classes ::: media,
children ::: Music (genres)
branches ::: genre

bookmarks: Instances - Definitions - Quotes - Chapters - Wordnet - Webgen


object:genre
class:media

W - GENRE
W - LIST OF GENRES

--- CONCEPTION
so as I was filling out music playlists, playing idle games yesterday and am often hunting for shows or movies to watch or books to read, these all boil down to the largeness that is genres which seems to apply to most forms of developmed media. And so I hope to catalog as many of the main ones as possible, w desc etc.
- is there a 1-1 overlap of tv+movies w fiction books?

--- NOTES
so each instance of a medium (media) likely belongs to multiple genres. but is poetry a literary genre? there seems a higher level of abstraction.

AUDIO
- music genres (see music playlists (W)

TV AND MOVIES (+ FICTION BOOKS?)
- sci fi
-

VIDEO GAMES (W)



LITERATURE
W - Literary genres
W - list of writing genres
W - genre fiction


see also :::

questions, comments, suggestions/feedback, take-down requests, contribute, etc
contact me @ integralyogin@gmail.com or
join the integral discord server (chatrooms)
if the page you visited was empty, it may be noted and I will try to fill it out. cheers



now begins generated list of local instances, definitions, quotes, instances in chapters, wordnet info if available and instances among weblinks


OBJECT INSTANCES [5] - TOPICS - AUTHORS - BOOKS - CHAPTERS - CLASSES - SEE ALSO - SIMILAR TITLES

TOPICS
cyberpunk
cyberpunk
horror
RPGs
Sci-Fi
Theological_Fiction
SEE ALSO


AUTH

BOOKS
Heart_of_Matter
Ready_Player_One
Walden,_and_On_The_Duty_Of_Civil_Disobedience

IN CHAPTERS TITLE

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME

IN CHAPTERS TEXT
0_1969-11-22
02.03_-_The_Shakespearean_Word
1.01_-_To_Watanabe_Sukefusa
1f.lovecraft_-_A_Reminiscence_of_Dr._Samuel_Johnson
1f.lovecraft_-_Ashes
1f.lovecraft_-_At_the_Mountains_of_Madness
1f.lovecraft_-_Azathoth
1f.lovecraft_-_Beyond_the_Wall_of_Sleep
1f.lovecraft_-_Celephais
1f.lovecraft_-_Collapsing_Cosmoses
1f.lovecraft_-_Cool_Air
1f.lovecraft_-_Dagon
1f.lovecraft_-_Deaf,_Dumb,_and_Blind
1f.lovecraft_-_Discarded_Draft_of
1f.lovecraft_-_Ex_Oblivione
1f.lovecraft_-_Facts_concerning_the_Late
1f.lovecraft_-_From_Beyond
1f.lovecraft_-_He
1f.lovecraft_-_Herbert_West-Reanimator
1f.lovecraft_-_H.P._Lovecrafts
1f.lovecraft_-_Hypnos
1f.lovecraft_-_Ibid
1f.lovecraft_-_In_the_Vault
1f.lovecraft_-_In_the_Walls_of_Eryx
1f.lovecraft_-_Medusas_Coil
1f.lovecraft_-_Memory
1f.lovecraft_-_Nyarlathotep
1f.lovecraft_-_Old_Bugs
1f.lovecraft_-_Out_of_the_Aeons
1f.lovecraft_-_Pickmans_Model
1f.lovecraft_-_Poetry_and_the_Gods
1f.lovecraft_-_Polaris
1f.lovecraft_-_Sweet_Ermengarde
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Alchemist
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Battle_that_Ended_the_Century
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Beast_in_the_Cave
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Book
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Call_of_Cthulhu
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Case_of_Charles_Dexter_Ward
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Cats_of_Ulthar
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Challenge_from_Beyond
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Colour_out_of_Space
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Crawling_Chaos
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Curse_of_Yig
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Descendant
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Diary_of_Alonzo_Typer
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Disinterment
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Doom_That_Came_to_Sarnath
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Dream-Quest_of_Unknown_Kadath
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Dreams_in_the_Witch_House
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Dunwich_Horror
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Electric_Executioner
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Evil_Clergyman
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Festival
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Ghost-Eater
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Green_Meadow
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Haunter_of_the_Dark
1f.lovecraft_-_The_History_of_the_Necronomicon
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Hoard_of_the_Wizard-Beast
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Horror_at_Martins_Beach
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Horror_at_Red_Hook
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Horror_in_the_Burying-Ground
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Horror_in_the_Museum
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Hound
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Last_Test
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Little_Glass_Bottle
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Loved_Dead
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Lurking_Fear
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Man_of_Stone
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Moon-Bog
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Mound
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Music_of_Erich_Zann
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Mysterious_Ship
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Mystery_of_the_Grave-Yard
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Nameless_City
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Night_Ocean
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Other_Gods
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Picture_in_the_House
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Quest_of_Iranon
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Rats_in_the_Walls
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Secret_Cave
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Shadow_out_of_Time
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Shadow_over_Innsmouth
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Shunned_House
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Silver_Key
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Slaying_of_the_Monster
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Statement_of_Randolph_Carter
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Strange_High_House_in_the_Mist
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Street
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Temple
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Terrible_Old_Man
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Thing_on_the_Doorstep
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Tomb
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Transition_of_Juan_Romero
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Trap
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Tree
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Tree_on_the_Hill
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Unnamable
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Very_Old_Folk
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Whisperer_in_Darkness
1f.lovecraft_-_The_White_Ship
1f.lovecraft_-_Through_the_Gates_of_the_Silver_Key
1f.lovecraft_-_Till_A_the_Seas
1f.lovecraft_-_Two_Black_Bottles
1f.lovecraft_-_Under_the_Pyramids
1f.lovecraft_-_What_the_Moon_Brings
1f.lovecraft_-_Winged_Death
1.lovecraft_-_An_American_To_Mother_England
1.lovecraft_-_An_Epistle_To_Rheinhart_Kleiner,_Esq.,_Poet-Laureate,_And_Author_Of_Another_Endless_Day
1.lovecraft_-_Arcadia
1.lovecraft_-_Astrophobos
1.lovecraft_-_Christmas_Blessings
1.lovecraft_-_Christmas_Snows
1.lovecraft_-_Christmastide
1.lovecraft_-_Despair
1.lovecraft_-_Egyptian_Christmas
1.lovecraft_-_Ex_Oblivione
1.lovecraft_-_Fact_And_Fancy
1.lovecraft_-_Festival
1.lovecraft_-_Fungi_From_Yuggoth
1.lovecraft_-_Good_Saint_Nick
1.lovecraft_-_Halcyon_Days
1.lovecraft_-_Halloween_In_A_Suburb
1.lovecraft_-_Laeta-_A_Lament
1.lovecraft_-_Lifes_Mystery
1.lovecraft_-_Lines_On_General_Robert_Edward_Lee
1.lovecraft_-_Little_Tiger
1.lovecraft_-_March
1.lovecraft_-_Nathicana
1.lovecraft_-_Nemesis
1.lovecraft_-_Ode_For_July_Fourth,_1917
1.lovecraft_-_On_Reading_Lord_Dunsanys_Book_Of_Wonder
1.lovecraft_-_On_Receiving_A_Picture_Of_Swans
1.lovecraft_-_Pacifist_War_Song_-_1917
1.lovecraft_-_Poemata_Minora-_Volume_II
1.lovecraft_-_Providence
1.lovecraft_-_Psychopompos-_A_Tale_in_Rhyme
1.lovecraft_-_Revelation
1.lovecraft_-_St._John
1.lovecraft_-_Sunset
1.lovecraft_-_The_Ancient_Track
1.lovecraft_-_The_Bride_Of_The_Sea
1.lovecraft_-_The_Cats
1.lovecraft_-_The_City
1.lovecraft_-_The_Conscript
1.lovecraft_-_The_Garden
1.lovecraft_-_The_House
1.lovecraft_-_The_Messenger
1.lovecraft_-_Theodore_Roosevelt
1.lovecraft_-_The_Outpost
1.lovecraft_-_The_Peace_Advocate
1.lovecraft_-_The_Poe-ets_Nightmare
1.lovecraft_-_The_Rose_Of_England
1.lovecraft_-_The_Teutons_Battle-Song
1.lovecraft_-_The_Wood
1.lovecraft_-_To_Alan_Seeger-
1.lovecraft_-_To_Edward_John_Moreton_Drax_Plunkelt,
1.lovecraft_-_Tosh_Bosh
1.lovecraft_-_Waste_Paper-_A_Poem_Of_Profound_Insignificance
1.lovecraft_-_Where_Once_Poe_Walked
Book_of_Imaginary_Beings_(text)
For_a_Breath_I_Tarry
The_Act_of_Creation_text
The_Book_(short_story)
The_Dwellings_of_the_Philosophers
The_Garden_of_Forking_Paths_1
The_Shadow_Out_Of_Time

PRIMARY CLASS

media
SIMILAR TITLES
genre
Music (genres)

DEFINITIONS


TERMS STARTING WITH

genre: A category of literature or film marked by defined shared features orconventions. The three broadest categories of genre are poetry, drama, and fiction. These general genres are often subdivided, for example murder mysteries, westerns, sonnets, lyric poetry, epics and tragedies.

genre ::: n. --> A style of painting, sculpture, or other imitative art, which illustrates everyday life and manners. html{color:

Genres: Types of art to which special rules and independent developments were attributed. For example: in poetry -- epic, lyric, dramatic; in painting -- historic, portrait, landscape; in music -- oratorical, symphonic, operatic. -- L.V.


TERMS ANYWHERE

abhidharma. (P. abhidhamma; T. chos mngon pa; C. apidamo/duifa; J. abidatsuma/taiho; K. abidalma/taebop 阿毘達磨/對法). In Sanskrit, abhidharma is a prepositional compound composed of abhi- + dharma. The compound is typically glossed with abhi being interpreted as equivalent to uttama and meaning "highest" or "advanced" DHARMA (viz., doctrines or teachings), or abhi meaning "pertaining to" the dharma. The SARVASTIVADA Sanskrit tradition typically follows the latter etymology, while the THERAVADA PAli tradition prefers the former, as in BUDDHAGHOSA's gloss of the term meaning either "special dharma" or "supplementary dharma." These definitions suggest that abhidharma was conceived as a precise (P. nippariyAya), definitive (PARAMARTHA) assessment of the dharma that was presented in its discursive (P. sappariyAya), conventional (SAMVṚTI) form in the SuTRAS. Where the sutras offered more subjective presentations of the dharma, drawing on worldly parlance, simile, metaphor, and personal anecdote in order to appeal to their specific audiences, the abhidharma provided an objective, impersonal, and highly technical description of the specific characteristics of reality and the causal processes governing production and cessation. There are two divergent theories for the emergence of the abhidharma as a separate genre of Buddhist literature. In one theory, accepted by most Western scholars, the abhidharma is thought to have evolved out of the "matrices" (S. MATṚKA; P. mAtikA), or numerical lists of dharmas, that were used as mnemonic devices for organizing the teachings of the Buddha systematically. Such treatments of dharma are found even in the sutra literature and are probably an inevitable by-product of the oral quality of early Buddhist textual transmission. A second theory, favored by Japanese scholars, is that abhidharma evolved from catechistic discussions (abhidharmakathA) in which a dialogic format was used to clarify problematic issues in doctrine. The dialogic style also appears prominently in the sutras where, for example, the Buddha might give a brief statement of doctrine (uddesa; P. uddesa) whose meaning had to be drawn out through exegesis (NIRDEsA; P. niddesa); indeed, MAHAKATYAYANA, one of the ten major disciples of the Buddha, was noted for his skill in such explications. This same style was prominent enough in the sutras even to be listed as one of the nine or twelve genres of Buddhist literature (specifically, VYAKARAnA; P. veyyAkarana). According to tradition, the Buddha first taught the abhidharma to his mother MAHAMAYA, who had died shortly after his birth and been reborn as a god in TUsITA heaven. He met her in the heaven of the thirty-three (TRAYASTRIMsA), where he expounded the abhidharma to her and the other divinities there, repeating those teachings to sARIPUTRA when he descended each day to go on his alms-round. sAriputra was renowned as a master of the abhidharma. Abhidharma primarily sets forth the training in higher wisdom (ADHIPRAJNAsIKsA) and involves both analytical and synthetic modes of doctrinal exegesis. The body of scholastic literature that developed from this exegetical style was compiled into the ABHIDHARMAPItAKA, one of the three principal sections of the Buddhist canon, or TRIPItAKA, along with sutra and VINAYA, and is concerned primarily with scholastic discussions on epistemology, cosmology, psychology, KARMAN, rebirth, and the constituents of the process of enlightenment and the path (MARGA) to salvation. (In the MAHAYANA tradition, this abhidharmapitaka is sometimes redefined as a broader "treatise basket," or *sASTRAPItAKA.)

abhidharmapitaka. (P. abhidhammapitaka; T. chos mngon pa'i sde snod; C. lunzang; J. ronzo; K. nonjang 論藏). The third of the three "baskets" (PItAKA) of the Buddhist canon (TRIPItAKA). The abhidharmapitaka derives from attempts in the early Buddhist community to elucidate the definitive significance of the teachings of the Buddha, as compiled in the SuTRAs. Since the Buddha was well known to have adapted his message to fit the predilections and needs of his audience (cf. UPAYAKAUsALYA), there inevitably appeared inconsistencies in his teachings that needed to be resolved. The attempts to ferret out the definitive meaning of the BUDDHADHARMA through scholastic interpretation and exegesis eventually led to a new body of texts that ultimately were granted canonical status in their own right. These are the texts of the abhidharmapitaka. The earliest of these texts, such as the PAli VIBHAnGA and PUGGALAPANNATTI and the SARVASTIVADA SAMGĪTIPARYAYA and DHARMASKANDHA, are structured as commentaries to specific sutras or portions of sutras. These materials typically organized the teachings around elaborate doctrinal taxonomies, which were used as mnemonic devices or catechisms. Later texts move beyond individual sutras to systematize a wide range of doctrinal material, offering ever more complex analytical categorizations and discursive elaborations of the DHARMA. Ultimately, abhidharma texts emerge as a new genre of Buddhist literature in their own right, employing sophisticated philosophical speculation and sometimes even involving polemical attacks on the positions of rival factions within the SAMGHA. ¶ At least seven schools of Indian Buddhism transmitted their own recensions of abhidharma texts, but only two of these canons are extant in their entirety. The PAli abhidhammapitaka of the THERAVADA school, the only recension that survives in an Indian language, includes seven texts (the order of which often differs): (1) DHAMMASAnGAnI ("Enumeration of Dharmas") examines factors of mentality and materiality (NAMARuPA), arranged according to ethical quality; (2) VIBHAnGA ("Analysis") analyzes the aggregates (SKANDHA), conditioned origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPADA), and meditative development, each treatment culminating in a catechistic series of inquiries; (3) DHATUKATHA ("Discourse on Elements") categorizes all dharmas in terms of the skandhas and sense-fields (AYATANA); (4) PUGGALAPANNATTI ("Description of Human Types") analyzes different character types in terms of the three afflictions of greed (LOBHA), hatred (DVEsA), and delusion (MOHA) and various related subcategories; (5) KATHAVATTHU ("Points of Controversy") scrutinizes the views of rival schools of mainstream Buddhism and how they differ from the TheravAda; (6) YAMAKA ("Pairs") provides specific denotations of problematic terms through paired comparisons; (7) PAttHANA ("Conditions") treats extensively the full implications of conditioned origination. ¶ The abhidharmapitaka of the SARVASTIVADA school is extant only in Chinese translation, the definitive versions of which were prepared by XUANZANG's translation team in the seventh century. It also includes seven texts: (1) SAMGĪTIPARYAYA[PADAsASTRA] ("Discourse on Pronouncements") attributed to either MAHAKAUstHILA or sARIPUTRA, a commentary on the SaMgītisutra (see SAnGĪTISUTTA), where sAriputra sets out a series of dharma lists (MATṚKA), ordered from ones to elevens, to organize the Buddha's teachings systematically; (2) DHARMASKANDHA[PADAsASTRA] ("Aggregation of Dharmas"), attributed to sAriputra or MAHAMAUDGALYAYANA, discusses Buddhist soteriological practices, as well as the afflictions that hinder spiritual progress, drawn primarily from the AGAMAs; (3) PRAJNAPTIBHAsYA[PADAsASTRA] ("Treatise on Designations"), attributed to MaudgalyAyana, treats Buddhist cosmology (lokaprajNapti), causes (kArana), and action (KARMAN); (4) DHATUKAYA[PADAsASTRA] ("Collection on the Elements"), attributed to either PuRnA or VASUMITRA, discusses the mental concomitants (the meaning of DHATU in this treatise) and sets out specific sets of mental factors that are present in all moments of consciousness (viz., the ten MAHABHuMIKA) or all defiled states of mind (viz., the ten KLEsAMAHABHuMIKA); (5) VIJNANAKAYA[PADAsASTRA] ("Collection on Consciousness"), attributed to Devasarman, seeks to prove the veracity of the eponymous SarvAstivAda position that dharmas exist in all three time periods (TRIKALA) of past, present, and future, and the falsity of notions of the person (PUDGALA); it also provides the first listing of the four types of conditions (PRATYAYA); (6) PRAKARAnA[PADAsASTRA] ("Exposition"), attributed to VASUMITRA, first introduces the categorization of dharmas according to the more developed SarvAstivAda rubric of RuPA, CITTA, CAITTA, CITTAVIPRAYUKTASAMSKARA, and ASAMSKṚTA dharmas; it also adds a new listing of KUsALAMAHABHuMIKA, or factors always associated with wholesome states of mind; (7) JNANAPRASTHANA ("Foundations of Knowledge"), attributed to KATYAYANĪPUTRA, an exhaustive survey of SarvAstivAda dharma theory and the school's exposition of psychological states, which forms the basis of the massive encyclopedia of SarvAstivAda-VaibhAsika abhidharma, the ABHIDHARMAMAHAVIBHAsA. In the traditional organization of the seven canonical books of the SarvAstivAda abhidharmapitaka, the JNANAPRASTHANA is treated as the "body" (sARĪRA), or central treatise of the canon, with its six "feet" (pAda), or ancillary treatises (pAdasAstra), listed in the following order: (1) PrakaranapAda, (2) VijNAnakAya, (3) Dharmaskandha, (4) PrajNaptibhAsya, (5) DhAtukAya, and (6) SaMgītiparyAya. Abhidharma exegetes later turned their attention to these canonical abhidharma materials and subjected them to the kind of rigorous scholarly analysis previously directed to the sutras. These led to the writing of innovative syntheses and synopses of abhidharma doctrine, in such texts as BUDDHAGHOSA's VISUDDHIMAGGA and ANURUDDHA's ABHIDHAMMATTHASAnGAHA, VASUBANDHU's ABHIDHARMAKOsABHAsYA, and SAMGHABHADRA's *NYAYANUSARA. In East Asia, this third "basket" was eventually expanded to include the burgeoning scholastic literature of the MAHAYANA, transforming it from a strictly abhidharmapitaka into a broader "treatise basket" or *sASTRAPItAKA (C. lunzang).

adbhutadharma. (P. abbhutadhamma; T. rmad du byung ba'i chos; C. xifa; J. keho; K. hŭibop 希法). In Sanskrit, "marvelous events"; one of the nine (NAVAnGA[PAVACANA]) or twelve (DVADAsAnGA[PRAVACANA]) categories (AnGA) of scripture recognized in PAli and Sanskrit sources, respectively, as classified according to their structure or literary style. This particular genre of SuTRA is characterized by the presence of various miraculous or supernatural events that occur during the course of the narrative.

anthology: A selection of work by different writers. Sometimes the volume will be of a particular genre, e.g. post-colonial literature, or dedicated to a particular period, e.g. metaphysical poetry. See also collection.

apocrypha. (C. yijing/weijing; J. gikyo/gikyo; K. ŭigyong/wigyong 疑經/僞經). Buddhist scholars have appropriated (though not without some controversy) the Judeo-Christian religious term "apocrypha" to refer to indigenous sutras composed outside the Indian cultural sphere, but on the model of translated Indian or Serindian scriptures. Such scriptures were sometimes composed in conjunction with a revelatory experience, but many were intentionally forged using their false ascription to the Buddha or other enlightened figures as a literary device to enhance both their authority and their prospects of being accepted as authentic scriptures. Many of the literary genres that characterize Judeo-Christian apocrypha are found also in Buddhist apocrypha, including the historical, didactic, devotional, and apocalyptic. Both were also often composed in milieus of social upheaval or messianic revivalism. As Buddhism moved outside of its Indian homeland, its scriptures had to be translated into various foreign languages, creating openings for indigenous scriptures to be composed in imitation of these translated texts. Ferreting out such inauthentic indigenous scripture from authentic imported scripture occupied Buddhist bibliographical cataloguers (see JINGLU), who were charged with confirming the authenticity of the Buddhist textual transmission. For the Chinese, the main criterion governing scriptural authenticity was clear evidence that the text had been brought from the "Outer Regions" (C. waiyu), meaning India or Central Asia; this concern with authenticating a text partially accounts for why Chinese translations of Buddhist scriptures typically included a colophon immediately following the title, giving the name of the translator (who was also sometimes the importer of the scripture), along with the place where, and often the imperial reign era during which the translation was made. Scriptures for which there was no such proof were in danger of being labeled as texts of "suspect" or "suspicious" authenticity (yijing) or condemned as blatantly "spurious" or "counterfeit" scriptures (weijing). The presence of indigenous cultural elements, such as yin-yang cosmology, local spirits, or rituals and liturgies associated with folk religion could also be enough to condemn a scripture as "spurious." In Tibet, "treasure texts" (GTER MA) were scriptures or esoteric teachings attributed to enlightened beings or lineage holders that purported to have been buried or hidden away until they could be rediscovered by qualified individuals. Because of their association with a revelatory experience, such "treasure texts" carried authority similar to that of translated scripture. Different classifications of apocryphal scriptures have been proposed, based on genre and style, social history, and doctrinal filiations. In one of the ironies of the Buddhist textual transmission, however, many of the scriptures most influential in East Asian Buddhism have been discovered to be indigenous "apocrypha," not translated scriptures. Such indigenous scriptures were able to appeal to a native audience in ways that translated Indian materials could not, and the sustained popularity of many such "suspect" texts eventually led cataloguers to include them in the canon, despite continuing qualms about their authenticity. Such "canonical apocrypha" include such seminal scriptures as the FANWANG JING ("BrahmA's Net Sutra"), RENWANG JING ("Humane Kings Sutra"), and the YUANJUE JING ("Perfect Enlightenment Sutra"), as well as treatises like the DASHENG QIXIN LUN ("Awakening of Faith"). Similar questions of authenticity can be raised regarding scriptures of Indian provenance, since it is virtually impossible to trace with certainty which of the teachings ascribed to the Buddha in mainstream canonical collections (TRIPItAKA) such as the PAli canon can be historically attributed to him. Similarly, the MAHAYANA sutras, which are also attributed to the Buddha even though they were composed centuries after his death, are considered apocryphal by many of the MAINSTREAM BUDDHIST SCHOOLS, including the modern THERAVADA tradition; however, modern scholars do not use the term "Buddhist apocrypha" to describe MahAyAna texts.

