big distinction between fiction and non-fiction. These are arbitrary distinctions.

The animal encounter poem is now so distinct a genre that it would be possible to create a full-length anthology from deer encounter poems alone, and many varieties of experience would emerge from such an exercise.

My theory on genre is that while there are people out there who believe that genre tells people what to read, actually I believe that genre exists as a marketing tool to tell you what to avoid.

In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.

The past is full of examples of renegade writers who were overlooked in their time not only because their work didn't fit neatly into potted categories but also because they avoided the self-promotional efforts of their peers.

We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.

As a kid, I went from reading kids' books to reading science fiction to reading, you know, adult fiction. There was never any gap. YA was a thing when I was a teenager, but it was a library category, not a marketing category, and you never really felt like it was a huge section.