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To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like

Northrop Frye

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Northrop Frye
Age: 78 †
Born: 1912
Born: July 14
Died: 1991
Died: January 23
Cleric
Literary Critic
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Life
Like
Lifelike
Bring
Literature
Anything
Really

More quotes by Northrop Frye

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We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.
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I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society.
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Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.
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We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.
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Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.
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In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
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The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
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My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him .
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There is a curious law of art... that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination.
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We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.
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Americans like to make money Canadians like to audit it. I don't know of any other country where the accountant enjoys a higher social and moral status.
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[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
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Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.
Northrop Frye
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The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring.
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Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
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A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
Northrop Frye
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Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
Northrop Frye
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Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of
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Characters tend to be either for or against the quest. If they assist it, they are idealized as simply gallant or pure if they obstruct it, they are characterized as simply villainous or cowardly. Hence every typical character...tends to have his moral opposite confronting him, like black and white pieces in a chess game.
Northrop Frye
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A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.
Northrop Frye