ASCII art "graphics" (Or "character graphics", "ASCII graphics") The fine art of drawing diagrams using the {ASCII} character set (mainly "|-/\+"). See also {boxology}. Here is a serious example:  o----)||(--+--|"----+ +---------o + D O   L )||( |    | |       C U  A I )||( +--"|-+ | +-\/\/-+--o - T  C N )||(    | | |   |    P   E )||( +--"|-+--)---+--)|--+-o   U     )||( |    |     | GND  T  o----)||(--+--|"----+----------+  A power supply consisting of a full wave rectifier  circuit feeding a capacitor input filter circuit             Figure 1. And here are some very silly examples:  |\/\/\/|   ____/|       ___  |\_/|  ___  |   |   \ o.O| ACK!   / \_ |` '| _/ \  |   |   =(_)= THPHTH! /   \/   \/   \  | (o)(o)    U       /           \  C   _) (__)        \/\/\/\ _____ /\/\/\/  | ,___|  (oo)           \/   \/  | /   \/-------\     U         (__) /____\    ||   | \  /---V `v'-      oo ) /   \   ||---W|| * * |--| || |`.     |_/\ //-o-\\ ____---=======---____   ====___\ /.. ..\ /___====   Klingons rule OK!  //    ---\__O__/---    \\  \_\             /_/   _____    __...---'-----`---...__    _=============================== ,----------------._/'   `---..._______...---' (_______________||_) . . ,--'   /  /.---'     `/   '--------_- - - - - _/     `--------'   Figure 2. There is an important subgenre of ASCII art that puns on the standard character names in the fashion of a rebus. +--------------------------------------------------------+ |   ^^^^^^^^^^^^                   | | ^^^^^^^^^^^      ^^^^^^^^^           | |         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ | |    ^^^^^^^     B   ^^^^^^^^^       | | ^^^^^^^^^     ^^^      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^   | +--------------------------------------------------------+   "A Bee in the Carrot Patch"            Figure 3. Within humorous ASCII art, there is, for some reason, an entire flourishing subgenre of pictures of silly cows. One is shown in Figure 2; here are three more:  (__)       (__)       (__)  (\/)       ($$)       (**)  /-------\/    /-------\/    /-------\/ / | 666 ||    / |=====||    / |   || * ||----||   * ||----||   * ||----||   ~~  ~~     ~~  ~~     ~~  ~~ Satanic cow  This cow is a Yuppie Cow in love Figure 4. {(http://gagme.wwa.com/~boba/scarecrow.html)}. (1996-02-06)

ASCII art ::: (graphics) (Or character graphics, ASCII graphics) The fine art of drawing diagrams using the ASCII character set (mainly |-/\+).See also boxology. Here is a serious example: o----)||(--+--|----+ +---------o + D OL )||( | | | C U And here are some very silly examples: |\/\/\/| ____/| ___ |\_/| ___| | \ o.O| ACK! / \_ |` '| _/ \ There is an important subgenre of ASCII art that puns on the standard character names in the fashion of a rebus. +--------------------------------------------------------+| ^^^^^^^^^^^^ | flourishing subgenre of pictures of silly cows. One is shown in Figure 2; here are three more: (__) (__) (__)(\/) ($$) (**) . (1996-02-06)

Atisa DīpaMkarasrījNAna. (T. A ti sha Mar me mdzad dpal ye shes) (982-1054). Indian Buddhist monk and scholar revered by Tibetan Buddhists as a leading teacher in the later dissemination (PHYI DAR) of Buddhism in Tibet. His name, also written as Atisha, is an ApabhraMsa form of the Sanskrit term atisaya, meaning "surpassing kindness." Born into a royal family in what is today Bangladesh, Atisa studied MAHAYANA Buddhist philosophy and TANTRA as a married layman prior to being ordained at the age of twenty-nine, receiving the ordination name of DīpaMkarasrījNAna. After studying at the great monasteries of northern India, including NALANDA, ODANTAPURĪ, VIKRAMAsĪLA, and SOMAPURA, he is said to have journeyed to the island of Sumatra, where he studied under the CITTAMATRA teacher Dharmakīrtisrī (also known as guru Sauvarnadvīpa) for twelve years; he would later praise Dharmakīrtisrī as a great teacher of BODHICITTA. Returning to India, he taught at the Indian monastic university of VIKRAMAsĪLA. Atisa was invited to Tibet by the king of western Tibet YE SHES 'OD and his grandnephew BYANG CHUB 'OD, who were seeking to remove perceived corruption in the practice of Buddhism in Tibet. Atisa reached Tibet in 1042, where he initially worked together with the renowned translator RIN CHEN BZANG PO at THO LING monastery in the translation of PRAJNAPARAMITA texts. There, he composed his famous work, the BODHIPATHAPRADĪPA, or "Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment," an overview of the MahAyAna Buddhist path that served as a basis for the genre of literature known as LAM RIM ("stages of the path"). He spent the remaining twelve years of his life in the central regions of Tibet, where he formed his principal seat in Snye thang (Nyetang) outside of LHA SA where he translated a number of MADHYAMAKA works into Tibetan. He died there and his relics were interred in the SGROL MA LHA KHANG. Atisa and his chief disciples 'BROM STON RGYAL BA'I 'BYUNG GNAS and RNGOG LEGS PA'I SHES RAB are considered the forefathers of the BKA' GDAMS PA sect of Tibetan Buddhism. In Tibet, he is commonly known by the honorific title Jo bo rje (Jowoje), "the Superior Lord."

avadAna. (P. apadAna; T. rtogs par brjod pa; C. apotuona/piyu; J. ahadana or apadana/hiyu; K. ap'adana/piyu 阿波陀那/譬喩). In Sanskrit, "tales" or "narrative"; a term used to denote a type of story found in both Buddhist and non-Buddhist literature. The precise meaning of the word has been the subject of much discussion. In the Indian BrAhmanas and srauta literature, the term denotes either something that is sacrificed or a portion of a sacrifice. The term avadAna was originally thought to mean "something cut off; something selected" and was presumed to derive from the prefix ava- + the Sanskrit root √dA. Feer, who published a French translation of the AVADANAsATAKA in 1891, tentatively translated it as "légende, action héroïque," while noting that the Tibetans, the Chinese, and the Mongols all employed differing translations of the word as well. (The Chinese use a transcription, apotuona, as well as a translation, piyu, meaning "simile." The Tibetan rtogs brjod has been rendered as "judgment" or "moral legend"; literally, it means the presentation or expression of the realizations [of an adept]. The Mongolian equivalent is domok.) Feer's rendering of avadAna is closer to its meaning of "heroic action" in classical Indian works such as the RaghuvaMsa and the KumArasambhava. AvadAnas are listed as the tenth of the twelvefold (DVADAsAnGA) division of the traditional genres of Buddhist literature, as classified by compositional style and content. The total corpus of the genre is quite extensive, ranging from individual avadAnas embedded in VINAYA texts, or separate sutras in the SuTRAPItAKA, to avadAnas that circulated either individually or in avadAna collections. These stories typically illustrate the results of both good and bad KARMAN, i.e., past events that led to present circumstances; in certain cases, however, they also depict present events that lead to a prediction (VYAKARAnA) of high spiritual attainment in the future. AvadAnas are closely related to JATAKAs, or birth stories of the Buddha; indeed, some scholars have considered jAtakas to be a subset of the avadAna genre, and some jAtaka tales are also included in the AVADANAsATAKA, an early avadAna collection. AvadAnas typically exhibit a three-part narrative structure, with a story of the present, followed by a story of past action (karman), which is then connected by identifying the past actor as a prior incarnation of the main character in the narrative present. In contrast to the jAtakas, however, the main character in an avadAna is generally not the Buddha (an exception is Ksemendra's eleventh-century BodhisattvAvadAnakalpalatA) but rather someone who is or becomes his follower. Moreover, some avadAnas are related by narrators other than the Buddha, such as those of the AsOKAVADANA, which are narrated by UPAGUPTA. Although the avadAna genre was once dismissed as "edifying stories" for the masses, the frequent references to monks as listeners and the directives to monks on how to practice that are embedded in these tales make it clear that the primary audience was monastics. Some of the notations appended to the stories in sura's [alt. Aryasura; c. second century CE] JATAKAMALA suggest that such stories were also used secondarily for lay audiences. On the Indian mainland, both mainstream and MAHAYANA monks compiled avadAna collections. Some of the avadAnas from northwestern India have been traced from kernel stories in the MuLASARVASTIVADA VINAYA via other mainstream Buddhist versions. In his French translation of the AvadAnasataka, Feer documented a number of tales from earlier mainstream collections, such as the AvadAnasataka, which were reworked and expanded in later MahAyAna collections, such as the RatnAvadAnamAlA and the KalpadrumAvadAnamAlA, which attests to the durability and popularity of the genre. Generally speaking, the earlier mainstream avadAnas were prose works, while the later MahAyAna collections were composed largely in verse.

baojuan. (寶巻). In Chinese, "precious scrolls" or "treasure scrolls"; a genre of scripture produced mainly by popular religious sects with Buddhist orientations during the Ming and Qing dynasties. The baojuan are believed to have been divinely revealed to select beings who often became the leaders of these new religious movements (see also T. GTER MA). The earliest extant baojuan, which focuses on the worship of MAITREYA, the future buddha, is dated 1430, shortly after the fall of the Yuan dynasty. Lo Qing (1442-1527), a lay Buddhist, founded the Wuwei jiao ("Teachings of Noninterference"), for instance, for which he produced "five books and six volumes" of baojuan. Precious scrolls seem to share certain mythological elements, such as a new cosmogony of both the creation and demise of the world. Many of them also expound a new soteriology based on CHAN meditation and Daoist alchemy. The baojuan genre seems to be an evolutionary development from the earlier Buddhist vernacular narrative known as "transformation texts" (BIANWEN). Like bianwen, the baojuan were also employed for both popular entertainment and religious propagation.

Baolin zhuan. (J. Horinden; K. Porim chon 寶林傳). In Chinese, "Chronicle of the Bejeweled Forest (Monastery)"; an important early lineage record of the early Chinese CHAN tradition, in ten rolls; also known as Da Tang Shaozhou Shuangfeng shan Caoxi Baolin zhuan or Caoxi Baolin zhuan. The title refers to Baolinsi, the monastery in which HUINENG, the legendary "sixth patriarch" (LIUZU) of Chan, resided. The Baolin zhuan was compiled by the obscure monk Zhiju (or Huiju) in 801, and only an incomplete version of this text remains (rolls 7, 9, 10 are no longer extant). As one of the earliest extant records of the crucial CHAN legend of patriarchal succession (cf. FASI, ZUSHI), the Baolin zhuan offers a rare glimpse into how the early Chan tradition conceived of the school's unique place in Buddhist history. Texts like the Baolin zhuan helped pave the way for the rise of a new genre of writing, called the "transmission of the lamplight records" (CHUANDENG LU), which provides much more elaborate details on the principal and collateral lineages of the various Chan traditions. The Baolin zhuan's list of patriarchs includes the buddha sAKYAMUNI, twenty-eight Indian patriarchs beginning with MAHAKAsYAPA down to BODHIDHARMA (the Baolin Zhuan is the earliest extant text to provide this account), and the six Chinese patriarchs: Bodhidharma, HUIKE, SENGCAN, DAOXIN, HONGREN, and HUINENG (the Baolin zhuan's entries on the last three figures are no longer extant). For each patriarch, the text gives a short biography and transmission verse (GATHA).

genre: A category of literature or film marked by defined shared features orconventions. The three broadest categories of genre are poetry, drama, and fiction. These general genres are often subdivided, for example murder mysteries, westerns, sonnets, lyric poetry, epics and tragedies.

genre ::: n. --> A style of painting, sculpture, or other imitative art, which illustrates everyday life and manners. html{color:

bianwen. (變文). In Chinese, "transformation texts"; the earliest examples of Chinese vernacular writings, many drawing on prominent Buddhist themes. Produced during the Tang dynasty (c. seventh through tenth centuries), they were lost to history until they were rediscovered among the manuscript cache at DUNHUANG early in the twentieth century. The vernacular narratives of bianwen are probably descended from BIANXIANG, pictorial representations of Buddhist and religious themes. The Sinograph bian in both compounds refers to the "transformations" or "manifestations" of spiritual adepts, and seems most closely related to such Sanskrit terms as nirmAna ("magical creation" or "magical transformation," as in NIRMAnAKAYA) or ṚDDHI ("magical powers"). Bianwen were once thought to have been prompt books that were used during public performances, but this theory is no longer current. Even so, bianwen have a clear pedigree in oral literature and are the first genre of Chinese literature to vary verse recitation with spoken prose (so-called "prosimetric" narratives). As such, the bianwen genre was extremely influential in the evolution of Chinese performing arts, opera, and vernacular storytelling. Bianwen are primarily religious in orientation, and the Buddhist bianwen are culled from various sources, such as the JATAKAMALA, SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA, and VIMALAKĪRTINIRDEsA. The genre does, however, include a few examples drawn from secular subjects. Bianwen may also have led to the development of later vernacular genres of literature with a religious orientation, such as the "treasure scrolls," or BAOJUAN.

Bka' gdams. (Kadam). An early sect of Tibetan Buddhism. In Tibetan, BKA' (ka) is the word of the Buddha or an enlightened master, and gdams (dam) means "to instruct"; traditionally the compound is parsed as "those who take all of the Buddha's words as instruction." Another etymology associates the word bka' with the words of ATIsA DĪPAMKARAsRĪJNANA, whose followers began the early sect of Tibetan Buddhism, and in place of gdams "to advise" understands dam "to bind," hence, "those who hold his sacred words as binding." The origins of the sect are traced back to the founding of RWA SGRENG monastery in 1056 by Atisa's foremost disciple and interpreter 'BROM STON RGYAL BA'I 'BYUNG GNAS. The three main students of 'Brom ston pa are Po to ba Rin chen gsal (Potowa), Spyan mnga' ba Tshul khrims 'bar (Chen Ngawa), and Bu chung ba Gzhon nu rgyal mtshan (Bu chungwa), from whom originate the three principal Bka' gdams lineages (bka' babs): (1) the authoritative treatises (gzhung) lineage, (2) the essential instruction (gdams ngag) lineage, and (3) the oral instruction (man ngag) lineage, respectively. Po to ba's authoritative treatise lineage emphasized the close study of six paired fundamental Buddhist treatises: the BODHISATTVABHuMI and MAHAYANASuTRALAMKARA, the BODHICARYAVATARA and sIKsASAMUCCAYA, and the JATAKAMALA and UDANAVARGA. The teachings of the lineage of oral instructions are collected in the BKA' GDAMS GLEGS BAM PHA CHOS BU CHOS. The sect is probably best known for its strict discipline and austerity of practice, but the Gsang phu ne'u thog Bka' gdams lineage that is traced back to the founding of the monastery of GSANG PHU NE'U THOG in about 1073 by RNGOG LEGS PA'I SHES RAB, an immediate disciple of Atisa, and his nephew, the translator RNGOG BLO LDAN SHES RAB, gave the Bka' gdams a well-deserved reputation as a sect of great learning. Monks from Gsang phu ne'u thog like PHYWA PA CHOS KYI SENG GE wrote important works on PRAMAnA (logic and epistemology) and formalized debate (rtsod rigs). The Bka' gdams was responsible for the distinctive Tibetan BSTAN RIM (tenrim) ("stages of teaching") genre, based on Atisa's seminal work, the BODHIPATHAPRADĪPA. This genre was later adapted and popularized by TSONG KHA PA in his influential LAM RIM CHEN MO. Tsong kha pa idealized Atisa as the perfect teacher and his early DGE LUGS PA followers, first called Dga' ldan pa (Gandenpa) after the DGA' LDAN monastery he founded, were also known as the new Bka' gdams pa. After the rise of the Dge lugs sect, the Bka' gdams disappeared from Tibetan history, for reasons still not fully understood, with only the monasteries of Rwa sgreng and SNAR THANG retaining their original affiliation.

b. Literary genre in which conflicts are portrayed on the stage. -- L.V.

blo rigs. [alt. blo rig] (lorik). In Tibetan, "mind and reasoning," "categories of mind" or "mind and awareness" (when spelled blo rig); a genre of Tibetan monastic textbook literature (yig cha) that sets forth the categories of mind so that beginners can learn the basic concepts of Buddhist epistemology and logic. This genre supplements, or is a subset of, the "collected topics" (BSDUS GRWA) genre of textbook that forms the basis of the curriculum during the first years of study in many Tibetan monasteries. The categories of mind are not fixed, but usually include subdivisions into seven, three, and pairs. The seven minds range on a scale from wrong consciousness (log shes), through doubt, assumption, and inference (ANUMANA), to direct perception (PRATYAKsA); among the contrasting pairs of minds are "sense consciousness" (dbang shes) via the sense faculties (INDRIYA) and "mental consciousness" (yid shes) based on MANAS; minds that are tshad ma ("valid") and tshad min ("invalid"); conceptual (rtog bcas) and nonconceptual minds (rtog med); and minds that have a specifically characterized (SVALAKsAnA) appearing object (snang yul) and a generally characterized (SAMANYALAKsAnA) appearing object. The last of the contrasting pairs is primary and secondary minds, or minds (CITTA) and mental factors (CAITTA). Longer discussion of this topic includes a discussion of the fifty-one mental factors in several subcategories. The explanation of mind in blo rigs draws mainly on terminology found in DHARMAKĪRTI's PRAMAnAVARTTIKA and its commentarial tradition, as well as the ABHIDHARMAKOsABHAsYA.

Blo sbyong don bdun ma. (Lojong Dondünma). In Tibetan, "Seven Points of Mind Training"; an influential Tibetan work in the BLO SBYONG ("mind training") genre. The work was composed by the BKA' GDAMS scholar 'CHAD KA BA YE SHES RDO RJE, often known as Dge bshes Mchad kha ba, based on the tradition of generating BODHICITTA known as "mind training" transmitted by the Bengali master ATIsA DĪPAMKARAsRĪJNANA. It also follows the system laid out previously by Glang ri thang pa (Langri Tangpa) in his BLO SBYONG TSHIG BRGYAD MA ("Eight Verses on Mind Training"). Comprised of a series of pithy instructions and meditative techniques, the Blo sbyong don bdun ma became influential in Tibet, with scholars from numerous traditions writing commentaries to it. According to the commentary of the nineteenth-century Tibetan polymath 'JAM MGON KONG SPRUL, the seven points covered in the treatise are: (1) the preliminaries to mind training, which include the contemplations on the preciousness of human rebirth, the reality of death and impermanence, the shortcomings of SAMSARA, and the effects of KARMAN; (2) the actual practice of training in bodhicitta; (3) transforming adverse conditions into the path of awakening; (4) utilizing the practice in one's entire life; (5) the evaluation of mind training; (6) the commitments of mind training; and (7) guidelines for mind training.

Bodhipathapradīpa. (T. Byang chub lam gyi sgron ma). In Sanskrit, "Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment"; a work composed by the Indian scholar ATIsA DĪPAMKARAsRĪJNANA at THO LING GTSUG LAG KHANG shortly after he arrived in Tibet in 1042. Tibetan histories often note that Atisa wrote this text in order to clarify problematic points of Buddhist practice, especially TANTRA, which were thought to have degenerated and become distorted, and to show that tantra did not render basic Buddhist practice irrelevant. The Bodhipathapradīpa emphasizes a gradual training in the practices of the MAHAYANA and VAJRAYANA and became a prototype and textual basis first for the bstan rim, or "stages of the teaching" genre, and then for the genre of Tibetan religious literature known as LAM RIM, or "stages of the path." It is also an early source for the instructions and practice of BLO SBYONG, or "mind training." Atisa wrote his own commentary (paNjikA) (Commentary on the Difficult Points of the Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment) to the text. The text says bodhisattvas must first follow one of the sets of PRATIMOKsA disciplinary rules; based on those precepts, they practice the six perfections (PARAMITA); with those perfections as a solid foundation, they finally practice Buddhist tantra.

Bodhisattvabhumi. (T. Byang chub sems dpa'i sa; C. Pusa dichi jing; J. Bosatsujijikyo; K. Posal chiji kyong 菩薩地持經). In Sanskrit, "The Bodhisattva Stages"; a treatise on the entire vocation and training of a BODHISATTVA, attributed to MAITREYA/MAITREYANATHA or ASAnGA (c. fourth century CE), the effective founder of the YOGACARA school. Sanskrit and Tibetan recensions are extant, as well as three different renderings in Chinese: (1) Pusa dichi jing, translated by DHARMAKsEMA between 414-421 CE, which is also abbreviated as the "Treatise on the Bodhisattva Stages" (C. Dichi lun; J. Jijiron; K. Chiji non); (2) Pusa shanjie jing, translated by GUnAVARMAN in 431 CE; and (3) a version incorporated as the fifteenth section of XUANZANG's Chinese translation of Asanga's YOGACARABHuMIsASTRA. In the Tibetan BSTAN 'GYUR, the Bodhisattvabhumi appears as the sixteenth and penultimate part of the fundamental section (sa'i dngos gzhi) of the YogAcArabhumi (which has a total of seventeen sections), but it is set apart as a separate work in 6,000 lines. The Bodhisattvabhumi explains in three major sections the career and practices of a bodhisattva. The chapters on the abodes (vihArapatala) in the second major division and the chapter on stages (bhumipatala) in the third section are considered especially important, because they provide a systematic outline of the soteriological process by which a bodhisattva attains enlightenment. ¶ In contrast to the ten stages (DAsABHuMI) of the bodhisattva path that are described in the DAsABHuMIKASuTRA, the Bodhisattvabhumi instead outlines a system of seven stages (BHuMI), which are then correlated with the thirteen abodes (VIHARA): (1) The stage of innate potentiality (gotrabhumi), which corresponds to the abode of innate potentiality (gotravihAra); (2) the stage of the practice of resolute faith (adhimukticaryAbhumi), corresponding to the abode of resolute faith (adhimukticaryAvihAra); (3) the stage of superior aspiration (suddhAdhyAsayabhumi), which corresponds to the abode of extreme bliss (pramuditavihAra); (4) the stage of carrying out correct practices (caryApratipattibhumi), which includes the abode of superior morality (adhisīlavihAra), the abode of superior concentration (adhicittavihAra), and the abode of the superior wisdom (adhiprajNavihAra), i.e., the abode of superior insight associated with the factors of enlightenment (bodhipaksyapratisaMyukto 'dhiprajNavihAra), the abode of superior insight associated with the truths (satyapratisaMyukto 'dhiprajNavihAra), the abode of superior insight associated with the cessation of dependently arisen transmigration (pratītyasamutpAdapravṛttinivṛttipratisaMyukto 'dhiprajNavihAra), and the signless abode of applied practices and exertion (sAbhisaMskArasAbhoganirnimittavihAra); (5) the stage of certainty (niyatabhumi), which is equivalent to the signless abode that is free from application and exertion (anAbhoganirnimittavihAra); (6) the stage of determined practice (niyatacaryAbhumi), which corresponds to the abode of analytical knowledge (pratisaMvidvihAra); (7) the stage of arriving at the ultimate (nisthAgamanabhumi), which correlates with the abode of ultimate consummation [viz., of bodhisattvahood] (paramavihAra) and the abode of the tathAgata (tathAgatavihAra). In this schema, the first two stages are conceived as preliminary stages of the bodhisattva path: the first stage, the stage of innate potentiality (gotrabhumi), is presumed to be a state in which the aspiration for enlightenment (BODHICITTA) has yet to be generated; the second stage, the stage of the practice of resolute faith (adhimukticaryAbhumi), is referred to as the stage of preparation (saMbhArAvasthA) and applied practice (prayogAvasthA) in the case of the fivefold YOGACARA mArga schema, or alternatively to the ten faiths, ten abodes, ten practices, and ten dedications in the case of the comprehensive fifty-two stage bodhisattva path presented in the AVATAMSAKASuTRA, PUSA YINGLUO BENYE JING, and RENWANG JING. The third stage, the stage of superior aspiration, is regarded as corresponding to the first of the ten bhumis in the Dasabhumikasutra; the fourth stage of carrying out correct practices corresponds to the second through seventh bhumis in that rival schema; the fifth stage of certainty pertains to the eighth bhumi; the stage of determined practice to the ninth bhumi; and the stage of arriving at the ultimate to the tenth bhumi. In fact, however, the seven-bhumi schema of the Bodhisattvabhumi and the ten-bhumi schema of the Dasabhumikasutra developed independently of each other and it requires consider exegetical aplomb to correlate them. ¶ The Bodhisattvabhumi also serves as an important source of information on another crucial feature of bodhisattva practice: the MahAyAna interpretation of a set of moral codes specific to bodhisattvas (BODHISATTVAsĪLA). The chapter on precepts (sīlapatala) in the first major section of the text provides an elaborate description of MahAyAna precepts, which constitute the bodhisattva's perfection of morality (sĪLAPARAMITA). These precepts are classified into the "three sets of pure precepts" (trividhAni sīlAni; C. sanju jingjie, see sĪLATRAYA; TRISAMVARA): (1) the saMvarasīla, or "restraining precepts," (cf. SAMVARA), which refers to the "HĪNAYANA" rules of discipline (PRATIMOKsA) that help adepts restrain themselves from all types of unsalutary conduct; (2) practicing all virtuous deeds (kusaladharmasaMgrAhakasīla), which accumulates all types of salutary conduct; and (3) sattvArthakriyAsīla, which involve giving aid and comfort to sentient beings. Here, the first group corresponds to the generic hīnayAna precepts, while the second and third groups are regarded as reflecting a specifically MahAyAna position on morality. Thus, the three sets of pure precepts are conceived as a comprehensive description of Buddhist views on precepts, which incorporates both hīnayAna and MahAyAna perspectives into an overarching system. A similar treatment of the three sets of pure precepts is also found in the Chinese apocryphal sutra FANWANG JING (see APOCRYPHA), thus providing a scriptural foundation in East Asia for an innovation originally appearing in an Indian treatise. ¶ In Tibet, the Bodhisattvabhumi was a core text of the BKA' GDAMS sect, and its chapter on sīla was the basis for a large body of literature elaborating a VINAYA-type ritual for taking bodhisattva precepts in a MahAyAna ordination ceremony. The SA SKYA PA master Grags pa rgyal mtshan's explanation of CANDRAGOMIN's synopsis of the morality chapter, and TSONG KHA PA's Byang chub gzhung lam are perhaps the best known works in this genre. In Tibet, the SDOM GSUM genre incorporates the Bodhisattvabhumi's three sets of pure precepts into a new scheme that reconciles hīnayAna and MahAyAna with TANTRA.

bsdus grwa. (dudra). A distinctively Tibetan genre of monastic textbook (used widely in DGE LUGS monasteries) that introduces beginners to the main topics in PRAMAnA (T. tshad ma) and ABHIDHARMA. The genre probably originated with the summaries (bsdus pa) of important pramAna texts composed by the translator RNGOG BLO LDAN SHES RAB of GSANG PHU NE'U THOG monastery. PHYWA PA CHOS KYI SENG GE is credited with originating the distinctively Tibetan dialectical form that strings together a chain of consequences linked by a chain of reasons that distinguishes bsdus grwa. Beginners are introduced to the main topics in abhidharma and pramAna using this formal language, a language that has been heard in Tibetan debate institutions (RTSOD GRWA) down to the present day.

bstan rim. (tenrim). In Tibetan, "stages of the doctrine"; a genre of Tibetan Buddhist literature similar to the "stages of the path" (LAM RIM), of which it is a precursor. Bstan rim texts present a systematic and comprehensive outline of Tibetan Buddhist thought, although they generally differ from "stages of the path" works by referring strictly to MAHAYANA doctrine and avoiding the typology of three spiritual levels of individuals (skyes bu gsum): these are, following the explanation of TSONG KHA PA in his LAM RIM CHEN MO, the individual whose practice leads to a good rebirth, a middling type of individual whose practice leads to NIRVAnA, and the great person whose MahAyAna practice as a BODHISATTVA leads to buddhahood for the sake of all beings. However, the differences between bstan rim and lam rim texts are often blurred; the THAR PA RIN PO CHE'I RGYAN ("Jewel Ornament of Liberation") by SGAM PO PA BSOD NAMS RIN CHEN, for example, is often designated as a "stages of the path" work, although it might more precisely be classified as "stages of the doctrine." Early examples of bstan rim treatises were written at GSANG PHU NE'U THOG monastery by RNGOG BLO LDAN SHES RAB and his followers.

buli wenzi. (J. furyumonji; K. pullip muncha 不立文字). In Chinese, lit. "not establishing words and letters"; a line summarizing the CHAN school's unique sense of its own pedigree, as a school of Buddhism that does not rely on the scriptural teachings of Buddhism but has a direct connection through the "buddhas and patriarchs" (FOZU) to the mind of the Buddha himself. The saying is later attributed to the school's traditional founder, BODHIDHARMA. According to GUIFENG ZONGMI's CHANYUAN ZHUQUANJI DUXU, the Indian monk Bodhidharma taught that the mind was the DHARMA and he transmitted this teaching from mind to mind (YIXIN CHUANXIN) without establishing words or letters. This phrase also often appears together with three other phrases: JIAOWAI BIECHUAN ("a special transmission outside the teachings"), ZHIZHI RENXIN ("directly pointing to the human mind"), and JIANXING CHENGFO ("seeing one's own nature and becoming a buddha"). They appear together for the first time in the ZUTING SHIYUAN compiled in 1108 and soon became a normative teaching in the subsequent CHAN, SoN, THIỀN, and ZEN traditions. As a radical interpretation of the notion of UPAYA, the phrase buli wenzi remains to this day a controversial and frequently debated topic. Song-dynasty exponents of "lettered Chan" (WENZI CHAN), such as JUEFAN HUIHONG (1071-1128), decried the bibliophobic tendencies epitomized in this line and advocated instead that Chan insights were made manifest in both Buddhist SuTRAs as well as in the uniquely Chan genres of discourse records (YULU), lineage histories (see CHUANDENG LU), and public-case anthologies (GONG'AN).

