Literary Allusions Quotes

The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.

We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it.

Many, many of my paintings have come from the first chapter of Moby Dick.

Quoting, like smoking, ... is a dirty habit to which I am devoted. But then ... I am a professor of English literature; it is an occupational hazard.

In one book, CACHALOT, just for my own amusement, every character is based directly on someone I have known.

Those quotations were really quite obscure. Anyone can see that he is a very well read man.

Books always speak of other books.

In every book I write, I try to name-check the most prominent influences, or the most prominent conscious influences.

I briefly considered doing Edgar Allan Poe and just swearing a lot.

You will most appreciate 'Freddy and Fredericka' if you are familiar with the story of the Fall, the Good Hermit, 'Tom Jones,' 'Huckleberry Finn,' 'Paradise Lost,' 'Henry V,' and 'My Cousin Vinny.' That doesn't mean that you can't enjoy or understand it on an emotional level, free of all allusion, which is the test of any book of fiction.

Things like 'mad as a hatter' or 'grinning like a Cheshire cat', are so powerful that music and songs incorporate the imagery. Writers, artists, illustrators, a lot of them have incorporated that.

I don't really like to work with literary allusions very much. I never want to be in a position where I'm saying, "You've got to read a lot of other stuff" or "You've got to have had a good education in literature to fully appreciate what I'm doing."

I couldn't resist hiding some historical details and a few clues relevant to the plot and characters of 'A Discovery of Witches' throughout the pages of the novel.

The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.

I have always loved really dense, complicated stories with lots of layers, tons of obscure literary references, and a plethora of inside jokes.

Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

Those who have heard me speak from time to time know that quite often I cite the observation of that great American author, Mark Twain, who said, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in.

We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality . . . the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cats may be black at night, but not to other cats.

All of those faeries and duels and mad queens and so on, and no one quoted old Billy Shakespeare. Not even once.