Literary Universe Quotes

A book… it’s a world all on its own too. A world made of words, where you live for a while.

On reading the first part of Anthony Powell's four-part masterpiece, 'A Dance to the Music of Time,' I was struck by one of the characters - an irritating peripheral character- who keeps showing up in the main protagonist's life.

'American Gods' was designed to be, if not open-ended, at least a trilogy kind of shape, so there's definitely one more book, probably another couple of books there to get written.

The astronomer who catalogues the stars cannot add one atom to the universe; the poet can call an universe from the atom.

No writer can really sustain two huge - I hate the word 'franchises.'

But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now.

Books are a finer world within the world.

Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds.

We've been given this great gift, this huge canvas of these beautiful books by George Martin, and the idea of telling this whole epic through to the end is incredibly compelling.

The words are strung together, with their own special grammar-the laws of quantum theory-to form sentences, which are molecules. Soon we have books, entire libraries, made out of molecular "sentences." The universe is like a library in which the words are atoms. Just look at what has been written with these hundred words! Our own bodies are books in that library, specified by the organization of molecules-but the universe and literature are organizations of identical, interchangeable objects; they are information systems.

For me it's a remarkable thing that there is a prize celebrating and honouring and making for a brief moment short fiction the centre of the literary universe.