Chanyuan qinggui. (J. Zen'on shingi; K. Sonwon ch'onggyu 禪苑清規). In Chinese, "Pure Rules of the Chan Garden"; compiled by the CHAN master CHANGLU ZONGZE, in ten rolls. According to its preface, which is dated 1103, the Chanyuan qinggui was modeled on BAIZHANG HUAIHAI's legendary "rules of purity" (QINGGUI) and sought to provide a standardized set of monastic rules and an outline of institutional administration that could be used across all Chan monasteries. As the oldest extant example of the qinggui genre, the Chanyuan qinggui is an invaluable source for the study of early Chan monasticism. It was the first truly Chinese set of monastic regulations that came to rival in importance and influence the imported VINAYA materials of Indian Buddhism and it eventually came to be used not only in Chan monasteries but also in "public monasteries" (SHIFANG CHA) across the Chinese mainland. The Chanyuan qinggui provides meticulous descriptions of monastic precepts, life in the SAMGHA hall (SENGTANG), rites and rituals, manners of giving and receiving instruction, and the various institutional offices at a Chan monastery. A great deal of information is also provided on the abbot and his duties, such as the tea ceremony. Semi-independent texts such the ZUOCHAN YI, a primer of meditation, the Guijing wen, a summary of the duties of the monastic elite, and the Baizhang guisheng song, Zongze's commentary on Baizhang's purported monastic code, are also appended at the end of the Chanyuan qinggui. The Japanese pilgrims MYoAN EISAI, DoGEN KIGEN, and ENNI BEN'EN came across the Chanyuan qinggui during their visits to various monastic centers in China and, upon their return to Japan, they used the text as the basis for the establishment of the Zen monastic institution. Copies of a Chinese edition by a certain Yu Xiang, dated 1202, are now housed at the Toyo and Kanazawa Bunko libraries. The Chanyuan qinggui was also imported into Korea, which printed its own edition of the text in 1254; the text was used to reorganize Korean monastic institutions as well.

Chengshi lun. (S. *Tattvasiddhi; J. Jojitsuron; K. Songsil non 成實論). In Chinese, "Treatise on Establishing Reality"; a summary written c. 253 CE by the third century CE author HARIVARMAN of the lost ABHIDHARMA of the BAHUsRUTĪYA school, a branch of the MAHASAMGHIKA. (The Sanskrit reconstruction *Tattvasiddhi is now generally preferred over the outmoded *SatyasiddhisAstra). The Tattvasiddhi is extant only in KUMARAJĪVA's Chinese translation, made in 411-412, in sixteen rolls (juan) and 202 chapters (pin). The treatise is especially valuable for its detailed refutations of the positions held by other early MAINSTREAM BUDDHIST SCHOOLS; the introduction, for example, surveys ten different grounds of controversy separating the different early schools. The treatise is structured in the form of an exposition of the traditional theory of the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS, but does not include listings for different factors (DHARMA) that typify many works in the abhidharma genre. The positions advocated in the text are closest to those of the STHAVIRANIKAYA and SAUTRANTIKA schools, although, unlike the SthaviranikAya, the treatise accepts the reality of "unmanifest materiality" (AVIJNAPTIRuPA) and, unlike SautrAntika, rejects the notion of an "intermediate state" (ANTARABHAVA) between existences. Harivarman opposes the SARVASTIVADA position that dharmas exist in past, present, and future, the MahAsAMghika view that thought is inherently pure, and the VATSĪPUTRĪYA premise that the "person" (PUDGALA) exists. The Chengshi lun thus hones to a "middle way" between the extremes of "everything exists" and "everything does not exist," both of which it views as expediencies that do not represent ultimate reality. The text advocates, instead, the "voidness of everything" (sarvasunya) and is therefore sometimes viewed within the East Asian traditions as representing a transitional stage between the mainstream Buddhist schools and MahAyAna philosophical doctrine. The text was so widely studied in East Asia, especially during the fifth and sixth centuries, that reference is made to a *Tattvasiddhi school of exegesis (C. Chengshi zong; J. Jojitsushu; K. Songsilchong); indeed, the Jojitsu school is considered one of the six major schools of Japanese Buddhist scholasticism during the Nara period.

chuandeng lu. (J. dentoroku; K. chondŭng nok 傳燈録). In Chinese, "transmission of the lamplight record"; a generic term for a genre of historical writing associated with the CHAN school, or more specifically to the most representative text of that genre, the JINGDE CHUANDENG LU. These so-called "lamp" or "lamplight histories" (denglu) include the CHODANG CHIP (C. Zutang ji), CHUANFA ZHENGZONG JI, Tiansheng guangdeng lu, Wudeng huiyuan ("Collected Essentials of the Five Lamplight Histories"), and others. These texts were composed primarily to establish a genealogical map of Chan orthodoxy and to reinforce the legitimacy for the lineages, teachings, and practices of the various Chan lines. These mature Chan histories were strongly influenced by earlier genealogical histories compiled during the Tang dynasty, such as the CHUAN FABAO JI, LENGQIE SHIZI JI, LIDAI FABAO JI, and BAOLIN ZHUAN. In these earlier texts, contending groups of masters and their disciples wove together intricate lineages that they traced back to the legendary Indian founder of Chan, BODHIDHARMA, and his immediate successors. These texts began using the metaphor of a "lamplight" (deng) being transmitted from lamp to lamp to suggest the wordless, mind-to-mind transmission (YIXIN CHUANXIN) of the Buddha's insight from master to disciple and down through the generations. These chuandeng lu also came to serve another important purpose as the primary source of the stories about the interactions between masters and students, from which important precedents or cases (GONG'AN) were collected for contemplation or testing of meditative experience.

cyberpunk: A genre of science fiction.

cyberpunk ::: /si:'ber-puhnk/ (Originally coined by SF writer Bruce Bethke and/or editor Gardner Dozois) A subgenre of SF launched in 1982 by William Gibson's but innovative Max Headroom TV series. See cyberspace, ice, jack in, go flatline.Since 1990 or so, popular culture has included a movement or fashion trend that calls itself cyberpunk, associated especially with the rave/techno subculture. hacking talent in those who have it. The general consensus is to tolerate them politely in hopes that they'll attract people who grow into being true hackers.[Jargon File]

cyberpunk /si:'ber-puhnk/ (Originally coined by SF writer Bruce Bethke and/or editor Gardner Dozois) A subgenre of SF launched in 1982 by William Gibson's epoch-making novel "Neuromancer" (though its roots go back through Vernor Vinge's "True Names" to John Brunner's 1975 novel "The Shockwave Rider"). Gibson's near-total ignorance of computers and the present-day hacker culture enabled him to speculate about the role of computers and hackers in the future in ways hackers have since found both irritatingly na"ive and tremendously stimulating. Gibson's work was widely imitated, in particular by the short-lived but innovative "Max Headroom" TV series. See {cyberspace}, {ice}, {jack in}, {go flatline}. Since 1990 or so, popular culture has included a movement or fashion trend that calls itself "cyberpunk", associated especially with the rave/techno subculture. Hackers have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, self-described cyberpunks too often seem to be shallow trendoids in black leather who have substituted enthusiastic blathering about technology for actually learning and *doing* it. Attitude is no substitute for competence. On the other hand, at least cyberpunks are excited about the right things and properly respectful of hacking talent in those who have it. The general consensus is to tolerate them politely in hopes that they'll attract people who grow into being true hackers. [{Jargon File}]

Da Tang Xiyu qiufa gaoseng zhuan. (J. Dai To Saiiki guho kosoden; K. Tae Tang Soyok kubop kosŭng chon 大唐西域求法高僧傳). In Chinese, "The Great Tang Biographies of Eminent Monks who Sought the Dharma in the Western Regions"; compiled by the Chinese pilgrim and translator YIJING (635-713). Yijing's record, modeled after other texts in the "eminent monks" (GAOSENG ZHUAN) genre, provides biographies of fifty-six contemporary and near-contemporary East Asian monks who made the arduous journey from China to the Buddhist homeland of India. Forty-nine of the pilgrims discussed are Chinese and seven are identified as Korean. Yijing's account of his own pilgrimage to Sumatra and India appears independently in his NANHAI JIGUI NEIFA ZHUAN.

Deb ther dmar po. (Depter Marpo). In Tibetan, lit. "The Red Annals"; an influential Tibetan religious and political history written by 'Tshal pa Kun dga' rdo rje (1309-1364). The work shows evidence of Mongolian influence, likely due to the strong Tibeto-Mongolian ties at the time. The title word deb ther is likely a Mongolian loan word and, although it became a subgenre in Tibetan literature, this appears to be the first instance of its usage. The text is also known as the Hu lan deb ther, where hu lan derives from the Mongolian word for "red."

Denkoroku. (傳光録). In Japanese, "Record of the Transmission of the Light"; a text also known by its full title, Keizan osho denkoroku ("A Record of the Transmission of the Light by Master Keizan"). The anthology is attributed by Soto tradition to KEIZAN JoKIN, but was most probably composed posthumously by his disciples. The Denkoroku is a collection of pithy stories and anecdotes concerning fifty-two teachers recognized by the Japanese SoToSHu as the patriarchs of the school, accompanied by the author's own explanatory commentaries and concluding verses. Each chapter includes a short opening case (honsoku), which describes the enlightenment experience of the teacher; a longer section (called a kien) offering a short biography and history of the teacher, including some of his representative teachings and exchanges with students and other teachers; a prose commentary (teisho; C. TICHANG) by the author; and a concluding appreciatory verse (juko). The teachers discussed in the text include twenty-seven Indian patriarchs from MAHĀKĀsYAPA to PrajNātāra; six Chinese patriarchs from BODHIDHARMA through HUINENG; seventeen Chinese successors of Huineng in the CAODONG ZONG, from QINGYUAN XINGSI to TIANTONG RUJING; and finally the two Japanese patriarchs DoGEN KIGEN and Koun Ejo (1198-1280). The Denkoroku belongs to a larger genre of texts known as the CHUANDENG LU ("transmission of the lamplight records"), although it is a rigidly sectarian lineage history, discussing only the single successor to each patriarch with no treatment of any collateral lines.

dharma. (P. dhamma; T. chos; C. fa; J. ho; K. pop 法). In Sanskrit, "factor," or "element"; a polysemous term of wide import in Buddhism and therefore notoriously difficult to translate, a problem acknowledged in traditional sources; as many as ten meanings of the term are found in the literature. The term dharma derives from the Sanskrit root √dhṛ, which means "to hold" or "to maintain." In Vedic literature, dharma is often used to refer to the sacrifice that maintains the order of the cosmos. Indian kings used the term to refer to the policies of their realms. In Hinduism, there is an important genre of literature called the dharmasāstra, treatises on dharma, which set forth the social order and the respective duties of its members, in relation to caste, gender, and stage of life. Based on this denotation of the term, many early European translators rendered dharma into English as "law," the same sense conveyed in the Chinese translation of dharma as fa (also "law"). ¶ In Buddhism, dharma has a number of distinct denotations. One of its most significant and common usages is to refer to "teachings" or "doctrines," whether they be Buddhist or non-Buddhist. Hence, in recounting his search for truth prior to his enlightenment, the Buddha speaks of the dharma he received from his teachers. After his enlightenment, the Buddha's first sermon was called "turning the wheel of the dharma" (DHARMACAKRAPRAVARTANA). When the Buddha described what he himself taught to his disciples, he called it the DHARMAVINAYA, with the vinaya referring to the rules of monastic discipline and the dharma referring presumably to everything else. This sense of dharma as teaching, and its centrality to the tradition, is evident from the inclusion of the dharma as the second of the three jewels (RATNATRAYA, along with the Buddha and the SAMGHA, or community) in which all Buddhists seek refuge. Commentators specified that dharma in the refuge formula refers to the third and fourth of the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS: the truth of the cessation (NIRODHASATYA) of the causes that lead to suffering and the truth of the path (MĀRGA) to that cessation. Here, the verbal root of dharma as "holding" is evoked etymologically to gloss dharma as meaning something that "holds one back" from falling into states of suffering. A distinction was also drawn between the dharma or teachings as something that is heard or studied, called the scriptural dharma (ĀGAMA-dharma), and the dharma or teachings as something that is made manifest in the consciousness of the practitioner, called the realized dharma (ADHIGAMA-dharma). ¶ A second (and very different) principal denotation of dharma is a physical or mental "factor" or fundamental "constituent element," or simply "phenomenon." In this sense, the individual building blocks of our compounded (SAMSKṚTA) existence are dharmas, dharma here glossed as something that "holds" its own nature. Thus, when Buddhist texts refer to the constituent elements of existence, they will often speak of "all dharmas," as in "all dharmas are without self." The term ABHIDHARMA, which is interpreted to mean either "higher dharma" or "pertaining to dharma," refers to the analysis of these physical and mental factors, especially in the areas of causation and epistemology. The texts that contain such analyses are considered to be one of the three general categories of the Buddhist canon (along with SuTRA and vinaya), known as the TRIPItAKA or "three baskets." ¶ A third denotation of the term dharma is that of "quality" or "characteristic." Thus, reference is often made to dharmas of the Buddha, referring in this sense not to his teachings but to his various auspicious qualities, whether they be physical, verbal, or mental. This is the primary meaning of dharma in the term DHARMAKĀYA. Although this term is sometimes rendered into English as "truth body," dharmakāya seems to have originally been meant to refer to the entire corpus (KĀYA) of the Buddha's transcendent qualities (dharma). ¶ The term dharma also occurs in a large number of important compound words. SADDHARMA, or "true dharma," appears early in the tradition as a means of differentiating the teachings of the Buddha from those of other, non-Buddhist, teachers. In the MAHĀYĀNA sutras, saddharma was used to refer, perhaps defensively, to the Mahāyāna teachings; one of the most famous Mahāyāna sutras is the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA, known in English as the "Lotus Sutra," but whose full title is "White Lotus of the True Dharma Sutra." In Buddhist theories of history, the period after the death of the Buddha (often said to last five hundred years) is called the time of the true dharma. This period of saddharma is followed, according to some theories, by a period of a "semblance" of the true dharma (SADDHARMAPRATIRuPAKA) and a period of "decline" (SADDHARMAVIPRALOPA). The term DHARMADHĀTU refers to the ultimate nature of reality, as does DHARMATĀ, "dharma-ness." It should also be noted that dharma commonly appears in the designations of persons. Hence, a DHARMABHĀnAKA is a preacher of the dharma, a DHARMAPĀLA is a deity who protects the dharma; in both terms, dharma refers to the Buddhist doctrine. A DHARMARĀJAN is a righteous king (see CAKRAVARTIN), especially one who upholds the teachings of the Buddha. For various rosters of dharmas, see the List of Lists appendix.

Divyāvadāna. In Sanskrit, "Divine Exploits"; a collection of thirty-eight "heroic tales" or "narratives" (AVADĀNA). Avadānas are the tenth of the twelvefold (DVĀDAsĀnGA[PRAVACANA]) categorization of the traditional genres of Buddhist literature and relate the past and present deeds of a person, either lay or ordained, who in some specific fashion exemplifies Buddhist ethics and practice. The present characters in the stories in the Divyāvadāna are often identified as persons whom the Buddha encountered in a former life. Thus, its tales have a narrative structure similar to JĀTAKA stories, in which an event in the present offers an opportunity to recount a story from the past, which in turn illuminates details regarding present circumstances. Themes that run throughout the Divyāvadāna include the realization of positive or negative consequences of action (KARMAN), the importance of moral discipline, and the great merit (PUnYA) that can be accrued through service or reverence offered to the buddhas or to sites related to the buddhas, such as a STuPA. The Divyāvadāna includes thirty-six avadānas and two SuTRAs. Famous stories found in the Divyāvadāna collection include the Purnāvadāna, the story of the monk PuRnA, and the AsOKĀVADĀNA, which recounts the birth, life, and reign of King AsOKA, the monarch whom the Buddhist tradition considers the great protector of the religion. Although the style and language of the works vary tremendously, more than half of the tales also appear in the MuLASARVĀSTIVĀDA VINAYA. Given their debt to vinaya literature, it is not surprising that many of the tales in the Divyāvadāna often make reference to points of monastic discipline (VINAYA). This association with the Mulasarvāstivāda vinaya suggests that these stories could date as far back as the beginning of the Common Era. However, the oldest extant manuscript of the Divyāvadāna dates only to the seventeenth century, and there is no reference to a text by that title in a Buddhist source prior to that date. There also is no Tibetan or Chinese translation of the text, although many of its stories are found in the Tibetan and Chinese canons. (For example, twenty-one of the thirty-eight stories of the collection are found in the vinaya section of the Tibetan canon.) This has led some scholars to conclude that, although the stories themselves are quite old, the particular compilation as the Divyāvadāna may be rather late. A number of stories from the Divyāvadāna were translated by EUGÈNE BURNOUF in his 1844 Introduction à l'histoire du Buddhisme indien. The first Sanskrit edition of the entire text was undertaken in 1866 by Edward B. Cowell and Robert A. Neil. The Divyāvadāna legends had a significant influence on Buddhist art and were often the subject of Buddhist sculptures and paintings. For instance, in the "Sahasodgata" chapter of this collection, the Buddha describes the "wheel of existence" (BHAVACAKRA), which became a popular subject of painting in many of the Buddhist traditions.

downtempo: a slow, moody, or decreased tempo or played or done in such a tempo. It also refers to a genre of electronic music based on this (downtempo).

dvādasānga[pravacana]. (T. gsung rab yan lag bcu gnyis; C. shi'erbu jing; J. junibukyo; K. sibibu kyong 十二部經). In Sanskrit, "twelve categories"; the twelve traditional divisions of the Buddha's teachings based on content and literary style, according to Sanskrit Buddhist sources. The Sanskrit list adds three more genres-framing stories or episodes (NIDĀNA), heroic tales or narratives (AVADĀNA), and instructions (UPADEsA)-to the nine divisions (P. NAVAnGA[PĀVACANA]) listed in mainstream Buddhist sources: discourses (SuTRA), aphorisms in mixed prose and verse (GEYA), prophetic teachings or expositions (VYĀKARAnA), verses (GĀTHĀ), utterance or meaningful expressions (UDĀNA), fables (ITIVṚTTAKA), tales of previous lives (JĀTAKA), marvelous events (ADBHUTADHARMA), and catechisms or works of great extent (VAIPULYA). In Sanskrit sources, these twelve are called vacana or pravacana (P. pāvacana), viz., the words of the Buddha. See also AnGA.

Electronic sports (esports) - organized multiplayer video game competitions. The most common video game genres associated with electronic sports are real-time strategy, fighting, first-person shooter, and multiplayer online battle arena. See /r/esports

field circus ::: A derogatory pun on field service. The field service organisation of any hardware manufacturer, but especially DEC. There is an entire genre of jokes about DEC field circus engineers:Q: How can you recognise a DEC field circus engineer with a flat tire?A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.Q: How can you recognise a DEC field circus engineer who is out of gas?A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.See Easter egging for additional insight on these jokes.There is also the Field Circus Cheer (from the plan file for DEC on MIT-AI): Maynard! Maynard!Don't mess with us! (DEC's service HQ is located in Maynard, Massachusetts).[Jargon File] (1994-12-01)

field circus A derogatory pun on "field service". The field service organisation of any hardware manufacturer, but especially {DEC}. There is an entire genre of jokes about DEC field circus engineers: Q: How can you recognise a DEC field circus engineer with a flat tire? A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat. Q: How can you recognise a DEC field circus engineer who is out of gas? A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat. See {Easter egging} for additional insight on these jokes. There is also the "Field Circus Cheer" (from the {plan file} for {DEC} on MIT-AI): Maynard! Maynard! Don't mess with us! We're mean and we're tough! If you get us confused We'll screw up your stuff. (DEC's service HQ is located in Maynard, Massachusetts). [{Jargon File}] (1994-12-01)

filk /filk/ [SF fandom, where a typo for "folk" was adopted as a new word] A popular or folk song with lyrics revised or completely new lyrics, intended for humorous effect when read, and/or to be sung late at night at SF conventions. There is a flourishing subgenre of these called "computer filks", written by hackers and often containing rather sophisticated technical humour. See {double bucky} for an example. Compare {grilf}, {hing} and {newsfroup}. [{Jargon File}]

fool file "jargon" A term found on {Usenet} for a notional repository of all the most dramatically and abysmally stupid utterances ever. An entire subgenre of {sig blocks} consists of the header "From the fool file:" followed by some quote the poster wishes to represent as an immortal gem of dimwittery; for this usage to be really effective, the quote has to be so obviously wrong as to be laughable. More than one {Usenetter} has achieved an unwanted notoriety by being quoted in this way. (2001-01-05)

fool file ::: (jargon) A term found on Usenet for a notional repository of all the most dramatically and abysmally stupid utterances ever. An entire subgenre of sig More than one Usenetter has achieved an unwanted notoriety by being quoted in this way.(2001-01-05)

gāthā. (T. tshigs su bcad pa; C. ji; J. ge; K. ke 偈). In Sanskrit and Pāli, "odes" or "religious verse," typically listed as the fourth of the Pāli ninefold (NAVAnGĀ[PĀVACANA]) and Sanskrit twelvefold (DVĀDAsĀnGA[PRAVACANA]) divisions of the traditional genres of Buddhist literature as classified by composition style and content. Gāthās are often written in quatrains of four lines of eight syllables apiece. The gāthā genre is closely related to GEYA, "verse narratives" or "verse interspersed with prose"; however, gāthā does not include the geya's interspersed prose narration and is not necessarily the verse reiteration of a preceding prose narrative.

Genres: Types of art to which special rules and independent developments were attributed. For example: in poetry -- epic, lyric, dramatic; in painting -- historic, portrait, landscape; in music -- oratorical, symphonic, operatic. -- L.V.

geya. (P. geyya; T. dbyangs bsnyad; C. qiye; J. giya; K. kiya 衹夜). In Sanskrit, "verse narrations," or "songs"; the verse summaries, sometimes with preceding prose material, included in the Buddhist scriptures. The geya are typically listed as the second of the Pāli ninefold (NAVAnGA) and Sanskrit twelvefold (DVĀDAsĀnGA) divisions of the traditional genres of Buddhist literature as classified by composition style and content. These verses are sometimes written in the traditional Sanskrit sLOKA form, with four lines of eight syllables apiece. The geya genre is closely related to GĀTHĀ, religious verse, but may in some cases be distinguished by being the verse reiteration of a preceding prose narrative or by sometimes having verse interspersed with prose narration.

gong'an. (J. koan; K. kongan 公案). In Chinese, "public case," or "precedent"; better known in the West by its Japanese pronunciation koan, a word that has now entered common English parlance as "koan." Gong'an was originally a legal term, referring to the magistrate's (gong) table (an), which by metonymy comes to refer to a legal precedent or an authoritative judgment; the term also comes to mean simply a "story" (gong'an in vernacular Chinese refers to the genre of detective stories). The term is widely used in the CHAN school in a way that conveys both denotations of a legal precedent and a story. The study of gong'an seems to have had its beginnings in the practice, probably dating from the late-Tang dynasty, of commenting on the exchanges or "ancient precedents" (guce) culled from Chan genealogical histories (e.g., JINGDE CHUANDENG LU) and the recorded sayings or discourse records (YULU) of the Chan masters of the past. Commenting on old cases (niangu), often using verses (SONGGU), seems to have become a well-established practice by the early Song dynasty, as more recorded sayings began to include separate sections known as nianggu and songgu. Perhaps one of the most famous collections of verse commentaries on old cases is the Chan master XUEDOU CHONGXIAN's Xuedou heshang baice songgu, which now exists only as part of a larger influential collection of gong'ans known as the BIYAN LU. Other famous gong'an collections, such as the CONGRONG LU and WUMEN GUAN, were compiled during the Song dynasty and thereafter. These collections often shared a similar format. Each case (bence), with some exceptions, begins with a pointer (CHUISHI), a short introductory paragraph. The actual case, often a short anecdote, is interspersed with interlinear notes known as "annotations" or "capping phrases" (C. zhuoyu/zhuyu; see J. JAKUGO). After the case, a prose commentary (pingchang), verse commentary (songgu), and subcommentary on the verse commentary follow. Traditionally, 1,700 specific gong'an are said to have been in circulation in the Chan school. Although this number does have antecedents within the tradition, there are no fixed numbers of cases included in Chan gong'an anthologies; for example, a late Qing-dynasty collection, the 1712 Zongjian falin, includes 2,720 gong'an, which were claimed to be all the gong'an then in active use within the tradition. Whatever the number, there seems not to have been any kind of systematic curriculum within the Chinese Chan or Korean Son traditions using this full panoply of gong'an. The creation of a pedagogical system of training involving mastery of a series of many different koans is commonly attributed to HAKUIN EKAKU (1685-1768) in the Japanese RINZAISHu of ZEN. The widespread reference to 1,700 gong'an in Western-language materials may derive from accounts of Japanese government attempts in 1627 to routinize the Rinzai monastic curriculum, by promulgating a regulation requiring all Zen abbots to master 1,700 cases as part of their training. ¶ The literary endeavor of studying old cases also gave rise to new forms of meditation. The Chan master DAHUI ZONGGAO in the YANGQI PAI of the LINJI ZONG systematized a practice in which one focuses on what he termed the "meditative topic" (HUATOU), which in some contexts refers to the "keyword," or "critical phrase" of a gong'an story. For instance, the famous huatou "WU" (no) that Dahui used as a meditative topic was derived from a popular gong'an attributed to ZHAOZHOU CONGSHEN: A student asked Zhaozhou, "Does a dog have buddha nature, or not?," to which Zhaozhou replied "wu" (no; lit., "it does not have it") (see WU GONG'AN; GOUZI WU FOXING). This new practice was called the "Chan of observing the meditative topic" or, more freely, "questioning meditation" (KANHUA CHAN). During the Song dynasty, students also began to seek private instruction on gong'an from Chan masters. These instructions often occurred in the abbot's quarters (FANGZHANG). ¶ The active study of gong'an in Korean SoN begins with POJO CHINUL and his disciple CHIN'GAK HYESIM, who learned of Dahui's kanhua Chan largely through the writings of their Chinese counterpart. Hyesim was also the first Korean Son monk to compile his own massive collection of cases, titled the SoNMUN YoMSONG CHIP. The use of cases was later transmitted to Japan by pilgrims and émigré monks, where koan study became emblematic of the Rinzaishu. Because rote memorization of capping phrases came to take precedence over skilled literary composition in classical Chinese, the Japanese compiled large collections of capping phrases, such as the ZENRIN KUSHu, to use in their training.

Gothic literature: A genre of writing preoccupied with mysteries, murder, villainy and the supernatural, often set in desolate and ancient landscapes such as castles and churches. These can include novels, poetry or short stories.

