Literary Theme Quotes

No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway's postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.

I write the black experience in America, and contained within that experience, because it is a human experience, are all the universalities.

We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.

All literature is gossip.

Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life.

Apparently, the city of Delhi is a 'character' in my novels. I'd argue that it's a ... city... in my novels.

Long as there's a sun that sets, Primroses will have their glory; Long as there are violets, They will have a place in story: There's a flower that shall be mine, 'Tis the little Celandine.

I wrote my first sucio story, as I call them, in 1997. This was always my 'cheater's book,' my book about sucios desgraciados. My plan was to write a book about how people deal with love and loss.

America is a wonderful country! I mean it! No honest writer would challenge that statement! The human comedy never runs out of material! it never lets you down!

'Frankenstein' feels like an ancient tale, the kind of traditional story that appears in many other forms.

Evictions used to be rare in this country. They used to draw crowds. There are scenes in literature where you can come upon an eviction - like, in 'Invisible Man' there's the famous eviction scene in Harlem, and people are gathered around, and they move the family back in.

I think it is a quest of literature throughout the ages to describe the human condition.

This, indeed, is one of the eternal paradoxes of both life and literature-that without passion little gets done; yet, without control of that passion, its effects are largely ill or null.

There's something in human nature, the trying-to-get-on-with-it quality of people, the struggle to maintain or keep the show going can be exhausting. It just seems like that element of trying to move forward while things are breaking down... Obviously, it's always been the backdrop for a lot of great literature and great cinematic characters, but aside from that, I'm just drawn to it because that feels honest to me.

I think that all writing is in search of lost time. I'm starting to realise that very clearly.

Like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, I try to balance reality with how we'd like the world to be.

A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.

You need a theme in a picture book just as much or maybe even more than you need it in a novel.

Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.

The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out.

Of course I consider myself a Jewish writer - I am one! All of the protagonists in my five books have been Jewish, and I wouldn't be surprised if all my future main characters were as well.

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.

I am very much afraid that to the fiction writer the fact that we shall always have the poor with us is a source of satisfaction,for it means, essentially, that he will always be able to find someone like himself.

In many respects, I think 'Bless Me, Ultima' is a novel about the indigenous.

The problem is Jewish-American fiction that always ends with assimilation back into the community.