Gsang phu ne'u thog. (Sangphu Ne'utok). A monastery associated with the BKA' GDAMS sect established south of LHA SA in 1073 by RNGOG LEGS PA'I SHES RAB; for many centuries one of the premier institutions of learning in central Tibet. The abbacy passed to the scholar and translator RNGOG BLO LDAN SHES RAB, Legs pa'i shes rab's nephew, on his thirty-fifth birthday. Blo ldan shes rab's translations and summaries (bsdus don) of all the major works of DHARMAKĪRTI, together with the commentaries of DHARMOTTARA, as well as his two major commentaries (rnam bshad) established Gsang phu as the unchallenged center for the study of epistemology (T. tshad ma; S. PRAMĀnA) until SA SKYA PAndITA's masterly presentation of Dharmakīrti's thought in about 1219 in his TSHAD MA RIGS GTER; it criticized some aspects of the Gtsang phu tradition. Most illustrious of the line of pramāna scholars after Rngog at GSANG PHU was PHYWA PA CHOS KYI SENG GE who is credited with originating the distinctively Tibetan BSDUS GRWA genre of textbook (used widely in DGE LUGS monasteries) that introduces beginners to the main topics in ABHIDHARMA in a particular dialectical form that strings together a chain of consequences linked by a chain of reasons. Gtsang phu was also the center of PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ studies based on the ABHISAMAYĀLAMKĀRA, originating again with Blo ldan shes rab's translation, summary, and a major commentary. It attracted great masters of various sectarian affiliations including DUS GSUM MKHYEN PA, the first KARMA PA. The monastery divided into two colleges in the twelfth century; Gnyal [alt. Mnyal] zhig 'Jam pa'i rdo rje (fl. c. 1200) was abbot during Sa skya Pandita's early years. Gnyal zhig's students passed on the traditions down to ZHWA LU monastery and to BU STON RIN CHEN GRUB and his followers. Like many former Bka' gdams institutions, it faded into obscurity with the rise of the DGE LUGS sect.

guruyoga. (T. bla ma'i rnal 'byor). The practice of GURU devotion, considered especially important in tantric practice, in which one's teacher is regarded as a buddha. In Tibetan Buddhism, guruyoga is included in a series of preliminary practices (SNGON 'GRO) to be undertaken before receiving a consecration. According to such works as DPAL SPRUL's KUN BZANG BLA MA'I ZHAL LUNG ("Words of My Perfect Teacher"), guruyoga includes reciting one hundred thousand repetitions of the name MANTRA of one's guru, visualized in the form of an enlightened being (in the case of that text, PADMASAMBHAVA). Guruyoga also includes the proper attitude toward a guru, as set forth in the GURUPANCĀsIKĀ and expanded on at length at the beginning of works of the LAM RIM-type genre. See also GAnACAKRA.

Harivarman. (T. Seng ge go cha; C. Helibamo; J. Karibatsuma; K. Haribalma 訶梨跋摩). Indian Buddhist exegete who probably lived between the third and fourth centuries CE (c. 250-350 CE). Harivarman was a disciple of Kumāralabdha and is the author of the CHENGSHI LUN (*Tattvasiddhi; "Treatise on Establishing Reality"), a summary of the lost ABHIDHARMA of the BAHUsRUTĪYA school, a branch of the MAHĀSĀMGHIKA school of the mainstream Buddhist tradition. The *Tattvasiddhi, extant only in Chinese translation as the Chengshi lun, is especially valuable for its detailed refutations of the positions held by other early sRĀVAKAYĀNA schools; the introduction, e.g., surveys ten different bases of controversy that separate the different early schools. The treatise is structured in the form of an exposition of the traditional theory of the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS, but does not include the listings for different factors (DHARMA) that typify many works in the abhidharma genre. The positions that Harivarman advocates are closest to those of the STHAVIRANIKĀYA and SAUTRĀNTIKA schools, although, unlike the Pāli texts, he accepts the reality of "unmanifest materiality" (AVIJNAPTIRuPA) and, unlike Sautrāntika, rejects the notion of an "intermediate state" (ANTARĀBHAVA) between existences. Harivarman opposes the SARVĀSTIVĀDA position that dharmas exist in both past and future, the MAHĀSĀMGHIKA view that thought is inherently pure, and the VĀTSĪPUTRĪYA premise that the "person" (PUDGALA) exists in reality. Harivarman seems to hone to a middle way between the extremes of "everything exists" and "everything does not exist," both of which he views as expediencies that do not represent ultimate reality. Harivarman advocates, instead, the "emptiness of everything" (sarva-suNYATĀ) and is therefore sometimes viewed within the East Asian traditions as representing a transitional stage between the mainstream Buddhist schools and MAHĀYĀNA philosophical doctrine.

horror story: A genre of prose fiction that aims to create a sense of fear, disgust, or horror in the reader.

Huanglong pai. (J. oryoha/oryuha; K. Hwangnyong p'a 龍派). In Chinese, "Huanglong school"; collateral lineage of the CHAN school's LINJI ZONG, one of the five houses and seven schools (WU JIA QI ZONG) of the Chan during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1126). The school's name comes from the toponym of its founder, HUANGLONG HUINAN (1002-1069), who taught at Mt. Huanglong in present-day Jiangxi province; Huinan was a disciple of Shishuang Chuyuan (986-1039), himself a sixth-generation successor in the Linji school. The Huanglong school was especially known for "lettered Chan" (WENZI CHAN), a style of Chan that valorized belle lettres, and especially poetry, in Chan practice. Many of the most influential monks in the Huanglong school exemplified a period when Chan entered the mainstream of Chinese intellectual life: their practice of Chan was framed and conceptualized in terms that drew from their wide learning and profound erudition, tendencies that helped make Chan writings particularly appealing to wider Chinese literati culture. JUEFAN HUIHONG (1071-1128), for example, decried the bibliophobic tendencies in Chan that were epitomized in the aphorism that Chan "does not establish words and letters" (BULI WENZI) and advocated that Chan insights were in fact made manifest in both Buddhist sutras and the uniquely Chan genres of discourse records (YULU), lineage histories (see CHUANDENG LU), and public-case anthologies (GONG'AN). Huanglong and YUNMEN ZONG masters made important contributions to the development of the Song Chan literary styles of songgu ([attaching] verses to ancient [cases]) and niangu (raising [and analyzing] ancient [cases]). Because of their pronounced literary tendencies, many Huanglong monks became close associates of such Song literati-officials as Su Shi (1036-1101), Huang Tingjian (1045-1105), and ZHANG SHANGYING (1043-1122). After the founder's death, discord appeared within the Huanglong lineage: the second-generation master Baofeng Kewen (1025-1102) and his disciple Juefan Huihong criticized the practices of another second-generation master Donglin Changzong (1025-1091) and his disciples as clinging to silence and simply waiting for enlightenment; this view may have influenced the subsequent criticism of the CAODONG ZONG by DAHUI ZONGGAO (1089-1163), who trained for a time with the Huanglong master Zhantang Wenjun (1061-1115). The Huanglong pai was the first school of Chan to be introduced to Japan: by MYoAN EISAI (1141-1215), who studied with the eighth-generation Huanglong teacher Xu'an Huaichang (d.u.). The Huanglong pai did not survive as a separate lineage in either country long after the twelfth century, as its rival YANGQI PAI came to prominence; it was eventually reabsorbed into the Yangqi lineage.

Jakushitsu Genko. (C. Jishi Yuanguang 寂室元光) (1290-1367). Japanese ZEN monk in the RINZAISHu and founder of the Eigenji branch of the school. After entering the monastery at the age of thirteen, Jakushitsu studied under several Zen masters, including Yakuo Tokken (1244-1320) of ZENKoJI in Kamakura, who administered to him the complete monastic precepts (gusokukai) of a BHIKsU, and Yishan Yining (J. Issan Ichinei; 1247-1317) of NANZENJI in Kyoto, a Chinese LINJI ZONG monk who was active in Japan. Jakushitsu traveled to Yuan China in 1320 together with another Rinzai monk named Kao Sonen (d.1345). There, he studied with such eminent Linji Chan masters as ZHONGFENG MINGBEN (1263-1323), who gave him the cognomen Jishi (J. Jakushitsu), and Yuansou Xingduan (1255-1341). After returning to Japan in 1326, Jakushitsu spent the next twenty-five years traveling around the country as an itinerant monk, until 1362, when he assumed the abbacy of Eigenji, a monastery built for him by Sasaki Ujiyori (1326-1370) in omi no kuni (present-day Shiga prefecture). The emperor subsequently invited him to stay at Tenryuji in Kyoto and KENCHoJI in Kamakura, but he refused, choosing to remain at Eigenji for the remainder of his life. Jakushitsu is well known for his flute playing and his refined Zen poetry, which is considered some of the finest examples of the genre. He was given the posthumous title Enno Zenji (Zen Master Consummate Response).

jātaka. (T. skyes rabs; C. bensheng jing; J. honshokyo; K. ponsaeng kyong 本生經). In Sanskrit and Pāli, literally, "birth," or "nativity"; a term used in Buddhism to refer by extension to narrative accounts of previous births or lives, especially of a buddha. The jātaka constitute one of the nine (NAVAnGA[PĀVACANA]) (Pāli) or twelve (DVĀDAsĀnGA[PRAVACANA]) (Sanskrit) categories (AnGA) of Buddhist scripture that are delineated according to their structure or literary style. There are hundreds of such stories (547 in the Pāli collection alone) and together they form one of the most popular genres of Buddhist literature. In a typical tale, GAUTAMA Buddha will recount a story from one of his past lives as a human or an animal, demonstrating a particular virtue, or perfection (PĀRAMITĀ), after which he will identify the other characters in the story as the past incarnations of members of his present audience. A jātaka story usually has five components: (1) an introduction, in which the Buddha recounts the circumstances leading up to the story to be recounted; (2) a prose narrative, in which the story from one of the Buddha's past lives is related; (3) stanzas of poetry, which often contain the moral of the story; (4) a prose commentary on the stanzas; and (5) a conclusion that connects the past with the present, in which the Buddha identifies members of his current audience as incarnations in the present of the characters in the story from the past. ¶ The Pāli Jātaka is the tenth book of the KHUDDAKANIKĀYA of the SUTTAPItAKA. The collection is comprised of 547 stories of former lives of Gotama Buddha while he was a bodhisatta (S. BODHISATTVA). The Jātaka itself is made up entirely of short verses, but these are accompanied by prose commentary called the JĀTAKAttHAKATHĀ, which recounts the relevant stories. Some of the Jātakas have been included in another collection contained in the KHUDDAKANIKĀYA, the CARIYĀPItAKA. In Sanskrit, the most famous jātaka collection is the JĀTAKAMĀLĀ by sura. Over the course of the history of Buddhism and throughout the Buddhist world, jātakas have been one of the most popular forms of Buddhist literature, especially among the laity, due both to their entertaining plots and their edifying moral lessons. Scenes from various jātaka stories are widely depicted in Buddhist art and occur among some of the earliest Buddhist stone carvings in India. Scholarship has demonstrated that the plots of many of the jātakas derive from Indian folklore, with the same story occurring in Hindu, JAINA, and Buddhist works. In the Buddhist versions, the plot has been adapted by adding a prologue and epilogue that identifies the protagonist as the bodhisattva and the other characters as members of the Buddha's circle in a former life; the hero's antagonist in the story is often identified as DEVADATTA in a former life. In addition to their general popularity, individual jātakas have had great influence, such as the VESSANTARA JĀTAKA in Southeast Asia.

jinglu. (J. kyoroku; K. kyongnok 經). In Chinese, "scriptural catalogues"; a genre of Buddhist literature unique to East Asian Buddhism. Because the Chinese state presumed the authority to authorize which texts (including Buddhist scriptures) were allowed to circulate, the Chinese Buddhist institution from early in its history began to compile catalogues of scriptures that were deemed authentic, and thus suitable for inclusion in the Buddhist canon (DAZANGJING), and texts that were deemed suspect and thus potentially to be excluded from the canon (see APOCRYPHA). Scriptural catalogues began to be compiled within a century of the beginnings of the translation of Buddhist texts into Chinese, or sometime around the middle of the third century, and some eighty catalogues were compiled over the next one thousand five hundred years, with the majority dating from the Tang dynasty (618-907) or before. As Buddhist canons came to be compiled in Korea and Japan as well, those countries also began to create their own catalogues. For the Chinese cataloguers, the main standard of scriptural authority was whether there was clear evidence that a scripture had been imported from outside China and then translated into Chinese; any evidence that indigenous material had intruded into texts, whether that evidence involved vocabulary, thought, or practice, could lead to those texts being judged as apocrypha. Important catalogues include DAO'AN's ZONGLI ZHONGJING MULU, the earliest catalogue, composed c. 374; Sengyou's CHU SANZANG JIJI from 515, which established the principal categories into which all subsequent cataloguers would classify texts; Fei Changfang's LIDAI SANBAO JI from 597, which fabricated many translator attributions to texts that had previously been listed as anonymous, so as to quash potential questions about the reliability of the Buddhist textual transmission; DAOXUAN's DA TANG NEIDIAN LU from 664; and Zhisheng's KAIYUAN SHIJIAO LU from 730, the catalogue par excellence, whose scriptural listings would provide the definitive content and organization of the East Asian Buddhist canon from that point onward.

Jingtu ruiying zhuan. (J. Jodo zuioden; K. Chongt'o soŭng chon 浄土瑞應傳). In Chinese, "Legends of Auspicious Resonance in the PURE LAND"; attributed to the monks Wenshen (fl. c. nine CE) and Shaokang (d. 805), although their authorship remains a matter of debate. The Jingtu ruiying zhuan is a collection of forty-eight testimonials of rebirth in the pure land of SUKHĀVATĪ, offering proof that the prospect of rebirth there is a viable reason for faith in the salvific grace of AMITĀBHA Buddha. This text is one of the earliest examples of a genre of Buddhist literature called rebirth testimonials (wangsheng zhuan), which is unique to East Asia. The Jingtu ruiying zhuan also served as a prototype for later collections, such as the Jingtu wangsheng zhuan, attributed to Jiezhu (985-1077).

Jingtu zhuan. (J. Jododen; K. Chongt'o chon 淨土傳). In Chinese, "biographies of PURE LAND [practitioners]," also called "biographies of those who have gone to rebirth in the pure land" (wangsheng Jingtu zhuan); several such compilations are extant. Most of these anthologies were made by selecting examples from the various biographies of eminent monks (GAOSENG ZHUAN) of persons who were reported, first, to have shown "auspicious signs" (ruixiang) at the time of their deaths and, second, were noted for their exceptional devotion to pure land practice. Visions of AMITĀBHA and his entourage, an inexplicable radiance filling the site, heavenly fragrances, and prescience and/or predictions of one's imminent death and rebirth into the pure land were taken to be such "auspicious signs" and are common themes in the hagiographical accounts recorded in these anthologies. One of the earliest extant examples of the genre is the Jingtu zhuan compiled in the eleventh century by Jiezhu (985-1077), but many other anthologies were compiled in later centuries and were widely circulated. The stories they contain became popular testimonials to the efficacy and verity of pure land practice. These pure land anthologies are notable for their inclusive nature, and they collect biographies not only of eminent monks, but also of nuns, laypeople, and even persons of ill repute and low social status.

Juefan Huihong. (J. Kakuhan Eko; K. Kakpom Hyehong 覺範慧洪) (1071-1128). Chinese CHAN monk in the HUANGLONG PAI collateral line of the LINJI ZONG during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) and major proponent of "lettered Chan" (WENZI CHAN), which valorized belle lettres, and especially poetry, in the practice of Chan. Huihong entered the monastery after he was orphaned at fourteen, eventually passing the monastic examinations at age nineteen and receiving ordination at Tianwangsi in the eastern capital of Kaifeng. After studying the CHENG WEISHI LUN (*VijNaptimātratāsiddhi) for four years, he eventually began to study at LUSHAN with the Chan master Zhenjing Kewen (1025-1102), under whom he achieved enlightenment. Because of Huihong's close ties to the famous literati officials of his day, and especially with the statesman and Buddhist patron ZHANG SHANGYING (1043-1122), his own career was subject to many of the same political repercussions as his associates; indeed, Huihong himself was imprisoned, defrocked, and exiled multiple times in his life when his literati colleagues were purged. Compounding his problems, Huihong also suffered along with many other monks during the severe Buddhist persecution (see FANAN) that occurred during the reign of Emperor Huizong (r. 1100-1125). Even amid these trying political times, however, Huihong managed to maintain both his monastic vocation and his productive literary career. Huihong is in fact emblematic of many Chan monks during the Song dynasty, when Chan enters the mainstream of Chinese intellectual life: his practice of Chan was framed and conceptualized in terms that drew from his wide learning and profound erudition, tendencies that helped make Chan writings particularly appealing to wider Chinese literati culture. Huihong decried the bibliophobic tendencies in Chan that were epitomized in the aphorism that Chan "does not establish words and letters" (BULI WENZI) and advocated that Chan insights were made manifest in both Buddhist sutras as well as in the uniquely Chan genres of discourse records (YULU), genealogical histories (see CHUANDENG LU), and public-case anthologies (GONG'AN). Given his literary penchant, it is no surprise that Huihong was a prolific author. His works associated with Chan lineages include the CHANLIN SENGBAO ZHUAN ("Chronicles of the SAMGHA Jewel in the Chan Grove"), a collection of biographies of about a hundred eminent Chan masters important in the development of lettered Chan; and the Linjian lu ("Anecdotes from the Groves [of Chan]"), completed in 1107 and offering a record of Huihong's own encounters with fellow monks and literati and his reflections on Buddhist practice. Huihong also wrote two studies of poetics and poetic criticism, the Lengzhai yehua ("Evening Discourses from Cold Studio") and Tianchu jinluan ("Forbidden Cutlets from the Imperial Kitchen"), and numerous commentaries to Buddhist scriptures, including the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"), SHOULENGYAN JING, and YUANJUE JING.

klong sde. (long de). In Tibetan, the "expanse class," one of the three classes of ATIYOGA in the RNYING MA sect of Tibetan Buddhism. The atiyoga or RDZOGS CHEN teachings are traditionally divided into three classes: the mind section (SEMS SDE), which emphasizes the luminosity of the mind (RIG PA) in its natural state; the expanse section, which emphasizes the expansive or spacious mind in its natural state; and the instruction section (MAN NGAG SDE), which emphasizes the indivisibility of luminosity and expansiveness. The root tantra of the klong sde is traditionally said to be the Klong chen rab 'byams rgyal po'i rgyud, a long text in which the term klong figures prominently. Some of the texts ascribed to this class may date from as early as the ninth century, but the genre seems to have taken shape in the twelfth century; an important tantra for this class is the Rdo rje sems dpanam mkha'i mtha' dang mnyam pa'i rgyud chen po, where an important theme is the four signs (brda). According to tradition, klong sde is traced back to the late eighth-century Tibetan master VAIROCANA.

Lam rim chen mo. In Tibetan, "Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path"; the abbreviated title for one of the best-known works on Buddhist thought and practice in Tibet, composed by the Tibetan luminary TSONG KHA PA BLO BZANG GRAGS PA in 1402 at the central Tibetan monastery of RWA SGRENG. A lengthy treatise belonging to the LAM RIM, or stages of the path, genre of Tibetan Buddhist literature, the LAM RIN CHEN MO takes its inspiration from numerous earlier writings, most notably the BODHIPATHAPRADĪPA ("Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment") by the eleventh-century Bengali master ATIsA DĪPAMKARAsRĪJNĀNA. It is the most extensive treatment of three principal stages that Tsong kha pa composed. The others include (1) the LAM RIM CHUNG BA ("Short Treatise on the Stages of the Path"), also called the Lam rim 'bring ba ("Intermediate Treatise on the States of the Path") and (2) the LAM RIM BSDUS DON ("Concise Meaning of the Stages of the Path"), occasionally also referred to as the Lam rim chung ngu ("Brief Stages of the Path"). The latter text, which records Tsong kha pa's own realization of the path in verse form, is also referred to as the Lam rim nyams mgur ma ("Song of Experience of the Stages of the Path"). The LAM RIM CHEN MO is a highly detailed and often technical treatise presenting a comprehensive and synthetic overview of the path to buddhahood. It draws, often at length, upon a wide range of scriptural sources including the SuTRA and sĀSTRA literature of both the HĪNAYĀNA and MAHĀYĀNA; Tsong kha pa treats tantric practice in a separate work. The text is organized under the rubric of the three levels of spiritual predilection, personified as "the three individuals" (skyes bu gsum): the beings of small capacity, who engage in religious practice in order to gain a favorable rebirth in their next lifetime; the beings of intermediate capacity, who seek liberation from rebirth for themselves as an ARHAT; and the beings of great capacity, who seek to liberate all beings in the universe from suffering and thus follow the bodhisattva path to buddhahood. Tsong kha pa's text does not lay out all the practices of these three types of persons but rather those practices essential to the bodhisattva path that are held in common by persons of small and intermediate capacity, such as the practice of refuge (sARAnA) and contemplation of the uncertainty of the time of death. The text includes extended discussions of topics such as relying on a spiritual master, the development of BODHICITTA, and the six perfections (PĀRAMITĀ). The last section of the text, sometimes regarded as a separate work, deals at length with the nature of serenity (sAMATHA) and insight (VIPAsYANĀ); Tsong kha pa's discussion of insight here represents one of his most important expositions of emptiness (suNYATĀ). Primarily devoted to exoteric Mahāyāna doctrine, the text concludes with a brief reference to VAJRAYĀNA and the practice of tantra, a subject discussed at length by Tsong kha pa in a separate work, the SNGAGS RIM CHEN MO ("Stages of the Path of Mantra"). The Lam rim chen mo's full title is Skyes bu gsum gyi rnyams su blang ba'i rim pa thams cad tshang bar ston pa'i byang chub lam gyi rim pa.

lam rim. In Tibetan, "stages of the path"; a common abbreviation for byang chub lam gyi rim pa (jangchup lamkyi rimpa), or "stages of the path to enlightenment," a broad methodological framework for the study and practice of the complete Buddhist path to awakening, as well as the name for a major genre of Tibetan literature describing that path. It is closely allied to the genre known as BSTAN RIM, or "stages of the doctrine." The initial inspiration for the instructions of this system is usually attributed to the Bengali master ATIsA DĪPAMKARAsRĪJNĀNA, whose BODHIPATHAPRADĪPA ("Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment") became a model for numerous later stages of the path texts. The system presents a graduated and comprehensive approach to studying the central tenets of MAHĀYĀNA Buddhist thought and is often organized around a presentation of the three levels of spiritual predilection, personified as "three individuals" (skyes bu gsum): lesser, intermediate, and superior. The stages gradually lead the student from the lowest level of seeking merely to obtain a better rebirth, through the intermediate level of wishing for one's own individual liberation, and finally to adopting the MAHĀYĀNA outlook of the "superior individual," viz., aspiring to attain buddhahood in order to benefit all living beings. The approach is most often grounded in the teachings of the sutra and usually concludes with a brief overview of TANTRA. Although usually associated with the DGE LUGS sect, stages of the path literature is found within all the major sects of Tibetan Buddhism. One common Dge lugs tradition identifies eight major stages of the path treatises:

Lamrin (Tibetan) lam rim. Stages of the path; the name for a genre of Tibetan Buddhist literature. The most famous such work is Tsong-kha-pa’s Lam rim chen mo, which claims to be based on the earliest such work, the Bodhipathapradipa by Atisha (Dipamkara-shrijnana).

Linji lu. (J. Rinzairoku; K. Imje nok 臨濟). In Chinese, "The Record of Linji," the discourse record (YULU) attributed to LINJI YIXUAN (d. 867), the putative founder of the eponymous LINJI ZONG of CHAN (J. Zen; K. Son), and one of the most widely read and cited works within the Chan tradition; also known as the Linji yulu and the Zhenzhou Linji Huizhao Chanshi yulu. The Linji lu purports to provide a verbatim account of Linji's sermons, teachings, and his exchanges with disciples and guests. As with most texts in the discourse-record genre, however, the Linji lu was not compiled until long after Linji's death (the most popular recension was compiled in 1120, some 250 years after his death) and therefore provides a retrospective portrayal of how the mature Chan school assumed one of its quintessential masters would have taught and conducted himself. The record is in one roll and is divided into three sections: (1) formal discourses (e.g., SHANGTANG), many delivered at the request of local officials; (2) critical examinations (KANBIAN), viz., his encounters with monks, students, and lay visitors; and (3) a record of his activities (xinglu), which discusses his enlightenment under HUANGBO XIYUN (d. 850), his meetings with Chan masters early in his career, and concludes with an official biography taken from his stele inscription. The text is well known for its distinctive teachings, such as the "lump of raw flesh" (CHIROUTUAN), and his pedagogical technique called the Linji "shout" (he); see BANGHE.

Lyric: a. Literary genre pertaining to the absolute uniqueness of poets' sensations,

Mahāvastu. In Sanskrit, the "Great Chapter." Also known as the Mahāvastu AVADĀNA, this lengthy work is regarded as the earliest Sanskrit biography of the Buddha. The work describes itself as a book "of the VINAYAPItAKA according to the LOKOTTARAVĀDA, which is affiliated with the MAHĀSĀMGHIKA." The work thus provides important insights into how the Buddha was understood by the Lokottaravāda, or "Proponents of the Supramundane," a branch of the MahāsaMghika, or "Great Community," which some scholars regard as a possible antecedent of the Mahāyāna. The placement of the work in the vinayapitaka suggests that the genre of biographies of the Buddha began as introductions to the monastic code, before becoming independent works. Indeed, it corresponds roughly to the MAHĀVAGGA portion of the KHANDHAKA in the Pāli vinayapitaka. The Mahāvastu is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the previous lives of the being who would become the buddha sĀKYAMUNI, recounting the virtuous deeds he performed and the BODHISATTVA vow he made to the buddha DĪPAMKARA and other buddhas of the past. The second part begins in TUsITA, when the bodhisattva decides where to take his final birth. It goes on to recount his birth, childhood and youth; departure from the palace; and search for enlightenment. It concludes with his defeat of MĀRA. The third section describes the first conversions and the foundation of the SAMGHA. Like other early "biographies" of the Buddha, the narrative ends long before the Buddha's passage into PARINIRVĀnA. Also like these other works, the Mahāvastu does not provide a simple chronology, but is interrupted with numerous teachings, avadānas, and JĀTAKAs, some of which do not have analogues in the Pāli. There are also interpolations: for example, there are two versions of the BODHISATTVA's departure, the first rather simple and the second more elaborate, containing the famous story of the chariot rides during which the prince encounters aging, sickness, and death for the first time (cf. CATURNIMITTA). The so-called proto-Mahāyāna elements of the Mahāvastu have been the subject of much debate. For example, the text includes a lengthy description of the ten bodhisattva BHuMIs, often regarded as a standard Mahāyāna tenet, but their description differs in significant ways from that found in the Mahāyāna sutras. Although clearly a work with many interpolations, linguistic elements suggest that portions of the text may date to as early as the second century BCE.

MaNjusrīmulakalpa. (T. 'Jam dpal gyi rtsa ba'i rgyud; C. Dafangguang pusazang wenshushili genben yigui jing; J. Daihoko bosatsuzo Monjushiri konpongikikyo; K. Taebanggwang posalchang Munsusari kŭnbon ŭigwe kyong 大方廣菩薩藏文殊師利根本儀軌經). In Sanskrit "The Fundamental Ordinance of MANJUsRĪ"; known in Tibetan as the "Fundamental Tantra of MaNjusrī." The work is an early and important Buddhist TANTRA (marking a transition between the SuTRA and tantra genres), dating probably from around the late sixth or early seventh centuries, which was later classed as a KRIYĀTANTRA. The text, which is in a compilation of fifty-five chapters, provides detailed instructions by the Buddha on the performance of rituals and consecrations, including the important jar or vase consecrations (KALAsĀBHIsEKA). The work is also among the first to introduce the notion of families (KULA) of divinities, in this case three families: the TATHĀGATAKULA, the PADMAKULA, and the VAJRAKULA. Like other tantric texts, it provides instruction on a wide range of topics, including the recitation of MANTRAs, the drawing of images and MAndALAs, and the nature of the VIDYĀDHARA, as well as on astrology, medicine. Among the many prophecies in the text is the oft-cited prophecy concerning NĀGĀRJUNA, in which the Buddha states that four hundred years after his passage into PARINIRVĀnA, a monk named Nāga will appear, who will live for six hundred years.

Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG, MMO) Any game that allows dozens, hundreds or even thousands of players to interact with a game via the {Internet}. Typically the game runs on a central {server farm} and players access it via a {personal computer}, {game console} or mobile phone. The most popular genre is the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), of which {World of Warcraft} is probably the most popular example. Note that an MMOG is not necessarily a _massive_ game (though often they are based in large, complex worlds), their distinguishing characteristic is the number of players. (2012-05-30)

Mi la ras pa'i rnam thar. (Milarepe Namtar). In Tibetan, "Life of Milarepa"; an account of the celebrated eleventh-century Tibetan yogin MI LA RAS PA. While numerous early Tibetan versions of the life story exist, including several that may date from his lifetime, the best-known account was composed in 1488 by GTSANG SMYON HERUKA, the so-called mad YOGIN of Tsang, based upon numerous earlier works. Its narrative focuses on Mi la ras pa's early wrongdoings, his subsequent training and meditation, and eventual death. It is a companion to the MI LA'I MGUR 'BUM ("The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa"), also arranged and printed by Gtsang smyon Heruka, which records Milarepa's later teaching career through a compilation of his religious instruction and songs of realization. Gtsang smyon Heruka's version of the Mi la ras pa'i rnam thar is known and read throughout the Tibetan Buddhist cultural world and is widely accepted as a great literary achievement by Tibetans and Western scholars alike. The account of Milarepa's life profoundly affected the development of sacred biography in Tibet, a prominent genre in Tibetan Buddhist culture, and has influenced the way in which Tibet's Buddhism and culture have been understood in the West.

Niddesa. In Pāli, "Exposition"; the eleventh book of the KHUDDAKANIKĀYA of the Pāli SUTTAPItAKA. It is a commentarial work on portions of the SUTTANIPĀTA and is divided into two parts, the CulANIDDESA ("Lesser Exposition") and the MAHĀNIDDESA ("Longer Exposition"). The former comments on the Khaggavisānasutta (cf. S. KHAdGAVIsĀnA) and Parāyanavagga, while the latter comments on the AttHAKAVAGGA. The book is among the earliest examples of the commentarial genre of Buddhist literature-so early, in fact, that it was included within the suttapitaka itself. See CulANIDDESA; MAHĀNIDDESA.

PaNcaviMsatisāhasrikāprajNāpāramitāsutra. (T. Shes rab kyi pha rol tu phyin pa stong phrag nyi shu lnga pa; C. Mohe bore boluomi jing; J. Maka hannya haramitsukyo; K. Maha panya paramil kyong 摩訶般若波羅蜜經). In Sanskrit, "Perfection of Wisdom in Twenty-five Thousand Lines," one of the three most important of the "large" PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ sutras, together with the sATASĀHASRIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA ("Perfection of Wisdom in One-Hundred Thousand Lines") and the AstASĀHASRIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA ("Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines"). The early prajNāpāramitā sutras were named based upon their length. The scholarly consensus is that the earliest of the sutras of this genre was the version in eight thousand lines. Although it is not strictly the case that the two larger sutras are simply prolix expansions of the shorter sutra, there is considerable repetition among the texts, with the larger sutras increasing the number of categories to which various qualifications, including negations, were made. The prajNāpāramitā sutras are said to have an explicit meaning and a hidden meaning: the former is the doctrine of emptiness (suNYATĀ), the latter is the structure of the bodhisattva's path (MĀRGA) to this enlightenment. This structure is set forth in the ABHISAMAYĀLAMKĀRA attributed to MAITREYANĀTHA, one of the most widely commented upon of all Mahāyāna sĀSTRAs in India. Although the text does not explicitly say so, the AbhisamayālaMkāra is said to derive its categories from the PaNcaviMsatisāhasrikā. Ārya VIMUKTISENA, Bhadanta Vimuktisena, and HARIBHADRA each wrote commentaries on the AbhisamayālaMkāra, in which they explicitly connect it with the PaNcaviMsatisāhasrikā. The DAZHIDU LUN is also considered a commentary on this sutra.

Phywa pa [alt. Cha pa] Chos kyi Seng ge. (Chapa Chokyi Senge) (1109-1169). The sixth abbot of GSANG PHU NE'U THOG, a BKA' GDAMS monastery founded in 1073 by RNGOG LEGS PA'I SHES RAB. Among his students are included the first KARMA PA, DUS GSUM MKHYEN PA and the SA SKYA hierarch BSOD NAMS RTSE MO. His collected works include explanations of MADHYAMAKA and PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ. With his influential Tshad ma'i bsdus pa yid kyi mun sel rtsa 'grel he continued the line of PRAMĀnA scholarship started by RNGOG BLO LDAN SHES RAB, one that would later be challenged by SA SKYA PAndITA. He is credited with originating the distinctively Tibetan BSDUS GRWA genre of textbook (used widely in DGE LUGS monasteries) that introduces beginners to the main topics in abhidharma in a peculiar dialectical form that strings together a chain of consequences linked by a chain of reasons. He also played an important role in the formation of the BSTAN RIM genre of Tibetan Buddhist literature, the forerunner of the more famous LAM RIM.

poetry: A literary genre characterized by rhythmical patterns of language and figurative language. Poetry is also created with a sense of the musicality, and is not just written for meaning.

PrajNāpāramitāhṛdayasutra. (T. Shes rab kyi pha rol tu phyin pa'i snying po'i mdo; C. Bore boluomiduo xin jing; J. Hannya haramitta shingyo; K. Panya paramilta sim kyong 般若波羅蜜多心經). In English, the "Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom Sutra" (or, in other interpretations, the "DHĀRAnĪ-Sutra of the Perfection of Wisdom"); a work known in English simply as the "Heart Sutra"; one of only a handful of Buddhist SuTRAs (including the "Lotus Sutra" and the "Diamond Sutra") to be widely known by an English title. The "Heart Sutra" is perhaps the most famous, and certainly the most widely recited, of all Buddhist sutras across all Mahāyāna traditions. It is also one of the most commented upon, eliciting more Indian commentaries than any Mahāyāna sutra (eight), including works by such luminaries as KAMALAsĪLA, VIMALAMITRA, and ATIsA DĪPAMKARAsRĪJNĀNA, as well as such important East Asian figures as FAZANG, KuKAI, and HAKUIN EKAKU. As its title suggests, the scripture purports to be the quintessence or heart (hṛdaya) of the "perfection of wisdom" (PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ), in its denotations as both supreme wisdom and the eponymous genre of scriptures. The sutra exists in long and short versions-with the longer version better known in India and the short version better known in East Asia-but even the long version is remarkably brief, requiring only a single page in translation. The short version, which is probably the earlier of the two recensions, is best known through its Chinese translation by XUANZANG made c. 649 CE. There has been speculation that the Chinese version may be a redaction of sections of the Chinese recension of the MAHĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA (also translated by Xuanzang) as a mnemonic encoding (dhāranī) of the massive perfection of wisdom literature, which was then subsequently translated back into Sanskrit, perhaps by Xuanzang himself. Although there is as yet no scholarly consensus on the provenance of the text, if this argument is correct, this would make the "Heart Sutra" by far the most influential of all indigenous Chinese scriptures (see APOCRYPHA). The long version of the text, set on Vulture Peak (GṚDHRAKutAPARVATA) outside RĀJAGṚHA, begins with the Buddha entering SAMĀDHI. At that point, the BODHISATTVA AVALOKITEsVARA (who rarely appears as an interlocutor in the prajNāpāramitā sutras) contemplates the perfection of wisdom and sees that the five aggregates (SKANDHA) are empty of intrinsic nature (SVABHĀVA). The monk sĀRIPUTRA, considered the wisest of the Buddha's sRĀVAKA disciples, is inspired by the Buddha to ask Avalokitesvara how one should train in the perfection of wisdom. Avalokitesvara's answer constitutes the remainder of the sutra (apart from a brief epilogue in the longer version of the text). That answer, which consists essentially of a litany of negations of the major categories of Buddhist thought-including such seminal lists as the five aggregates (skandha), twelve sense-fields (ĀYATANA), twelve links of dependent origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA), and FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS-contains two celebrated statements. The first, made in reference to the first of the five aggregates, is "form (RuPA) is emptiness (suNYATĀ); emptiness is form" (RuPAM suNYATĀ sUNYATAIVA RuPAM). This is one of the most widely quoted and commented upon statements in the entire corpus of Mahāyāna sutras and thus is not easily amenable to succinct explication. In brief, however, the line suggests that emptiness, as the nature of ultimate reality, is not located in some rarified realm, but rather is found in the ordinary objects of everyday experience. The other celebrated statement is the spell (MANTRA) that concludes Avalokitesvara's discourse-GATE GATE PĀRAGATE PĀRASAMGATE BODHI SVĀHĀ-which, unlike many mantras, is amenable to translation: "gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond, enlightenment, svāha." This mantra has also been widely commented upon. The presence of the mantra in the sutra has led to its classification as a TANTRA rather than a sutra in some Tibetan catalogues; it also forms the basis of Indian tantric SĀDHANAs. The brevity of the text has given it a talismanic quality, being recited on all manner of occasions (it is commonly used as an exorcistic text in Tibet) and inscribed on all manner of objects, including fans, teacups, and neckties in modern Japan.

prajNāpāramitā. (P. paNNāpāramī; T. shes rab kyi pha rol tu phyin pa; C. bore boluomiduo/zhidu; J. hannya haramitta/chido; K. panya paramilta/chido 般若波羅蜜多/智度). In Sanskrit, "perfection of wisdom" or "perfect wisdom"; a polysemous term, which appears in Pāli accounts of the Buddha's prior training as a BODHISATTVA (P. bodhisatta), but is widely used in MAHĀYĀNA Buddhism. ¶ PrajNāpāramitā refers to a level of understanding beyond that of ordinary wisdom, especially referring to the the wisdom associated with, or required to achieve, buddhahood. The term receives a variety of interpretations, but it is often said to be the wisdom that does not conceive of an agent, an object, or an action as being ultimately real. The perfection of wisdom is also sometimes defined as the knowledge of emptiness (suNYATĀ). ¶ As the wisdom associated with buddhahood, prajNāpāramitā is the sixth of the six perfections (PĀRAMITĀ) that are practiced on the bodhisattva path. When the practice of the six perfections is aligned with the ten bodhisattva bhumis, the perfection of wisdom is practiced on the sixth BHuMI, called ABHIMUKHĪ. ¶ PrajNāpāramitā is also used to designate the genre of Mahāyāna sutras that sets forth the perfection of wisdom. These texts are considered to be among the earliest of the Mahāyāna sutras, with the first texts appearing sometime between the first century BCE and the first century CE. Here, the title "perfection of wisdom" may have a polemical meaning, claiming to possess a wisdom beyond that taught in the MAINSTREAM BUDDHIST SCHOOLS. In addition to numerous descriptions of, and paeans to, emptiness, the perfection of wisdom sutras also extol the practice of the bodhisattva path as the superior form of Buddhist practice. Although emptiness is said to be the chief topic of the sutras, their "hidden meaning" is said to be the detailed structure of the bodhisattva path. A number of later commentaries, most notably the ABHISAMAYĀLAMKĀRA, extracted terminology from these sutras in order to systematize the presentation of the bodhisattva path. There are numerous sutras with prajNāpāramitā in their titles, the earliest of which are designated simply by their length as measured in sLOKAs, a unit of metrical verse in traditional Sanskrit literature that is typically rendered in English as "stanza," "verse," or "line." Scholars speculate that there was a core text, which was then expanded. Hence, for example, the prajNāpāramitā sutra in eight thousand lines (AstASĀHASRIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ) is often thought to be one of the earliest of the genre, later followed by twenty-five thousand lines (PANCAVIMsATISĀHASRIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA), and one hundred thousand lines (sATASĀHASRIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ), as well as compilations many times longer, such as XUANZANG's translation of the MAHĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA. The texts known in English as the "Heart Sutra" (PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀHṚDAYASuTRA) and the "Diamond Sutra" (VAJRACCHEDIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ) are both much shorter versions of these prajNāpāramitā sutras. ¶ Perhaps because the Sanskrit term prajNāpāramitā is in the feminine gender, PrajNāpāramitā also became the name of a goddess, referred to as the mother of all buddhas, who is the embodiment of the perfection of wisdom. ¶ In the traditional Tibetan monastic curriculum, prajNāpāramitā is one of the primary topics of study, based on the AbhisamayālaMkāra of MAITREYANĀTHA and its commentaries.

prajNā. (P. paNNā; T. shes rab; C. bore/hui; J. hannya/e; K. panya/hye 般若/慧). In Sanskrit, typically translated "wisdom," but having connotations perhaps closer to "gnosis," "awareness," and in some contexts "cognition"; the term has the general sense of accurate and precise understanding, but is used most often to refer to an understanding of reality that transcends ordinary comprehension. It is one of the most important terms in Buddhist thought, occurring in a variety of contexts. In Buddhist epistemology, prajNā is listed as one of the five mental concomitants (CAITTA) that accompany all virtuous (KUsALA) states of mind. It is associated with correct, analytical discrimination of the various factors (DHARMA) enumerated in the Buddhist teachings (dharmapravicaya). In this context, prajNā refers to the capacity to distinguish between the faults and virtues of objects in such a way as to overcome doubt. PrajNā is listed among the five spiritual "faculties" (PANCENDRIYA) or "powers" (PANCABALA), where it serves to balance faith (sRADDHĀ) and to counteract skeptical doubt (VICIKITSĀ). PrajNā is also one of the three trainings (TRIsIKsĀ), together with morality (sĪLA) and concentration (SAMĀDHI). In this context, it is distinguished from the simple stability of mind developed through the practice of concentration and refers to a specific understanding of the nature of reality, likened to a sword that cuts through the webs of ignorance (see ADHIPRAJNĀsIKsĀ). Three specific types of wisdom are set forth, including the wisdom generated by learning (sRUTAMAYĪPRAJNĀ), an intellectual understanding gained through listening to teachings or reading texts; the wisdom generated by reflection (CINTĀMAYĪPRAJNĀ), which includes conceptual insights derived from one's own personal reflection on those teachings and from meditation at a low level of concentration; and the wisdom generated by cultivation (BHĀVANĀMAYĪPRAJNĀ), which is a product of more advanced stages in meditation. This last level of wisdom is related to the concept of insight (VIPAsYANĀ). The term also appears famously in the term PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ or "perfection of wisdom," which refers to the wisdom whereby bodhisattvas achieved buddhahood, as well as a genre of texts in which that wisdom is set forth.

prose: Any work that is not written in a regular meter like poetry. Many genressuch as short stories, novels, letters and essays are normally written in prose.

qinggui. (J. shingi; K. ch'onggyu 清規). In Chinese, lit. "rules of purity" or "rules for the pure (assembly)," a genre of monastic codes compiled by adherents within the CHAN tradition. According to such Song-period genealogical records as the JINGDE CHUANDENG LU, the Tang Chan master BAIZHANG HUAIHAI (720-814) composed the first such Chan code, entitled the BAIZHANG QINGGUI ("Baizhang's Rules of Purity"), in order to establish an independent Chan discipline distinct from the normative VINAYA tradition; his qinggui is not extant, however, and modern scholars doubt that it ever existed. There might have been some Chan monastic codes as early as the Tang dynasty, influenced by such Chinese codes as DAO'AN's (312-384) Sengni guifan ("Standards for Monks and Nuns") or DAOXUAN's (596-667) Jiaojie xinxue biqiu xinghu lüyi ("Exhortation on Manners and Etiquette for Novices in Training"). However, the oldest surviving Chan code is the CHANYUAN QINGGUI compiled by the YUNMEN ZONG master CHANGLU ZONGZE (d. c. 1107). These types of texts were typically composed by the founding abbots of monasteries and thus include their vision of how monks in their monasteries should conduct themselves. These codes deal with daily routines in the monastery, monthly schedules, annual festivals, titles and duties of the administrative monks in the monastery, and outlines of various religious services. They may also include monastic rules and regulations related to state policies regarding SAMGHA administration, such as rules on travel permits and the election of abbots. The codes differed in content, since each monastery compiled its own in accord with its own needs, e.g., as to whether it was a public or private monastery. For this reason, the Yuan Emperor Shun (r. 1333-1368) eventually compiled a unified code based on the rules attributed to Baizhang, entitled the Chixiu Baizhang qinggui. Although the term qinggui originally referred to the monastic codes associated with the Chan school, it later came to be used as a general term for the monastic codes used by other schools, such as in the TIANTAI monk Ziqing's (fl. fourteenth century) Jiaoyuan qinggui ("Pure Rules for the Garden of Doctrine") compiled in 1347. See also BCA' YIG.

rdzogs chen. (dzokchen). A Tibetan philosophical and meditative tradition, usually rendered in English as "great perfection" or "great completion." Developed and maintained chiefly within the RNYING MA sect, rdzogs chen has also been embraced to varying degrees by other Tibetan Buddhist sects. The non-Buddhist Tibetan BON religion also upholds a rdzogs chen tradition. According to legend, the primordial buddha SAMANTABHADRA (T. Kun tu bzang po) taught rdzogs chen to the buddha VAJRASATTVA, who transmitted it to the first human lineage holder, DGA' RAB RDO RJE. From him, rdzogs chen was passed to MANJUsRĪMITRA and thence to sRĪSIMHA, and the Tibetan translator Ba gor VAIROCANA, who had been sent to India by the eighth-century Tibetan King KHRI SRONG LDE BTSAN. In addition to Vairocana, the semimythical figures of VIMALAMITRA and PADMASAMBHAVA are considered to be foundational teachers of rdzogs chen in Tibet. Historically, rdzogs chen appears to have been a Tibetan innovation, drawing on multiple influences, including both non-Buddhist native Tibetan beliefs and Chinese and Indian Buddhist teachings. The term was likely taken from the GUHYAGARBHATANTRA. In the creation and completion stages of tantric practice, one first generates a visualization of a deity and its MAndALA and next dissolves these into oneself, merging oneself with the deity. In the Guhyagarbha and certain other tantras, this is followed with a stage known as rdzogs chen, in which one rests in the unelaborated natural state of one's own innately luminous and pure mind. In the Rnying ma sect's nine-vehicle (T. THEG PA DGU) doxography of the Buddhist teachings, these three stages constitute the final three vehicles: the MAHĀYOGA, ANUYOGA, and ATIYOGA, or rdzogs chen. The rdzogs chen literature is traditionally divided into three categories, which roughly trace the historical development of the doctrine and practices: the mind class (SEMS SDE), space class (KLONG SDE), and instruction class (MAN NGAG SDE). These are collected in a group of texts called the RNYING MA'I RGYUD 'BUM ("treasury of Rnying ma tantras"). The mind class is comprised largely of texts attributed to Vairocana, including the so-called eighteen tantras and the KUN BYED RGYAL PO. They set forth a doctrine of primordial purity (ka dag) of mind (sems nyid), which is the basis of all things (kun gzhi). In the natural state, the mind, often referred to as BODHICITTA, is spontaneously aware of itself (rang rig), but through mental discursiveness (rtog pa) it creates delusion ('khrul ba) and thus gives rise to SAMSĀRA. Early rdzogs chen ostensibly rejected all forms of practice, asserting that striving for liberation would simply create more delusion. One is admonished to simply recognize the nature of one's own mind, which is naturally empty (stong pa), luminous ('od gsal ba), and pure. As tantra continued to grow in popularity in Tibet, and new techniques and doctrines were imported from India, a competing strand within rdzogs chen increasingly emphasized meditative practice. The texts of the space class (klong sde) reflect some of this, but it is in the instruction class (man ngag sde), dating from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, that rdzogs chen fully assimilated tantra. The main texts of this class are the so-called seventeen tantras and the two "seminal heart" collections, the BI MA SNYING THIG ("Seminal Heart of Vimalamitra") and the MKHA' 'GRO SNYING THIG ("Seminal Heart of the dĀKINĪ"). The seventeen tantras and the "Seminal Heart of Vimalamitra" are said to have been taught by Vimalamitra and concealed as "treasure" (GTER MA), to be discovered at a later time. The "Seminal Heart of the dākinī" is said to have been taught by Padmasambhava and concealed as treasure by his consort, YE SHES MTSHO RGYAL. In the fourteenth century, the great scholar KLONG CHEN RAB 'BYAMS PA DRI MED 'OD ZER systematized the multitude of received rdzogs chen literature in his famous MDZOD BDUN ("seven treasuries") and the NGAL GSO SKOR GSUM ("Trilogy on Rest"), largely creating the rdzogs chen teachings as they are known today. With the man ngag sde, the rdzogs chen proponents made full use of the Tibetan innovation of treasure, a means by which later tantric developments were assimilated to the tradition without sacrificing its claim to eighth-century origins. The semilegendary figure of Padmasambhava was increasingly relied upon for this purpose, gradually eclipsing Vairocana and Vimalamitra as the main rdzogs chen founder. In subsequent centuries there have been extensive additions to the rdzogs chen literature, largely by means of the treasure genre, including the KLONG CHEN SNYING THIG of 'JIGS MED GLING PA and the Bar chad kun gsal of MCHOG GYUR GLING PA to name only two. Outside of the Rnying ma sect, the authenticity of these texts is frequently disputed, although there continue to be many adherents to rdzogs chen from other Tibetan Buddhist lineages. Rdzogs chen practitioners are commonly initiated into the teachings with "pointing-out instructions" (sems khrid/ngos sprod) in which a lama introduces the student to the nature of his or her mind. Two main practices known as KHREGS CHOD (breakthrough), in which one cultivates the experience of innate awareness (RIG PA), and THOD RGAL (leap over), elaborate visualizations of external light imagery, preserve the tension between the early admonition against practice and the appropriation of complex tantric techniques and doctrines. Extensive practices engaging the subtle body of psychic channels, winds, and drops (rtsa rlung thig le) further reflect the later tantric developments in rdzogs chen. ¶ RDZOGS CHEN is also used as the short name for one of the largest and most active Tibetan monasteries, belonging to the Rnying ma sect of Tibetan Buddhism, located in the eastern Tibetan region of Khams; the monastery's full name is Rus dam bsam gtan o rgyan chos gling (Rudam Samten Orgyan Choling). It is a major center for both academic study and meditation retreat according to Rnying ma doctrine. At its peak, the monastery housed over one thousand monks and sustained more than two hundred branches throughout central and eastern Tibet. The institution was founded in 1684-1685 by the first RDZOGS CHEN INCARNATION Padma rig 'dzin (Pema Rikdzin) with the support of the fifth DALAI LAMA NGAG DBANG BLO BZANG RGYA MTSHO. Important meditation hermitages in the area include those of MDO MKHYEN RTSE YE SHE RDO RJE and MI PHAM 'JAM DBYANGS RNAM RGYAL RGYA MTSHO. DPAL SPRUL RIN PO CHE passed many years in retreat there, during which time he composed his great exposition of the preliminary practices of Tibetan Buddhism entitled the KUN BZANG BLA MA'I ZHAL LUNG ("Words of My Perfect Teacher").

Renwang jing. (J. Ninnogyo; K. Inwang kyong 仁王經). In Chinese, "Scripture for Humane Kings"; an influential indigenous Chinese scripture (see APOCRYPHA), known especially for its role in "state protection Buddhism" (HUGUO FOJIAO) and for its comprehensive outline of the Buddhist path of practice (MĀRGA). Its full title (infra) suggests that the scripture belongs to the "perfection of wisdom" (PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ) genre of literature, but it includes also elements drawn from both the YOGĀCĀRA and TATHĀGATAGARBHA traditions. The text's audience and interlocutors are not the typical sRĀVAKAs and BODHISATTVAs but instead kings hailing from the sixteen ancient regions of India, who beseech the Buddha to speak this sutra in order to protect both their states and their subjects from the chaos attending the extinction of the dharma (MOFA; SADDHARMAVIPRALOPA). By having kings rather than spiritual mentors serve as the interlocutors, the scripture thus focuses on those qualities thought to be essential to governing a state founded on Buddhist principles. The text's concepts of authority, the path, and the world draw analogies with the "humane kings" of this world who serve and venerate the transcendent monks and bodhisattvas. The service and worship rendered by the kings turns them into bodhisattvas, while the soteriological vocation of the monks and bodhisattvas conversely renders them kings. Thus, the relationship between the state and the religion is symbiotic. The sutra is now generally presumed to be an indigenous Chinese scripture that was composed to buttress imperial authority by exalting the benevolent ruler as a defender of the dharma. The Renwang jing is also known for including the ten levels of faith (sRADDHĀ) as a preliminary stage of the Buddhist path prior to the arousal of the thought of enlightenment (BODHICITTOTPĀDA). It is one of a number of Chinese Buddhist apocrypha that seek to provide a comprehensive elaboration of all fifty-two stages of the path, including the PUSA YINGLUO BENYE JING and the YUANJUE JING. The Renwang jing is not known in Sanskrit sources, but there are two recensions of the Chinese text. The first, Renwang bore boluomi jing, is purported to have been translated by KUMĀRAJĪVA and is dated to c. 402, and the latter, titled Renwang huguo bore boluomiduo jing, is attributed to AMOGHAVAJRA and dated to 765. The Amoghavajra recension is based substantially on the Kumārajīva text, but includes additional teachings on MAndALA, MANTRA, and DHĀRAnĪ, additions that reflect Amoghavajra's place in the Chinese esoteric Buddhist tradition. Furthermore, because Amoghavajra was an advisor to three Tang-dynasty rulers, his involvement in contemporary politics may also have helped to shape the later version. Chinese scriptural catalogues (JINGLU) were already suspicious about the authenticity of the Renwang jing as least as early as Fajing's 594 Zhongjing mulu; Fajing lists the text together with twenty-one other scriptures of doubtful authenticity (YIJING), because its content and diction do not resemble those of the ascribed translator. Modern scholars have also recognized these content issues. One of the more egregious examples is the RENWANG JING's reference to four different perfection of wisdom (prajNāpāramitā) sutras that the Buddha is said to have proclaimed; two of the sutras listed are, however, simply different Chinese translations of the same text, the PANCAVIMsATISĀHASRIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA, a blunder that an Indian author could obviously not have committed. Another example is the scripture's discussion of a three-truth SAMĀDHI (sandi sanmei), in which these three types of concentrations are named worldly truth (shidi), authentic truth (zhendi), and supreme-meaning truth (diyiyidi). This schema is peculiar, and betrays its Chinese origins, because "authentic truth" and "supreme-meaning truth" are actually just different Chinese renderings of the same Sanskrit term, PARAMĀTHASATYA. Based on other internal evidence, scholars have dated the composition of the sutra to sometime around the middle of the fifth century. Whatever its provenance, the text is ultimately reclassified as an authentic translation in the 602 catalogue Zongjing mulu by Yancong and continues to be so listed in all subsequent East Asian catalogues. See also APOCRYPHA; SANDI.

revenge play: A Renaissance genre of drama, where the plot revolves around theprotagonist’s attempt to avenge a previous wrong, by killing the perpetrator of the deed. There is usually much bloodshed and violence. Shakespeare's Hamlet has been identified as a revenge play.

rhyparography ::: n. --> In ancient art, the painting of genre or still-life pictures.

rin chen gter mdzod. (rinchen terdzo). In Tibetan, "treasury of precious treasure teachings"; a collection of root texts, liturgical and ritual works, meditation manuals (SĀDHANA), commentarial, and supplemental literature pertaining to the genre of discovered treasure teachings (GTER MA) of the RNYING MA sect of Tibetan Buddhism. The collection was compiled and edited by the nineteenth-century savant 'JAM MGON KONG SPRUL BLO GROS MTHA' YAS and forms one of his five treasuries (KONG SPRUL MDZOD LNGA). Kong sprul's motivation for this massive project, resulting in sixty-three volumes of literature (over one hundred in modern redactions), was complex. The compilation preserves many systems of instruction that were in danger of being lost or forgotten, but it also forms a canonical collection of authoritative treasure texts-one of the first projects of its kind.

rnam thar. (namtar). In Tibetan, "complete liberation," translating the Sanskrit VIMOKsA. In the Tibetan context, rnam thar refers to a widespread literary genre of sacred biography or autobiography. As its translation suggests, the term usually indicates an emphasis on the stereotypically Buddhist aspects of the subject's life, including his or her religious training, practice of meditation, and eventual liberation. Such works often incorporate elements of the fabulous and the fantastic and have parallels with the genre of hagiography. Three types of rnam thar are often enumerated: the "outer autobiography" (phyi'i rnam thar), which narrates the important events of daily life, including travels and meetings with prominent persons; the "inner autobiography" (nang gi rnam thar), which describes religious teachings received and relationships with teachers and disciples; and the "secret autobiography" (GSANG BA'I RNAM THAR), which describes religious experiences, with the author often writing from the perspective of a transcendental subject.

rogue "games" [Unix] A Dungeons-and-Dragons-like game using character graphics, written under BSD Unix and subsequently ported to other Unix systems. The original BSD "curses(3)" screen-handling package was hacked together by Ken Arnold to support "rogue(6)" and has since become one of Unix's most important and heavily used application libraries. Nethack, Omega, Larn, and an entire subgenre of computer dungeon games all took off from the inspiration provided by "rogue(6)". See also {nethack}. [{Jargon File}]

rogue ::: (games) [Unix] A Dungeons-and-Dragons-like game using character graphics, written under BSD Unix and subsequently ported to other Unix systems. The subgenre of computer dungeon games all took off from the inspiration provided by rogue(6). See also nethack.[Jargon File]

sambhala. (T. bde 'byung). Often spelled Shambhala. In the texts associated with the KĀLACAKRATANTRA, the kingdom of sambhala is said to be located north of the Himālayan range. It is a land devoted to the practice of the Kālacakratantra, which the Buddha himself had entrusted to sambhala's king SUCANDRA, who had requested that the Buddha set forth the tantra. The kingdom of sambhala is shaped like a giant lotus and is filled with sandalwood forests and lotus lakes, all encircled by a massive range of snowy peaks. In the center of the kingdom is the capital, Kalapa, where the luster of the palaces, made from gold, silver, and jewels, outshines the moon; the walls of the palaces are plated with mirrors that reflect a light so bright that night is like day. In the very center of the city is the MAndALA of the buddha Kālacakra. The inhabitants of the 960 million villages of sambhala are ruled by a beneficent king, called the Kalkin. The laypeople are all beautiful and wealthy, free of sickness and poverty; the monks maintain their precepts without the slightest infraction. They are naturally intelligent and virtuous, devoted to the practice of the VAJRAYĀNA, although all authentic forms of Indian Buddhism are preserved. The majority of those reborn there attain buddhahood during their lifetime in sambhala. The Kālacakratantra also predicts an apocalyptic war. In the year 2425 CE, the barbarians (generally identified as Muslims) and demons who have destroyed Buddhism in India will set out to invade sambhala. The twenty-fifth Kalkin, Raudracakrin, will lead his armies out of his kingdom and into India, where they will meet the forces of evil in a great battle, from which the forces of Buddhism will emerge victorious. The victory will usher in a golden age in which human life span will increase, crops will grow without being cultivated, and the entire population of the earth will devote itself to the practice of Buddhism. Given the importance of the Kālacakratantra in Tibetan Buddhism, sambhala figures heavily in Tibetan Buddhist belief and practice; in the DGE LUGS sect, it is said that the PAn CHEN LAMAs are reborn as kings of sambhala. There is also a genre of guidebooks (lam yig) that provide the route to sambhala. The location of sambhala has long been a subject of fascination in the West. sambhala plays an important role in the Theosophy of HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY, and the Russian Theosophist Nicholas Roerich led two expeditions in search of sambhala. The name sambhala is considered the likely inspiration of "Shangri-La," described in James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon.

sanmei jing. (S. samādhisutra; J. sanmaikyo; K. sammae kyong 三昧經). In Chinese, "SAMĀDHI scriptures"; a category of MAHĀYĀNA sutras that are primarily or exclusively concerned with the practice or experience of meditation (SAMĀDHI), or whose title contains the term sanmei. The earliest reference to sanmei jing as a scriptural category appears in the oldest extant Chinese scriptural catalogue, CHU SANZANG JIJI ("Compilation of Notices on the Translation of the TRIPItAKA"), compiled by SENGYOU (445-518) around 515; there, Sengyou remarks that Zhu Fahu (DHARMARAKsA) translated several sanmei jings. The Chinese Buddhist canon (DAZANGJING) contains more than fifty sutras that use the term sanmei in their titles. These include sanmei jings whose Sanskrit titles do not use the term samādhi and to which the term sanmei was added when these scriptures were translated into Chinese. There are also other scriptures of uncertain provenance whose titles in earlier Chinese translations did not contain the term sanmei. An examination of successive Chinese Buddhist scriptural catalogues (JINGLU) in fact reveals that there were several sutras that circulated first with one title, and later with a revised title that added sanmei to the original. Furthermore, there are a number of indigenous Chinese Buddhist scriptures (see APOCRYPHA), that were not entered into the canon, which call themselves sanmei jing. This phenomenon began early in the history of Chinese Buddhism. DAO'AN's 374 CE scriptural catalogue (ZONGLI ZHONG-JING MULU), which is no longer extant but portions of which are excerpted in Sengyou's Chu sanzang jiji, lists twenty-six scriptures of dubious authenticity; of these, six are titled sanmei jing. Several sanmei jings, such as the Banzhou sanmeijing (S. PRATYUTPANNABUDDHASAMMUKHĀVASTHITASAMĀDHISuTRA), offer instruction regarding the full range of practices involved in cultivating a specific samādhi technique. The majority of sanmei jings, however, are instead concerned with the various states of mind that the Buddha or BODHISATTVAs attained through samādhi, praising that samādhi, and/or emphasizing the merit gained through keeping and transmitting the text of the sanmei jing. The popularity of the sanmei jing genre in Chinese Buddhism can be at least partially attributed to Chinese Buddhists' faith and interest in the religious practice of copying and reciting scriptures, which most sanmei jings encourage as a means of attaining enlightenment. Higher meditative states like samādhi sometime seem ancillary to the topic of certain sanmei jings: the JINGDU SANMEI JING, for example, offers a detailed account of thirty separate levels of the hells and the incumbent punishments meted out there; in order to avoid the torments of hell, the scripture exhorts laypeople not to meditate, but instead to observe the five precepts (PANCAsĪLA) and perform the "eight-restrictions fast" (BAGUAN ZHAI) on specific Chinese seasonal days.

sāstra. (T. bstan bcos; C. lun; J. ron; K. non 論). In Sanskrit, "treatise," a term used to refer to works contained in the various Buddhist canons attributed to various Indian masters. In this sense, the term is distinguished from SuTRA, a discourse regarded as the word of the Buddha or spoken with his sanction. In the basic division of Buddhist scripture in the Tibetan canon, for example, the translations of sāstra (BSTAN 'GYUR) are contrasted with the words of the Buddha (or a buddha) called BKA' 'GYUR. A Buddhist sāstra can be in verse or prose, and of any length, and it includes the different Sanskrit compositional genres (vṛtti, vārttika, bhāsya, tīkā, vyākhyā, paNjikā, and so on) often rendered by the single English word "commentary." In the Buddhist context, the genre is typically a form of composition that explains the words or intention of the Buddha. The word sāstra is found in the actual title of a number of works, for example, the PrajNāpāramitopadesasāstrakārikā, an alternate title of the ABHISAMAYĀLAMKĀRA, and the Mahāyānottaratantrasāstravyākhyā, another name for the RATNAGOTRAVIBHĀGA.

science fiction: A genre of literature that features an alternative society that is founded on the imagined technology of the future. The genre stretches the imagination by rooting the fantasy of the future in recognizable elements of modern life. This type of fantasy literature, typically takes the form of a short story or novel.

Sdom gsum rab dbye. (Domsum Rapye). In Tibetan, "Clear Differentiation of the Three Vows," an important work by the Tibetan master SA SKYA PAndITA KUN DGA' RGYAL MTSHAN. Composed in verse, around 1232, it deals with the three vows or codes: the PRĀTIMOKsA vows, the BODHISATTVA vows, and the tantric vows (SAMAYA). In Tibet, it was considered possible, and in some cases ideal, for the Buddhist practitioner to receive and maintain all three sets of precepts: the monk's precepts (prātimoksa), which from the Tibetan perspective derived from the HĪNAYĀNA; the bodhisattva precepts, which derived from the MAHĀYĀNA, and the tantric precepts, which derived from the VAJRAYĀNA. However, there was a wide range of opinion on the relation among these three and how to resolve contradictions among them. The "Clear Differentiation of the Three Vows" is not an exposition of the three sets of precepts, but rather a polemical work in which Sa skya Pandita criticizes interpretations of the three then current in the other sects of Tibetan Buddhism. Sa skya Pandita's own view, in brief, was that the prātimoksa and the bodhisattva precepts provided the foundation for the tantric precepts, such that someone receiving tantric initiation should already hold the other two sets. The work provoked hostile responses from those whose views were criticized in the text, leading Sa skya Pandita to reply to his critics in a series of letters. His text sparked the development in subsequent centuries of a genre of texts on the three vows or codes (SDOM GSUM).

Sdom gsum rnam nges. (Domsum Namnge). A work in the SDOM GSUM (three codes) genre by Mnga' ris pan chen Padma dbang rgyal (Ngari Panchen Pema Wangyel, 1487-1542). It is a work of the RNYING MA sect, but is influenced both by the SDOM GSUM RAB DBYE and by works on ethics by TSONG KHA PA. It became widely known through LO CHEN DHARMA SHRI's detailed explanation, which is a central part of the curriculum of many Rnying ma BSHAD GRWA (monastic schools).

siddhānta. (T. grub mtha'; C. zong; J. shu; K. chong 宗). In Sanskrit, "conclusion" or "tenet," the term is used to refer to the various schools of Indian philosophy (both Buddhist and non-Buddhist), to their particular positions, and to texts that set out those positions in a systematic fashion. The most important examples of Buddhist siddhānta texts in India are BHĀVAVIVEKA's [alt. Bhavya] autocommentary (called TARKAJVĀLĀ) on his MADHYAMAKAHṚDAYAKĀRIKĀ and sĀNTARAKsITA's TATTVASAMGRAHA; both set forth the positions of non-Buddhist and Buddhist philosophies in order to demonstrate the superiority of their respective MADHYAMAKA positions. They are paralleled in Indian non-Buddhist literature by sankarācārya's Brahmasutrabhāsya, for example, that sets forth the views of nāstika (heterodox) and āstika (orthodox) schools and shows the weaknesses and strengths in each as a strategy to demonstrate the superiority of sankara's own Advaita Vedānta philosophy. None of these Indian works were written simply as informative textbooks about the tenets of different Indian schools of thought. They instead have clear polemical agendas: namely, demonstrating the superiority of their own position, and showing how the lesser philosophies are either a hindrance or a stepping stone to their own philosophy, as revealed by the Buddha in the case of Buddhist siddhānta, and by the Vedas in the case of non-Buddhists. The SarvadarsanasaMgraha, a medieval work written from the perspective of a later Advaita school based on sankara's model, was important during the early reception of Buddhism in Europe and America in the nineteenth century because it cites the works of different schools of philosophy, including YOGĀCĀRA and Madhyamaka writers that were otherwise unknown at the time. As a literary genre, siddhānta reaches its full development in Tibet, where ever more detailed classifications of Indian and later Chinese, Tibetan, and Mongolian schools of Buddhism are found. Of particular importance are works known by the names of their authors: Dbu pa blo gsal (Upa Losel) (fl, fourteenth century), the first 'JAM DBYANGS BZHAD PA (1648-1721), and Lcang skya Rol pa'i rdo rje (1717-1786). Customarily Tibetan Buddhist siddhāntas employ the following structure: under the rubric of non-Buddhist (T. phyi pa) philosophies, they discuss the positions of the six schools that include Nyāya, Vaisesika, JAINA, SāMkhya, Yoga, and MīmāMsā. They are all dismissed as inferior, based on their assertion of the existence of a self (ĀTMAN) and a creator deity (īsvara), both positions that are refuted in Buddhism. The Buddhist schools are set forth in ascending order, starting with the HĪNAYĀNA schools of VAIBHĀsIKA and SAUTRĀNTIKA, followed by the Mahāyāna schools of Yogācāra and Madhyamaka. A typical structure for the presentation of each school was a tripartite division into the basis (gzhi), which set forth matters of epistemology and ontology; the path (lam), which set forth the structure of the path according to the particular school; and the fruition ('bras bu), which set forth the school's understanding of the enlightenment of ARHATs and buddhas. In Tibet, the genre of siddhānta was later expanded to include works that set forth the various sects and schools of Tibetan Buddhism and Chinese Buddhism. Cf. JIAOXIANG PANSHI.

snying thig. (nyingtik). In Tibetan, "heart drop" or "heart essence" (an abbreviation of snying gi thig le), a term used to describe an important genre of texts of the RNYING MA sect of Tibetan Buddhism. The master sRĪSIMHA is said to have divided the "instruction class" (MAN NGAG SDE) of the great completion (RDZOGS CHEN) teachings into four cycles: the outer, inner, secret, and the most secret unexcelled cycle (yang gsang bla na med pa). In Tibet, VIMALAMITRA organized the teachings of this fourth cycle into an explanatory lineage with scriptures and an aural lineage without scriptures and then concealed these teachings, which were later revealed as the BI MA'I SNYING THIG ("Heart Essence of Vimalamitra"). During his stay in Tibet, PADMASAMBHAVA concealed teachings on the most secret unexcelled cycle, called "heart essence of the dĀKINĪ" (MKHA' 'GRO SNYING THIG). In the fourteenth century, these and other teachings were compiled and elaborated upon by KLONG CHEN RAB 'BYAMS into what are known as the "four heart essences" (SNYING THIG YA BZHI): (1) the "heart essence of VIMALAMITRA" (Bi ma'i snying thig), (2) the "ultimate essence of the lama" (bla ma yang thig), (3) the "heart essence of the dākinī" (mkha' 'gro snying thig), and (4) two sections composed by Klong chen pa, the "ultimate essence of the dākinī" (mkha' 'gro yang thig) and the "ultimate essence of the profound" (zab mo yang thig). Although tracing its roots back to Padmasambhava and Vimalamitra in the eighth century, the snying thig texts and their practices likely derive from Tibetan reformulations of great completion teachings beginning in the eleventh century, when new translations of Indian tantras were being made in Tibet. A wide range of new meditative systems were added into the rdzogs chen corpus, which would prove to be essential to Tibetan Buddhist practice, especially in the RNYING MA and BKA' BRGYUD sects in subsequent centuries.

stock character: A type of characterthat emerges frequently in a specific literary genre. Stock characters in western films might include the noble sheriff, the whorehouse madam, the town drunkard. Another example: Stock characters in medieval romances include the damsel in distress, handsome young knight, and the senex amans (the ugly old man married to a younger girl).

sutra. (P. sutta; T. mdo; C. jing; J. kyo; K. kyong 經). In Sanskrit, lit. "aphorism," but in a Buddhist context translated as "discourse," "sermon," or "scripture"; a sermon said to be delivered by the Buddha or delivered with his sanction. A term probably used originally to refer to sayings of the Buddha that were preserved orally by his followers (and hence called "aphorisms"), the sutra developed into its own genre of Buddhist literature, with a fairly standard set of literary conventions. The most famous of these conventions was the phrase used to begin a sutra, "Thus have I heard" (EVAM MAYĀ sRUTAM), intended to certify that what was to follow was the first-person report of the Buddha's attendant ĀNANDA (see SAMGĪTIKĀRA) who was most often in the Buddha's presence and was renowned for his prodigious memory. Also standard was the NIDĀNA, which describes the setting of the sutra, noting where the Buddha was residing at the time, who was in the audience, who was the interlocutor, etc. According to tradition, the sutras were first codified when Ānanda recited them at the first Buddhist council (see COUNCIL, FIRST), shortly after the Buddha's death. This conceit of orality was maintained even for sutras that were literary compositions, written long after the Buddha, most notably, the hundreds of MAHĀYĀNA sutras that began to appear in India starting some four hundred years after the Buddha's NIRVĀnA. An important theme in these sutras and their commentaries is the claim that they are indeed the word of the Buddha (BUDDHAVACANA). In the standard threefold division of the Buddha's teachings, sutra indicates the contents of the SuTRAPItAKA, a grouping of texts that together with the VINAYA and ABHIDHARMA together constitute the TRIPItAKA, or "three baskets." In tantric literature, sutra is used to refer to the exoteric teachings of the Buddha, in contrast to the tantras, his esoteric teachings. It is also one of the nine (NAVAnGA[PĀVACANA]) (Pāli) or twelve (DVĀDAsĀnGA[PRAVACANA]) (Sanskrit) categories (AnGA) of Buddhist scripture, according to structure or literary style.

tamnan. In northern (Lānnā) Thai, "chronicle"; a genre of northern Thai historical writing combining local legends, myths, and Buddhist literary traditions, and written in Lānnā Thai, Mon, or Pāli; this genre flourished in the Lānnā kingdom between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. A tamnan generally begins with events in the life of Gotama (S. GAUTAMA) Buddha and continues on to the establishment of the dispensation (P. sāsanā; S. sĀSANA) at a specific location. Notable tamnan include the CĀMADEVĪVAMSA, the JINAKĀLAMĀLĪ, and the MuLASĀSANA.

Thar pa rin po che'i rgyan. (Tarpa rinpoche gyen). In Tibetan, "Jewel Ornament of Liberation"; a systematic presentation of Buddhist teachings and a seminal textbook for the BKA' BRGYUD sect of Tibetan Buddhism written by SGAM PO PA BSOD RNAM RIN CHEN. The text belongs to the genre of Tibetan literature known as LAM RIM, or "stages of the path," presenting an overview of the elementary tenets of MAHĀYĀNA doctrine through scriptural citation, philosophical reflection, and direct illustration. Its clear, concise, and unpedantic style has made it accessible to generations of readers. The doctrinal content reflects Sgam po pa's training in both the BKA' GDAMS sect and the tradition of MAHĀMUDRĀ, fusing Buddhist theory prevalent in both SuTRA and TANTRA and presenting what has been called sutra mahāmudrā-a tradition of mahāmudrā that does not rely on prerequisite tantric initiations and commitments. Sgam po pa thus transmits the underlying insights of tantric theory outside traditional methods of the VAJRAYĀNA. This system was later criticized by certain scholars such as SA SKYA PAndITA KUN DGA' RGYAL MTSHAN. The work is also commonly known as the Dwags po thar rgyan, after the author's residence in the region of Dwags po (Dakpo).

Theatre of the Absurd: Popular in the 1940s-1960s refers to plays and drama which deal with absurdist notions. These plays generally consider human existence to be without point as the world is devoid of meaning. Famous playwrights in this genre of the Absurd include Pinter, Stoppard and Beckett.

Thièn Uyën Tập Anh. (禪苑集英). In Vietnamese, "Outstanding Figures in the THIỀN Garden." Compiled by an unknown author around the third decade of the fourteenth century, this anthology is a collection of the biographies of eminent Thièn masters in Vietnam from the sixth to the thirteenth centuries, organized around the transmission of the three major Vietnamese Thièn schools: VINĪTARUCI, VÔ NGÔN THÔNG, and THẢO ĐƯỜNG. The Thiển Uyẻn purports to be a narrative history of Vietnamese Buddhism and as such is modeled upon the Chinese CHAN literary genre known as the "transmission of the lamplight" (CHUANDENG LU). According to the account presented in the Thiển Uyẻn, Vietnamese Buddhist history is a continuation of the development of the Chinese Chan tradition. In the same period during which the Thièn Uyẻn was compiled, there emerged a number of texts of the same genre, but only fragments of those are extant. The Thièn Uyẻn is the only such lineage history that appears to have been preserved in its entirety and is the only text that attempts to provide a cohesive narrative history of Vietnamese Buddhism. The Thiển Uyẻn, however, was all but forgotten for centuries until a later recension of the text was accidentally discovered by the scholar Tràn Văn Giap in 1927. Tràn wrote a long article outlining the content of text, which accepts the record of the Thiển Uyẻn as veridical history. Since that time, the account of the order provided in the Thiển Uyẻn has been widely regarded as the official history of Vietnamese Buddhism.

tradicomedy: A work which combines genres of both comedy and tragedy.

Turfan. Central Asian petty kingdom located along the northern track of the SILK ROAD through the Takla Makhan desert, in what is now the Chinese province of Xinjiang. This and other oasis kingdoms in Central Asia served as crucial stations in the transmission of Buddhism from India to China. Buddhism had a strong presence in Turfan from the seventh century through the fourteenth century, with important texts being translated, cave temples built, and works of art produced. The oldest physical manuscripts of the Indian Buddhist tradition are manuscripts in the KHAROstHĪ script (see GĀNDHĀRĪ), dated to the fourth to fifth centuries CE, which were discovered at Turfan. These and other discoveries were made by a team of German researchers led by Albert Grünwedel and Albert von Le Coq in a series of expeditions between 1902 and 1914. Turfan was also the locus where TOCHARIAN A (East Tocharian, or Turfanian) was used; manuscripts in Tocharian A date primarily from the eighth century. Western expeditions into the area led to the discovery of tens of thousands of textual fragments, in a variety of languages and scripts, which came to be known collectively as the "Turfan Collection." These texts belong to a variety of genres and schools, but the SARVĀSTIVĀDA is prevalent, leading to the conclusion that the school was prominent in Turfan. As with other locations in this region, the dry desert air helped to preserve the various materials on which these texts were written. In Turfan were found translations of Sanskrit and Chinese Buddhist texts, as well as some original Buddhist poetry and lay literature. Also discovered in Turfan were the Bezaklik rock caves, dating from around the ninth century, which contain the painted images of thousands of buddhas. Albert von le Coq removed many of these and transported them to Berlin, where many were destroyed by Allied bombing during the Second World War. Although this area was a melting pot of Indian, Chinese, and Central Asian traditions, Buddhist activity in the Turfan region saw a sharp rise in the ninth century, when the Uighur people moved from Mongolia into the Turfan region and many Turfan texts are recorded in the Uighur script. Buddhism seems to have survived in this region until as late as the fifteenth century.

udāna. (T. ched du brjod pa; C. youtuona; J. udana; K. udana 優陀那). In Sanskrit and Pāli, lit. "utterance," or "meaningful expression," a term with three important denotations. ¶ The Udāna is the third book of the Pāli KHUDDAKANIKĀYA and comprises eighty stories containing eighty utterances of the Buddha. The utterances are mostly in verse and are accompanied by prose accounts of the circumstances that prompted the Buddha to speak on those occasions. ¶ The name udāna is also given to a broader classification of texts within the Pāli canon as a whole, and in this usage it refers to a set of eighty-two suttas containing verses uttered out of joy. ¶ Finally, udāna are one of the standard sections in the division of the word of the Buddha (BUDDHAVACANA) into nine NAVAnGA (Pāli) or twelve (DVĀDAsĀnGA) categories based on genre. In that context, udāna are defined as solemn utterances intended to convey an understanding of the dharma. Many of the Buddha's statements in the DHAMMAPADA are said to fall into this category.

VajiraNānavarorasa. (Thai. Wachirayanwarorot) (1860-1921). One of the most influential Thai monks of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries; his name (given in its Pāli form here) is also rendered in the Thai vernacular as Wachirayanwarorot [alt. Wachirayan Warot]. The son of King Mongkut (RĀMA IV), after a youth spent in royal luxury, he was ordained as a monk in 1879. He distinguished himself as a scholar of the Buddhist scriptures and in 1892 became abbot of WAT BOWONNIWET [alt. Wat Bovoranives; P. Pavaranivesa], the leading monastery of the THAMMAYUT (P. Dhammayuttika) order. In 1893, he became patriarch of the order and served as supreme patriarch (sangharāja; S. SAMGHARĀJAN) of the Thai sangha (S. SAMGHA) from 1910 until his death. A distinguished scholar of Pāli, he was the author of many textbooks, including the definitive Thai primer on the Pāli VINAYA tradition, the Vinayamukha ("Gateway to the Discipline"), which he wrote in an (unsuccessful) attempt to bring together the two major sects of Thai Buddhism, the Thammuyut and the MAHANIKAI. VajiraNānavarorasa also designed the modern monastic curriculum and reorganized the Thai ecclesiastical hierarchy. As an advisor to King Chulalongkorn (RĀMA V), he also sought to extend modern education into the provinces. VajiraNānavarorasa's autobiography is considered the first work of the genre in Thai vernacular literature.

vaMsa. In Pāli, lit. "lineage," but generally referring to a semi-historical "chronicle"; an important genre of Pāli literature that typically recounts the life of the Buddha, the establishment of the sangha (S. SAMGHA), and the first Buddhist council (SAMGĪTI; see COUNCIL, FIRST) after the Buddha's death. Depending upon the particular purpose of the chronicle, the work will then go on to describe such things as the transmission of the dharma to a particular place, the founding of a monastery, the tracing of a monastic lineage back to the first council, the enshrinement of a relic, and/or the patronage of the sangha by a pious king. The most famous Sinhalese chronicles include the MAHĀVAMSA, or "Great Chronicle" (which has been periodically augmented since the fifth century); the DĪPAVAMSA, or "Chronicle of the Island (of Sri Lanka)"; and the THuPAVAMSA, or "Chronicle of the STuPA." Other important examples of the genre are the Thai JINAKĀLAMĀLĪ ("Garland of the Epochs of the Conqueror") and the Burmese SĀSANAVAMSA ("Chronicle of the Dispensation").

western: A literary and cinematic genre discernible by several conventions. Thesetting is usually a short main street in a dusty village of the American west, in the 1800s. Often, themes include a struggle between law and lawlessness.

You know you've been hacking too long when... ::: The set-up line for a genre of one-liners told by hackers about themselves. These include the following:* Not only do you check your e-mail more often than your paper mail, but you remember your network address faster than your postal one.* Your SO kisses you on the neck and the first thing you think is Uh, oh, priority interrupt.* You go to balance your chequebook and discover that you're doing it in octal.* Your computers have a higher street value than your car.* In your universe, round numbers are powers of 2, not 10.* You have woken up recalling a dream in some programming language.* You realise you have never seen half of your best friends.[An early version of this entry said All but one of these have been reliably reported as hacker traits (some of them quite often). Even hackers may have reports of its actually happening, most famously to Grace Hopper while she was working with BINAC in 1949. - ESR] (1995-04-07)

yulu. (J. goroku; K. orok 語録). In Chinese, "discourse records" or "recorded sayings," also known as yuben (lit. "edition of discourses") or guanglu ("extensive records"); compilations of the sayings of CHAN, SoN, and ZEN masters. This genre of Chan literature typically involved collections of the formal sermons (SHANGTANG), exchanges (WENDA), and utterances of Chan masters, which were edited together by their disciples soon after their deaths. The yulu genre sought to capture the vernacular flavor of the master's speech, thus giving it a personal and intimate quality, as if the master himself were in some sense still accessible. Often the recorded sayings of a master would also include his biography, poetry, death verse (YIJI), inscriptions, letters (SHUZHUANG), and other writings, in addition to the transcription of his lectures and sayings. For this reason, Chan discourse records are the Buddhist equivalent of the literary collections (wenji) of secular literati. The term first appears in the SONG GAOSENG ZHUAN, and the genre is often associated particularly with the Chan master MAZU DAOYI (709-788) and his HONGZHOU line of Chan. Among the more famous recorded sayings are the Mazu yulu (a.k.a. Mazu Daoyi chanshi guanglu), LINJI YIXUAN's LINJI LU, and HUANGBO XIYUN's CHUANXIN FAYAO. Recorded sayings written in Japanese vernacular are also often called a hogo (dharma discourse).

Zhabs dkar tshogs drug rang grol. (Shapkar Tsokdruk Rangdrol) (1781-1851). One of the most revered Tibetan preachers and saints of the nineteenth century. He was born in the Reb kong region of A mdo in the northeast of the Tibetan cultural domain. During his youth, he received instruction in RDZOGS CHEN and various treasure (GTER MA) cycles of the RNYING MA sect. He undertook a one-year retreat at the age of sixteen and was ordained at the age of twenty at Rdo bis, a DGE LUGS monastery. He maintained his monastic vows throughout his life but wore his hair long and piled on the top of his head in the manner of a tantric YOGIN. His main teacher was Chos rgyal Ngag gi dbang po, but he studied with a variety of teachers, including those of the Dge lugs sect. He also studied traditional painting. An adept, pilgrim, and poet of the Rnying ma sect, he traveled throughout Tibet, undertaking retreats at such famous sites as Rma chen spom ra, TSA RI, and Mount KAILĀSA, including in a number of caves where MI LA RAS PA is said to have meditated. He became known as Zhabs dkar, or "white footprint," because he meditated at Mount Kailāsa, where the Buddha is said to have left his footprints (BUDDHAPĀDA). He also traveled to Kathmandu, where he offered gold for the spire of the BODHNĀTH STuPA. He gained fame among all social classes through his wide-ranging activities as a Buddhist teacher and his enormous personal generosity and charisma. His autobiography, entitled Snyigs dus 'gro ba yongs kyi skyabs mgon zhabs dkar rdo rje 'chang chen po'i rnam par thar pa rgyas par bshad pa (translated as The Life of Shabkar) is regarded as one of the masterworks of that genre of Tibetan literature.



QUOTES [4 / 4 - 1345 / 1345]


KEYS (10k)

   1 Wikipedia
   1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
   1 Gary Gygax
   1 Carlos Fuentes

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

   23 Emlyn Chand
   9 Ursula K Le Guin
   9 Julianna Baggott
   8 Quentin Tarantino
   8 Neil Gaiman
   8 John D Agata
   8 Hal Duncan
   6 Stephen King
   6 Patrick Rothfuss
   6 Mindy Kaling
   6 Dwayne Johnson
   5 William Gibson
   5 Victor Hugo
   5 Robert Englund
   5 Nicholas Sparks
   5 Kailin Gow
   5 Adrian Hodges
   4 Wong Kar wai
   4 Michael Chabon
   4 Mary Harron

1:Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre. ~ Carlos Fuentes,
2:There is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you're involved in, whether it's a fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agents or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things. ~ Gary Gygax,
3:Apotheosis (from Greek ἀποθέωσις from ἀποθεοῦν, apotheoun to deify; in Latin deificatio making divine; also called divinization and deification) is the glorification of a subject to divine level. The term has meanings in theology, where it refers to a belief, and in art, where it refers to a genre. this seems particularily important relative to define, which seems to be attempt at the highest potential of the word.
   ~ Wikipedia,
4:About the only law that I think relates to the genre is that you should not try to explain, to find neat explanations for what happens, and that the object of the thing is to produce a sense of the uncanny. Freud in his essay on the uncanny wrote that the sense of the uncanny is the only emotion which is more powerfully expressed in art than in life, which I found very illuminating; it didn't help writing the screen-play, but I think it's an interesting insight into the genre. And I read an essay by the great master H.P. Lovecraft where he said that you should never attempt to explain what happens, as long as what happens stimulates people's imagination, their sense of the uncanny, their sense of anxiety and fear. And as long as it doesn't, within itself, have any obvious inner contradictions, it is just a matter of, as it were, building on the imagination (imaginary ideas, surprises, etc.), working in this area of feeling. I think also that the ingeniousness of a story like this is something which the audience ultimately enjoys; they obviously wonder as the story goes on what's going to happen, and there's a great satisfaction when it's all over not having been able to have anticipated the major development of the story, and yet at the end not to feel that you have been fooled or swindled. ~ Stanley Kubrick,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

1:Ah, genre. A word only a Frenchman could love. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove
2:There are no authors in my genre. No one is doing what I do. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove
3:Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove
4:Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish. ~ dean-koontz, @wisdomtrove
5:Focus in on the genre you want to write, and read books in that genre. A LOT of books by a variety of authors. And read with questions in your mind. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove
6:Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement. ~ dean-koontz, @wisdomtrove
7:Yes, of course, the whole idea is utterly inane, but to let its predictable inanities blind you to its truly fabulous and breathtaking aspects is to do both oneself and the genre a disservice. ~ alan-moore, @wisdomtrove
8:Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove
9:My feeling of the whole genre, of the terror tale, is this: The best thing that you can do for the readers in this field is to terrify them. It is something that is intellectual, it happens in your mind. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove
10:I'd like to be remembered not only for my body of work but also for specific novels. Ideally, I want to be remembered in the same way as Stephen King, who defined and exemplified excellence in the horror genre in the late 20th and early 21st century. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove
11:The horror genre is an extremely delicate thing. You can talk to filmmakers and even psychologists who've studied the genre, and even they don't understand what works or what doesn't work. More importantly, they don't understand why it works when it works. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove
12:My novels are in the literature section as opposed to the romance section of bookstores because they're not romance novels. If I tried to have them published as romances, they'd be rejected. I write dramatic fiction; a further sub-genre would classify them as love stories. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove
13:There are very real differences between science fiction and realistic fiction, between horror and fantasy, between romance and mystery. Differences in writing them, in reading them, in criticizing them. Vive les différences! They're what gives each genre its singular flavor and savor, its particular interest for the reader - and the writer. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove
14:As you see, I bear some resentment and some scars from the years of anti-genre bigotry. My own fiction, which moves freely around among realism, magical realism, science fiction, fantasy of various kinds, historical fiction, young adult fiction, parable, and other subgenres, to the point where much of it is ungenrifiable, all got shoved into the Sci Fi wastebasket or labeled as kiddilit - subliterature. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:Et Genre-Billede
~ Christian Winther,
2:Vampires are a genre now. ~ Joseph Morgan,
3:Genre is a minimum security prison. ~ David Shields,
4:I came late to the genre of folk music. ~ Tom Morello,
5:I don't consider genre while writing. ~ Karin Tidbeck,
6:I don't like to label films with a genre. ~ Tom Felton,
7:I wasn't the genre I'd thought I was. ~ Richard Powers,
8:Animation is a technique, not a genre. ~ Gore Verbinski,
9:I am self-educated from genre books. ~ Charlaine Harris,
10:It doesn't matter to me what the genre is. ~ Steve Buscemi,
11:Bad prose is the bugbear of genre fiction. ~ Adrian McKinty,
12:I love action films. It's my favorite genre. ~ Til Schweiger,
13:Im a huge fan of the James Bond genre. ~ Chris Diamantopoulos,
14:I never excluded any genre on my first record. ~ Deana Carter,
15:Writing is a struggle no matter what the genre. ~ Susan Wiggs,
16:I think I'm sort of locked into the sitcom genre ~ Jason Marsden,
17:Ah, genre. A word only a Frenchman could love. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,
18:Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood. ~ Robert Pinsky,
19:My focus is to not focus too much on one genre. ~ Amanda Seyfried,
20:Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem. ~ Rick Moody,
21:Real life is rubbish at staying in genre boundaries. ~ Neil Gaiman,
22:In my writing classes, I don't outlaw any genre writing. ~ Leni Zumas,
23:I don't exist to build a genre. I exist to build the Kingdom. ~ LeCrae,
24:I don't watch something just because it's a specific genre. ~ Drew Roy,
25:Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre. ~ Carlos Fuentes,
26:I'm not loyal to one genre. I want to mix it up. ~ Benedict Cumberbatch,
27:Should it matter what genre it is if the book is good? ~ Colleen Hoover,
28:Science fiction is becoming more of a diverse kind of genre. ~ Anna Torv,
29:There is good and mediocre writing within every genre. ~ Margaret Atwood,
30:I've never really been into the sci-fi genre myself. ~ Marie Avgeropoulos,
31:There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book. ~ Matt Haig,
32:Genre, to me, is not all that important, and it never has been. ~ Amos Lee,
33:I like the idea of trying to write a book in every genre. ~ China Mieville,
34:J-Lo finally married into her own music genre. Crappy music. ~ Doug Benson,
35:The genre of fantasy is about magic and occult characters. ~ Shawn Ashmore,
36:When I was a kid, I was always watching genre movies on TV. ~ Bong Joon ho,
37:C’était le genre de femme qui donne envie de boire du thé ~ David Foenkinos,
38:Great music completely obliterates any conceptions of genre. ~ Billy Corgan,
39:I like the Western genre, I think it's uniquely American. ~ Keith Carradine,
40:Readers want more of the same from you. So stick to one genre. ~ Ruskin Bond,
41:Think of this book as a new genre altogether—a when-to book. ~ Daniel H Pink,
42:The Holocaust movie is almost a genre in itself these days. ~ Viggo Mortensen,
43:When you're outside of genre, you can expose more vulnerability. ~ Jenny Hval,
44:There are no authors in my genre. No one is doing what I do. ~ Nicholas Sparks,
45:There's not a single genre that is hard to find or hard to get. ~ Billy Gibbons,
46:Democracy will defeat the economist at every turn on its own genre. ~ Harold Innis,
47:Getting into creating in a new genre is like arriving to a new country. ~ Yoko Ono,
48:I love country music. I don't ever feel restricted by the genre. ~ Martina McBride,
49:The horror genre is fun but I'm not sure it is quite right for me. ~ Andre Holland,
50:The thriller is the most popular literary genre of the 20th century. ~ Ken Follett,
51:I do genre films because I like them, or because I need the money. ~ Robert Englund,
52:I think Ive learned more about Baroque music than any other genre. ~ Joyce DiDonato,
53:It's cool to play a vampire and be a part of this new, hot genre. ~ Josh Hutcherson,
54:It's not about what you get out but what you put into hip hop as a genre. ~ Chuck D,
55:The Western genre is certainly something with which I'm familiar. ~ Keith Carradine,
56:A good book is a good book, I’ve always thought, whatever the genre. ~ Miranda James,
57:At its core, 'Heroes' is an ensemble character drama with genre elements. ~ Masi Oka,
58:You can apply the same heart, the same sense of euphoria to any genre. ~ Stuart Price,
59:All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one. ~ Walter Benjamin,
60:A long time ago, I stopped trying to look at projects as genre exercises. ~ Ron Howard,
61:I'd love to do a cop film in America. That's a genre I absolutely adore. ~ Danny Boyle,
62:Getting back into the action genre is like going back home. It's great. ~ Dwayne Johnson,
63:Google your target genre along with the words “readers” and “demographics. ~ Emlyn Chand,
64:To pigeonhole a genre as being successful or unsuccessful is weird. ~ Chester Bennington,
65:But the action film genre is gonna have to come up with some new bad guys. ~ Bruce Willis,
66:I never set out to be part of a genre, because I listen to all types of music. ~ Skrillex,
67:There's no coherent stylistic genre specific advice that I could provide. ~ Matthew Healy,
68:I'm not staying away from any genre. I'm trying to get scripts that I like. ~ Emile Hirsch,
69:I still collect comics. I still have a great love and respect for the genre. ~ Thomas Jane,
70:What I'm trying to do is break the genre from what is rap and what is music. ~ Wyclef Jean,
71:I'm glad a genre writer has got a knighthood, but stunned that it was me. ~ Terry Pratchett,
72:I think a good movie is a good movie whether that falls into a genre or not. ~ Nicolas Cage,
73:I want to tell stories, I don't really try to get boxed in by a specific genre. ~ Spike Lee,
74:I am a genre lover - everything from spaghetti western to samurai movie. ~ Quentin Tarantino,
75:I don't really think in terms of genre, I think in terms of story and character. ~ Paul Rudd,
76:I love doing horror with comedy twists and I think it's a really fun genre. ~ Katrina Bowden,
77:Everything changes in every genre, whether it's pop, rock or country. ~ Mary Chapin Carpenter,
78:Genre labels are useful only insofar as they help you find an audience. ~ Walter Jon Williams,
79:It's very difficult to make comedy work; I think it's a very underrated genre. ~ Andrew Scott,
80:The true genre of the life is neither hagiography nor saga, but tragedy. ~ Alasdair MacIntyre,
81:We knew that there was a certain kind of interest in Whale among a genre crowd. ~ Bill Condon,
82:I hated unexpected switches of genre within books, and much more in real life. ~ Bella Forrest,
83:I think movies should illuminate and teach, but that's for a certain genre. ~ Jordana Brewster,
84:Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,
85:I never even considered comedy genre as something to embrace or move away from. ~ Edward Norton,
86:I am a fan of the monster and horror genre but that's not my style as a director. ~ Bong Joon ho,
87:I came to terms with living mostly in a world of horror pictures or genre pictures. ~ Wes Craven,
88:Genre categories are irrelevant. I dislike them, but I do not have the casting vote. ~ Tanith Lee,
89:A lot of times, jazz musicians try to educate people. What other genre does that? ~ Robert Glasper,
90:I like to think of multicultural fiction as a flavor rather than a genre of its own. ~ Emlyn Chand,
91:A predilection for genre fiction is symptomatic of a kind of arrested development. ~ Thomas M Disch,
92:I'm not necessarily that big of a clubbing junkie, but I really like dance music as a genre. ~ Mika,
93:A great artist is not one who merely fits into a genre but one who defines the genre. ~ Vikas Swarup,
94:Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish. ~ Dean Koontz,
95:One thing I know is that I don't want to be a director for hire, making genre films. ~ Paul Mazursky,
96:I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre. ~ Ben Lerner,
97:I think women have always been considered objects, especially in the genre of westerns. ~ Sergio Leone,
98:My films have elements of genre in them, which prevents them from being purely art films. ~ Mary Harron,
99:Readers often become fans of a genre after discovering one defining work in that genre. ~ David Farland,
100:I put things on shuffle a lot, which is probably why I don't have a very good idea of genre. ~ Oliver Sim,
101:I don't care about the genre so much. I'm good with horror, but I like other genres, too. ~ Bruce Campbell,
102:I'm so beyond genre, drama, comedies, I just want to do really good, interesting projects. ~ Patton Oswalt,
103:My favorite genre is Beautifully Written Books of Any Genre. Could we make that a genre? ~ Kristin Cashore,
104:No writer can impose his own standards onto any other, nor claim to speak for the whole genre. ~ Mary Karr,
105:What I had to say was, in general, I'm not really a fan of any one genre of any kind of film. ~ Adam Arkin,
106:When a horror movie is well done, I love it and I put it up in esteem with any other genre. ~ David Hayter,
107:I love space opera, and I believe that every sub-genre has potential no matter how old it is. ~ Erica Brown,
108:In some ways we want definitions that can help protect our own interpretations of the genre. ~ John D Agata,
109:I would agree with you that there's 90% imitation and 10% innovation. That's true of any genre. ~ DJ Shadow,
110:Can you imagine life without the horror genre? There would be no monsters. Only a**holes. ~ Michael A Arnzen,
111:I don't know what genre I've fallen into, I don't know where it is, and that's really exciting. ~ Erol Alkan,
112:I read a lot of scripts and so many are clearly a knockoff of one familiar genre or another. ~ Edward Norton,
113:No, the horror genre is not my first love. I don't run to the theater to see horror films. ~ Amanda Righetti,
114:People just want to watch movies that are entertaining, it doesn't matter what genre it is. ~ Matthew Vaughn,
115:(Visibility makes possible, but it also disciplines: disciplines gender, disciplines genre.) ~ Maggie Nelson,
116:I love the horror genre and the thriller genre, so I've got no problem with playing a psycho. ~ Valorie Curry,
117:I met someone who said they'd figured out my genre: "madcap redemption comedy." I'll buy that. ~ Harold Ramis,
118:The purpose of concept art as a genre is to unbrainwash our mathematical and logical faculties. ~ Henry Flynt,
119:As a European filmmaker, you can not make a genre film seriously. You can only make a parody. ~ Michael Haneke,
120:I'm a self-confessed genre nerd. I'm a very serious actor, but a genre nerd, all the same. ~ Penelope Mitchell,
121:I'm quite a rational person. I'm not very superstitious, but I really do enjoy horror as a genre. ~ Gemma Chan,
122:I've never really been a genre fan. I never grew up reading comic books, or was a horror buff. ~ Chad Lindberg,
123:I want people to get out of that nasty habit of needing a label. Every genre for each song is different. ~ SZA,
124:You usually find me writing what I like to think of as intelligent summer action and genre films. ~ Max Landis,
125:'Fringe' is a sci-fi show. But once you go beyond the genre, you're immersed in a profound reality. ~ Anna Torv,
126:I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days. ~ Anne Lamott,
127:The genre of television that I love and watch is so vast. There's not one type of thing I love. ~ Bridget Regan,
128:I think [Doctor Strange] it is - it does tap into a supernatural type of genre that is not horror. ~ Kevin Feige,
129:I do love the young adult novels as a form and genre, because it has a purity of intention and heart. ~ Ira Sachs,
130:I don't know, just scripts randomly appeal to me. I'm not looking specifically at any genre. ~ Robert Pattinson,
131:If you can't see the joy and wonder to be found in genre fiction, that's your problem, not mine. ~ William Meikle,
132:I write almost everything, actually. Songs, poems, stories. And stories out of every genre, too. ~ Jackie Evancho,
133:The 'Western' is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself. ~ Andre Bazin,
134:Unfortunately in television, for whatever reason, fantasy became thought of as a kids' genre. ~ George R R Martin,
135:What drives me is exploration with a purpose, more the classic Royal Geographical Society genre. ~ Robert Ballard,
136:I love the paranormal, because there, every genre I write can become one beacon for my imagination. ~ Leslie Banks,
137:I'm just starting to take some more voice lessons but hell no, I'll always stick into the hip-hop genre. ~ SonReal,
138:I think romantic comedy, when done right, is my favorite genre. It's just a genre that's very human. ~ Lena Dunham,
139:I was crazy about the song "Doot Doot," so I usually love this genre of weird, European electronic. ~ Margaret Cho,
140:Podiobooks rules. It's still the best way I know to find an audience for longer works in any genre. ~ Nathan Lowell,
141:Science fiction really is the only genre that lets you use your imagination without limitations. ~ Steven Spielberg,
142:Action comedy, if you can get it right, it is, for me, a particularly brilliant genre. It really is. ~ Jason Statham,
143:Everyone who writes in the sub-genre of Victorian mystery stands in [Sir Arthur Conan] Doyle's shadow. ~ Will Thomas,
144:If I love the character, then thats all that matters to me. It doesnt really matter what genre it is. ~ Olivia Cooke,
145:I'm a big movie fan, and I want to make movies in every genre. I want to make my romantic comedy one day. ~ James Wan,
146:While writing a novel I almost completely stop reading books in the same sub-genre for the duration. ~ Charles Stross,
147:I don't mind genre names. "Chillwave" is probably the last thing I would think of, but I don't mind it. ~ Chaz Bundick,
148:What I want any genre to do, what I want any work of art to do, is to illuminate the human condition. ~ Nicholas Meyer,
149:I hope that I can make good music out of whatever genre I go into. Just to prove to myself that I can. ~ Herbie Hancock,
150:B.B. King will be remembered for his impressive skills on the guitar, that King defined the blue genre. ~ Chris Matthews,
151:If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that. ~ Yann Martel,
152:I love horror movies in space. I love it when the genre switches over and what was sci-fi becomes horror. ~ Kirk Hammett,
153:In the nineteenth century, poetry was a bestselling genre rather than the cultish phenomenon it is now. ~ John McWhorter,
154:I think music isn't just a genre or sound. If it sounds good and makes you feel good it's a beautiful thing. ~ DJ Khaled,
155:As a genre-bending blend of police procedural and science fiction, The Silk Code delivers on its promises. ~ Gerald Jonas,
156:I do think you learn things about genre storytelling, but you also have to be careful not to learn too much. ~ David Eick,
157:I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts. ~ Jonathan Lethem,
158:It's always gonna be different when I make a record just because I kind of touch on every sort of genre. ~ Lady Sovereign,
159:No one worries about genre when they're dancing. They're not asking themselves, 'Is this song a dubstep song?' ~ Skrillex,
160:Performance capture is a technology, not a genre; it's just another way of recording an actor's performance. ~ Andy Serkis,
161:Anthony Boucher (1911–1968) was one of the most remarkable figures ever produced by the mystery genre. And ~ Jeffery Deaver,
162:I believe the adventure game genre will never die any more than any type of storytelling would ever die. ~ Roberta Williams,
163:I don't write genre stuff in any form. I'm not interested in it. I always try to do the opposite of that. ~ Charlie Kaufman,
164:I just like movies, not one particular kind or genre. In fact, movies that are harder to classify I like more. ~ Rob Zombie,
165:I love being an actor, and that's really the bottom line - in any medium, in any genre - and I want to do it. ~ Chris Klein,
166:I'm just looking for material that excites me more than any specific genre. It just needs to be good. ~ Christina Hendricks,
167:I would like to see the technology used to explore more period horror genre works, for example, E. A. Poe. ~ Robert Englund,
168:To me, as a musician, there aren't any boundaries genre-wise as far as what can you listen to to inspire you. ~ John Legend,
169:Everyone's been on the "hip-hop is dead" campaign for years, and now it's the most unsure-of-itself genre ever. ~ Aesop Rock,
170:I think it was the sense that Turn is a spy thriller, and that's a genre that really fascinates me, in general. ~ Jamie Bell,
171:I would much rather see somebody bring something new to a genre than produce something that seems safe. ~ Guillermo del Toro,
172:The funny thing about me is I move from genre to genre, but I essentially shoot all the movies the same way. ~ James Mangold,
173:I think that people like getting their money's worth, so it's cool to have a load of bands in a similar genre. ~ Tim Lambesis,
174:There's been a shift: Country music is popular music now. Every other genre wants to come over to our land. ~ Miranda Lambert,
175:I feel like people, when it comes to music, whatever genre, they relate to the story more than just the song. ~ Chamillionaire,
176:I'm a big horror fan. I'm a genre fan. I like to make these movies. They're my favorite kinds of movies to make. ~ Amber Heard,
177:I'm a horror movie fan to begin with, so to come back to the genre, I feel like horror has been very good to me. ~ Kathy Bates,
178:I think it would be a shame for any writer to let their publishers in any way corral them into a single genre. ~ Emma Donoghue,
179:So there's nothing more provocative than taking a genre that everybody who's cool hates - and then making it cool. ~ Lady Gaga,
180:I think that it's really, really funny to see adult themes in a genre that's usually directed towards children. ~ John DiMaggio,
181:Memoir is a weird genre for a reporter. You end up investigating your own memories, reporting out your past. ~ William Finnegan,
182:Genre, it had always seemed to me, was a set of assumptions, a loose contract between the creator and the audience. ~ Neil Gaiman,
183:This is my genre...the happiness, tragedies, and the sorrows of mankind as realized in the teeming black ghetto. ~ Jacob Lawrence,
184:Each genre exerts a considerable spell, as a kind of "form" to be filled, as a Shakespearean sonnet is filled. ~ Joyce Carol Oates,
185:I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner. ~ Pope Francis,
186:I don't just want to do something that is purely stuck in a genre box. I would like to have the kind of autonomy... ~ George Nolfi,
187:I grew up on genre - on Westerns, spy thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy novels, horror novels. Especially horror novels. ~ Benjamin Percy,
188:I used to love jungle. I still think it's the ultimate genre, really, because the people making it weren't musicians. ~ Aphex Twin,
189:I've always tried to stay away from playing Jews. I get like 20 Holocaust scripts a month, but I hate the genre. ~ Natalie Portman,
190:Science fiction is the only genre that enables African writers to envision a future from our African perspective. ~ Nnedi Okorafor,
191:The problem with most genre fantasy is that it's not nearly fantastic enough. It's escapist, but it can't escape. ~ China Mieville,
192:The problem with most genre fantasy is that it's not nearly fantastic enough. It's escapist, but it can't escape. ~ China Mi ville,
193:You learn to exploit genre for the more important things - to my mind - like story, character, image, language. ~ Julianna Baggott,
194:I don't believe any genre of music can be unilaterally dismissed (aside from like, white-power music or something). ~ Patrick Stump,
195:I love the gangster genre, but how many gangster movies are there? If I get a good gangster movie script, I'll do it. ~ Graham King,
196:I'm not sure what kept me from the mainstream. I thought it was because I was too hard to pin down genre-wise. ~ Princess Superstar,
197:The only genre I have any problem with is musicals, but that's just my own tastes it's nothing to do with the films. ~ Ben Wheatley,
198:ELANTRIS is a new BEN HUR for the fantasy genre, with a sweeping, epic storyline and closely personal characters. ~ Kevin J Anderson,
199:Votre origine ethnique:
La Seconde Guerre mondiale ne leur a pas suffi? Qu'est-ce que c'est que ce genre de question? ~ Marc Levy,
200:Genre/forms are institutional questions mainly. Like matter to MFA programs in terms of which workshop you can teach. ~ Juliana Spahr,
201:I never had a problem with genre because a genre actually is like a uniform - you put yourself into a certain uniform. ~ Wong Kar wai,
202:I think baseball - the baseball genre - is this mitt, to use a double pun there, to catch a whole bunch of themes. ~ Rachel Griffiths,
203:I hope to be on the scene for a long time. I'd love to be old and gray and still be working in this [horror] genre. ~ Barbara Crampton,
204:I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form. ~ Sue Grafton,
205:I think as far as the action genre goes, I like when it has a sense of humor. I'm a Jane Austen/Jane Eyre kind of girl. ~ Maggie Grace,
206:I would love to collaborate on a graphic novel with an artist - I'm terrible at drawing but I really love that genre. ~ Matthea Harvey,
207:When a script focuses on being a film instead of a formula, it can transcend the ghetto of its genre.
-Mike Schmidt ~ Graham Elwood,
208:As a rule, I don't worry about genre. I just want to tell a good story, with characters that interest me and my readers. ~ Stephen King,
209:Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre. ~ Junot Diaz,
210:I didn't really like jazz that much and was unhappy in that genre. It was what I was doing just to get by and pay rent. ~ Yukimi Nagano,
211:I love suspense movies, because in a sense they're the most dreamlike of any genre, and I'm sure I'll make another one. ~ Curtis Hanson,
212:I really love fantasy. I have to say it is my favourite genre to read and one of the genres I love the most to write. ~ Cassandra Clare,
213:Whatever your favorite genre is, you can probably trace your love for it back to one single book that really moved you. ~ David Farland,
214:Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk - a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts - in its own image. ~ Paul Di Filippo,
215:For a while, the genre seemed to be just about sex and crime. Rappers are storytellers; the stories don't need to be true! ~ Lauryn Hill,
216:Horror is a reaction; it's not a genre. Somebody's life would have to be in danger for it [story] to be a horror story. ~ John Carpenter,
217:If Im going to invest the time in a novel, I want something more than the entertainment you get out of most genre fiction. ~ Glen Duncan,
218:If you look at the horror genre, that work is all about making people uncomfortable by stimulating our fear of death. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh,
219:I see horror as part of legitimate film. I don't see it as an independent genre that has nothing to do with cinema. ~ Guillermo del Toro,
220:I do like putting scenario and story first, and I actually like masking whatever I want to say in the guise of genre. ~ Quentin Tarantino,
221:I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer. ~ Alan Furst,
222:My goal isn't so much genre, or fact-based or not fact-based. I just want to work on projects that I think could be great. ~ Danny Strong,
223:The true pinnacle of the illuminated manuscript genre is the Book of Kells, created around 800 in an Irish monastery. ~ William J Bennett,
224:Well, you know, people don't know me as a country artist and I am new to the genre. But that's how I grew up singing. ~ Kristin Chenoweth,
225:What I love more than anything is Jerry Goldsmith's 80's music and Bernard Herrmann's genre music from the 50's and 60's. ~ Bear McCreary,
226:A live performance is the same no matter what genre it is. Wrestling, rock 'n roll, hosting, acting - it's the same thing. ~ Chris Jericho,
227:I don't go out of my way to write Weird Fiction, or in any other genre. Some of my stuff easily slips into the Weird slot. ~ Karin Tidbeck,
228:In the ghetto of Genre, anything goes, man. When you live in the gutter it doesn’t matter if you’re filthy. In theory anyway. ~ Hal Duncan,
229:Ça a toujours été le cas. Les gens voulaient toujours savoir : quel genre de femme se fait assassiner par son propre fils ? ~ Gillian Flynn,
230:I've always believed that we could reach past genre -- we didn't ride the grunge coat-tails; we've always been on our terms. ~ Billy Corgan,
231:mysteries as a genre have something to say to all of us about the world, and our efforts to make sense of our place in it. ~ Nina Sankovitch,
232:Science works as a way to make sense of life and the universe. Hard SF as my preferred fictional genre just feels natural. ~ Edward M Lerner,
233:My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is. ~ Iain Banks,
234:There is a sense that animated movies are suddenly a genre. I just don't believe they are; it's a technique to tell a story. ~ Gore Verbinski,
235:It's really hard to find just a simple character-driven drama, outside of a genre, that was available to direct, except for on TV. ~ Marc Webb,
236:Music is a huge part of my life, I enjoy every genre of music from jazz to country, and I even get down with a bit of hip hop. ~ Nicole Richie,
237:It'll die down like every other genre, but horror has always been one of the four or five main genres that will never go away. ~ Bruce Campbell,
238:Being cross-genre, you can encounter an image and decide not only how to best express it but what form would express it best. ~ Julianna Baggott,
239:Je ne dispute donc pas que la médecine ne soit utile à quelques hommes, mais je dis qu’elle est funeste au genre humain. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau,
240:One of the mistakes I made was believing that the rock 'n' roll genre as a genre was much more free than the whole pop or R&B scene. ~ Joan Jett,
241:The best thing about Sci-Fi, which is my favorite genre, is that there are no rules for behavior. So you can do anything you want. ~ Brion James,
242:There’s an entire genre of writing now that’s empowered women to type out their sex fantasies and publish them on the Internet. ~ Matthew Norman,
243:In college I studied essays with a poet, and so I think my interpretation of the genre was always going to be a little off-kilter. ~ John D Agata,
244:Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die. ~ Margaret Drabble,
245:Ses textes étaient des poèmes en prose, le genre de choses qu'écrivent les infirmières avant d'assister à leur première amputation. ~ Don DeLillo,
246:Each genre and part of the Old Testament looks toward Christ and informs us about who he is in some way that the others do not. ~ Timothy J Keller,
247:I root for all movies, but I especially root for good comic book movies. It's the best, most interesting genre going right now. ~ Scott Derrickson,
248:What some of the early horror genre masters knew, and what I know, is that the audience are perverts, but in the best possible way. ~ Fede Alvarez,
249:Clearly romantic comedy is my franchise genre, I don't mind saying that, it's true. I love doing them and hopefully always will do them. ~ Meg Ryan,
250:Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on. ~ Neil Gaiman,
251:I don't think I will write anything that could be even remotely considered a genre novel from this point on. I think I've graduated. ~ James Ellroy,
252:It doesn't really matter what "genre" your book is. What matters is that it's a good book of its kind. Whatever that kind may be. ~ Margaret Atwood,
253:Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die... ~ Margaret Drabble,
254:When I did TV shows and my other movies, I never try to do it for anybody. I just do what I think is good no matter what the genre is. ~ Will Gluck,
255:Digging up graves is backbreaking work. So I just like that the genre of horror can embrace so many different styles and textures. ~ Larry Fessenden,
256:Genre stuff is the most exciting stuff for an actor to play. I get to try new things, do things I would have never got the chance to do. ~ Amy Acker,
257:Science fiction has always had a dark side. There has been a touch of the irrational and absurd in the genre from the very beginning. ~ Douglas Lain,
258:As a writer who writes poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, I think it's important to always maintain a firm grasp on genre and ethics. ~ Kathleen Rooney,
259:I just want to be able to make a movie that takes some chances. I don't just want to do something that is purely stuck in a genre box. ~ George Nolfi,
260:And all at once I felt repelled by this whole genre, by this cult of mythologies, by this jigsaw puzzle of handed-down forms of faith. ~ Hermann Hesse,
261:I am a movie fan across the board, though, so if a movie is well done then I love it and it does not really matter what the genre is. ~ Tania Raymonde,
262:Post-war filmmakers gave us the documentary, Rob Reiner gave us the mockumentary and Moore initiated a third genre, the crockumentary. ~ Michael Moore,
263:What I like is not a particular genre, it's storytelling. There's a lot of great storytelling in jazz, and in folk and in country music. ~ Lizz Wright,
264:When you think of dog movies, that genre, Old Yeller is sort of the benchmark and you hope that you can raise your game up to that. ~ Jennifer Aniston,
265:I'm not really a zombie genre guy, I'm not particularly versed in it. Doing 'The Walking Dead' sort of turned me on to the whole thing. ~ Noah Emmerich,
266:Like many other outstanding examples of the genre, Ingres’s portrait teaches us that appearance can be a bearer of authentic meaning. ~ Alain de Botton,
267:A modern-day Dickens with a popular voice and a genius for storytelling in any genre, Stephen King has written many wonderful books. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon,
268:Because I am known in the horror genre now, I try and do at least one horror movie a year for my fans, my fans have been so good to me. ~ Robert Englund,
269:Each genre has something to teach me about the others. Not all the lessons are transferable, but many of the most important ones are. ~ Julianna Baggott,
270:Hard SF is the literature of change, the genre that examines the implications—both beneficial and dangerous—of new sciences and technologies. ~ Ben Bova,
271:I am too old to have ever been very worried about what "genre" any given book of mine might be. I read everything. I am easily amused. ~ Margaret Atwood,
272:It doesn't matter the genre or type of art, if it's authentic there's an apparent beauty to it and as an artist, that's very inspiring. ~ Brian McKnight,
273:It's good having a lot of different songs to choose from to do the show. It means you don't get bored of doing it in one particular genre. ~ Bryan Ferry,
274:Science fiction is the characteristic literary genre of the century. It is the genre that stands in opposition to literary modernism. ~ David G Hartwell,
275:Whats fun for me is to try new things and push myself and not get stuck in one genre or another, or stuck with one character or another. ~ Steven Strait,
276:I certainly realize that not only do I like the horror genre, but I'm getting really good at it and I'm having a good time making them. ~ Elisha Cuthbert,
277:Books in the YA genre, in particular, should use proper grammar because they're more of an example to young people than adults books are. ~ Laura Kreitzer,
278:Except horror, as a genre, isn’t all that fond of destiny either. It smacks too much of stability and fixed points and too little of chaos. ~ Octavia Cade,
279:Frank attrapa un des pancakes, le roula et l’entama. Il n’était pas du genre à se laisser couper l’appétit par un risque de mort imminente. ~ Rick Riordan,
280:The great opera composers were so good at their job, that the whole genre came to be built around the concept of the composer's vision. ~ Stewart Copeland,
281:When highbrow critics accused Time of practicing personality journalism, Luce replied that Time did not invent the genre, the Bible did. ~ Walter Isaacson,
282:and it was a given of the Western genre, both on the radio and in the movies (it’s interesting that one was ‘on’ the radio but ‘in’ the movies) ~ Trevanian,
283:As a music supervisor, you learn to embrace the best of every genre, and I really have to say there's nothing that I'm embarrassed of. ~ Alexandra Patsavas,
284:I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern. ~ P D James,
285:Rap is the only interesting music left - it's the only genre that's still pushing itself, and experimenting in a way that I find exciting. ~ Harmony Korine,
286:Samurai films, like westerns, need not be familiar genre stories. They can expand to contain stories of ethical challenges and human tragedy. ~ Roger Ebert,
287:The crowd-pleasing, pilfered genre had mated with democracy and produced a seemingly invincible bastard: government by force of farce. ~ David James Duncan,
288:The rest of 2012's big winners are romances, all but one (The Lucky One, by Nicholas Sparks) of the sexed-up genre now known as "mommy-porn. ~ Stephen King,
289:Trying to write books with a subject matter or in a genre or style you're not familiar with is the best way to find the Big Block looming. ~ Jeffery Deaver,
290:fusing themselves into a single new genre about partying all night with gangsta bitches screwing cowboys to the nasty beat that leads to Jesus. ~ Tim Dorsey,
291:Graphic novel genre become really quite popular. It's really a big screen film genre that they have successfully moved into the small screen. ~ Dustin Clare,
292:I reject the concept that comic books in movies are a genre. I have been fighting that for many years, with the powers-that-be in Hollywood. ~ Michael Uslan,
293:You know that part of your writing that you question, —that's weird and doesn't fit neatly into a genre or mold?Write more of that. Please. ~ Richard Thomas,
294:I don't belong to any school or clique or ghetto. I don't have any preconceived ideas. I'm trying to serve a story and not a genre or a style. ~ Xavier Dolan,
295:I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist. ~ Harold Bloom,
296:I make unpopular versions of popular things. I make a horror film and it's not a horror film. None of my genre movies function as genre movies. ~ Mary Harron,
297:Pop music is the one genre that isn't a genre. If the kids like it, then that's what defines it as pop music. Pop music is just something new. ~ Greg Saunier,
298:There's a thing with genre movies and science fiction movies that number two is the charmed; two seems to be the best. I loved 'Terminator 2.' ~ Dave Gibbons,
299:When I walk in the door sometimes, I'm already an anomaly. Because I'm working in a genre that African-American's don't typically engage in. ~ Kevin Grevioux,
300:I love making genre films. It's something I've really been attracted to since I was a kid, mostly because, as a kid, it was forbidden fruit. ~ Patrick Lussier,
301:Record any common themes these reviewers mention over and over again, and you’ve just created an invaluable “cheat sheet” to writing your genre. ~ Emlyn Chand,
302:Horror is not a genre, it is an emotion. It is a progressive form of fiction, one that evolves to meet the fears and anxieties of its times. ~ Douglas E Winter,
303:The reason fantasy fiction remains such a vital and necessary genre is that it lets us talk about such things in a way realistic fiction cannot. ~ Stephen King,
304:Theres a certain truth that you do end up making the same film again and again so if you vary the genre you have a chance of breaking that cycle. ~ Danny Boyle,
305:Deadlines comes as a surprise....superb: a new genre, in fact, combining the pleasures of list-making with that of last-minute eaves-dropping. ~ Alberto Manguel,
306:I don't choose my projects based on genre, I choose them based on the role and whether or not I've tackled that yet, based on the director and such. ~ Kate Mara,
307:Medical-genre shows have been around forever, they will be around forever, and I think this [Code Black] is a great iteration of the next generation. ~ Rob Lowe,
308:Traditionally the Nude was used to express formulations about life as larger-than-life, as Heroic or Ideal... The nude is not a 'genre' subject. ~ Isabel Bishop,
309:Entourage [movie] really is established as a genre unto itself, much like the thriller or the horror movie or the comedy. And those things trend. ~ Ryan Reynolds,
310:I do always like to do things I haven't done before, so I'm always looking out for things in a different genre, or a different sort of character. ~ Jim Broadbent,
311:The thriller genre keeps the reader at the edge of her seat as she watches the protagonist overcome extraordinary obstacles in a race against time. ~ Emlyn Chand,
312:The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story. ~ John le Carre,
313:I do feel there's certainly some films where you can feel that the directors don't care about the genre and they don't care about their characters. ~ Drew Goddard,
314:I don't write toward a genre, and I try not to make claim to a genre after a book is published. That said, The Guardians isn't poetry. It's prose. ~ Sarah Manguso,
315:I'm looking for stories that make me sit up and take notice. For engagement with language and style in ways that the genre doesn't see enough of. ~ Nalo Hopkinson,
316:So far as any literary genre can be said to have been invented by one author, Edgar Allan Poe is that author, and the detective story is that genre. ~ Paul Collins,
317:At the end of the day, I like the spy genre, as opposed to the action movie genre, because spies are smart. The successful spies are the smarter spies. ~ Doug Liman,
318:« Je ne crois pas aux méthodes du réalisme, genre artificiel s'il en est; je préfère révéler d'un seul coup ce que j'ai compris graduellement. » ~ Jorge Luis Borges,
319:My dream artists to collaborate with are probably Cee Lo Green and Imogen Heap. They're completely out of my genre but they're both musical geniuses. ~ Kina Grannis,
320:One of the reasons poetry is such an amazing genre to work with is because it constantly reinvents itself and re-negotiates its terms with the reader. ~ Cate Marvin,
321:You can write in multiple genres, but if you want a career in publishing, pick one genre and become very good at it. Then you can write the other stuff. ~ Bob Mayer,
322:I don't think I make genre movies. There is a certain type of violence in my films but I think I have my own genre because I made it happen like that. ~ Claire Denis,
323:I'm a huge fan of television, and it's a really good time to be a fan of television, because there's so much good stuff out there. In every genre, really. ~ Jon Hamm,
324:I'm not limited by genre and it doesn't really matter what the genre is as long as the film is going to be new and have some real artistic integrity. ~ Josh Hartnett,
325:Playing the Opry, when I get the opportunity - it's one of the coolest honors for any musician in any genre, but especially for a country musician. ~ Charlie Worsham,
326:As this genre finally, however grudgingly, acknowledges that the dreams of the marginalised matter, and that all of us have a future, so will the world. ~ N K Jemisin,
327:Down the road a bit, I would like to write a couple of stand-alone adult novels, especially in the horror genre. I've got lots of things up my sleeve. ~ James Dashner,
328:Focus in on the genre you want to write, and read books in that genre. A LOT of books by a variety of authors. And read with questions in your mind. ~ Nicholas Sparks,
329:Writers are a combative bunch when it comes to aesthetics, and the generation before GENRE are born into a discourse that’s been brewing since Cervantes. ~ Hal Duncan,
330:Drama is not a genre for infant prodigies: I can't think of a dramatist who made a major reputation as early as, say, Keats or Rimbaud in lyric poetry. ~ Northrop Frye,
331:Fiction is people having extraordinary reactions to ordinary things, but in genre fiction, they have ordinary reactions to extraordinary things. ~ Mary Robinette Kowal,
332:I love horror movies, so it's a real treat to be able to work on a television show of that genre, and have it actually be really, really good. ~ Alexandra Breckenridge,
333:I'm bored with the same genre, the same remakes of things. I like original ideas and high-concept things where it's off the page and kind of fantastical. ~ Nina Dobrev,
334:Rock'n'roll as a genre is different from pop and hip hop: it is about bands, and that for me suggests brotherhood, family, friendship and community. ~ Steven Van Zandt,
335:I love the first two X-Men movies because I thought that Bryan Singer did such a great job. He elevated that whole genre. He's a very talented director. ~ Famke Janssen,
336:In the horror genre, unfortunately you sometimes have the studio tell you, "No, go with more unknown people because it's a scary movie," and I disagree. ~ Alexandre Aja,
337:Marshall Jevons is the pioneer for integrating economics and detective fiction, and The Mystery of the Invisible Hand is another fine effort in this genre. ~ Tyler Cowen,
338:The mystery genre kind of defines itself. Stories in this genre revolve around a central puzzle that the protagonist—and readers along with him—must solve. ~ Emlyn Chand,
339:I felt slightly snobby about the genre. My pre-conceived notion of the comic book world had been: "Oh, that's nothing that I need to worry about!" ~ Matthew William Goode,
340:I've never found kicks to the groin particularly funny, although recent work in the genre of the buddy movie suggests audience research must prove me wrong. ~ Roger Ebert,
341:Now that I'm being very successful, publishers are trying to mainstream me, but I'm unabashedly genre. It's what I like to read, what I like to write ~ Laurell K Hamilton,
342:If we don't keep people engaged, we're not going to move you. And if we move you, we've done something useful. That's what anybody who writes genre knows. ~ Akiva Goldsman,
343:I've spoken out my whole life against the idea of simply dismissing whole areas of fiction by saying it's "genre" and therefore can't be seen as literature. ~ Stephen King,
344:Now chart music is a genre all of its own and it's slipped away from what I understand pop music as. It's pretty difficult to take; it clogs up the airwaves. ~ Johnny Marr,
345:Probably the best explanation for my success and other Internet writers, is that we're tapping a genre or a niche out there that needs to be filled and isn't. ~ Tucker Max,
346:All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new. ~ Neil Gaiman,
347:As always, Google—or any other search engine of your choice—is another great source of information, search “how to write” + your genre, and see what comes up. ~ Emlyn Chand,
348:It may be the first in what I trust will be a rapidly growing and influential genre--the novel designed on purpose to be excludedfrom the Booker short-list. ~ Angela Carter,
349:Oui, les brutalités du progrès s’appellent révolutions. Quand elles sont finies, on reconnaît ceci : que le genre humain a été rudoyé, mais qu’il a marché. Le ~ Victor Hugo,
350:After I did the first Die Hard I said I'd never do another, same after I did the second one and the third. The whole genre was running itself into the ground. ~ Bruce Willis,
351:I think a good director can embrace any genre and it's the kind of thing where you always want to do something different. You always want to challenge yourself. ~ David Ayer,
352:In the genre of science fiction it is more important to be fruitfully mistaken than dully accurate. That’s why we are science fiction writers, not scientists. ~ Stewart Brand,
353:It was a weird thing for me, because I don't read vampire books. I don't watch vampire movies. I'm not into the horror genre. I'm a wuss, I'm a scaredy cat. ~ Stephenie Meyer,
354:Reading books in the genre you write is incredibly important when it comes to understanding the rules of your genre and the preferences of your target audience. ~ Emlyn Chand,
355:'Get Out' takes on the task of exploring race in America, something that hasn't really been done within the genre since 'Night of the Living Dead' 47 years ago. ~ Jordan Peele,
356:I sometimes play different kinds of music to see where the performers end up. I play one genre. Then something else when I do it again. It really helps. ~ Nicolas Winding Refn,
357:I think that even if you're wondering if two characters are ever going to kiss, drawing out the inevitability is part of the fun. Whatever the genre happens to be. ~ J J Abrams,
358:One of the things I would love to do, by the time I die, is be in every single genre. That would be really fun. I get to shoot guns and jump out of a helicopter. ~ Indira Varma,
359:When punk began to be a genre, people were going to go out and try to mine it. Some of the better groups, like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, were very artificial. ~ Iggy Pop,
360:Getting to do different genres of movies means you're gonna have different types of situations. So I want to try and do every type of genre there is out there. ~ Josh Hutcherson,
361:Hip-hop is a beautiful thing. I think that the music genre itself has created more millionaires than any other music genre before it, especially in our community. ~ Steve Harvey,
362:If there's a great story and great characters, then I can love a film in any genre, though crime thrillers and sci-fi have a particular soft spot in my heart. ~ Ed Gass Donnelly,
363:Lord of the Rings is a good thing for us because it opened the door for the genre in general. Ursula Le Guin's stories are very different from Lord of the Rings. ~ Shawn Ashmore,
364:Trombone virtuoso and innovative composer, Papo combines the best of jazz and Latin music to create a genre that is unique and wild. He's redefined Latin jazz! ~ Michael Brecker,
365:I don't differentiate in the way that the genre creators want differentiation to be made. I feel that I have never written children's or YA stories particularly. ~ Robin McKinley,
366:My genre-hopping has caused problems with marketing and sales departments over the years, because they need to know where to position a book with the booksellers. ~ F Paul Wilson,
367:My own goal is to find readers of my genre and turn them into raving fans by over-delivering on their expectations and giving them a satisfying reading experience. ~ Derek Murphy,
368:Horror is so often a 'thinkless' genre, sort of considered popcorn movies, but you really put a lot of, not just heart and soul, but a lot of physical energy into it. ~ Fran Kranz,
369:In the early '80s, I was blown away when I began to hear some of the earliest hip-hop songs, and I'm fascinated by all the permutations the genre has gone through. ~ Simon de Pury,
370:I wouldn't necessarily consider myself the typical sci-fi genre fan. I do have a lot of sci-fi shows that I enjoy, but I wouldn't call it my favorite genre of all. ~ Amanda Schull,
371:Punk is an attitude, not a genre, age group, or time period. What's interesting is trying to define the blues and punk in different ways. They are very close cousins. ~ Jack White,
372:Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement. ~ Dean Koontz,
373:Because in fantasy perhaps more than in any other genre, the character is rewarded for making the right choices and punished for making the bad.

Ask Boromir. ~ R A Salvatore,
374:Dire que j'ai gâché des années de ma vie, que j'ai voulu mourir, que j'ai eu mon plus grand amour, pour une femme qui ne me plaisait pas, qui n’était pas mon genre! ~ Marcel Proust,
375:I love the science-fiction genre because there's always so many endless possibilities! It's a limitless genre and can be fun playing around with otherworldly ideas. ~ Laura Mennell,
376:I seem to like playing with form, and the superhero genre has an awful lot of formula to it. It has a lot of formula to it that I don't think it should be limited to. ~ Kurt Busiek,
377:It's a cyclical thing. When they make one, everyone loves them. Different genres come around in succession. People always welcome the western. It's America's genre. ~ Robert Duvall,
378:Maybe I exclude myself from that genre by not getting dressed up often enough, by acting ghetto most of the time, and running around in sweats and Timberlands. ~ Michelle Rodriguez,
379:In every genre of biblical literature and every stage of biblical history, God is seen pouring out his grace on his people for the sake of his glory among all peoples. ~ David Platt,
380:Paul Cain is an early, influential figure in this genre, who is now quite hard to find even in used bookstores and libraries. His 1932 Fast One was a noir landmark; it ~ Nancy Pearl,
381:The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs, you have to choose your genre. ~ Robert Hass,
382:This is a tried and true genre directed by a guy who's famous for character work. This could take a genre picture and lift it and elevate it. That was my thinking. ~ Michael Chiklis,
383:I have my library separate from the family home, and every room is a different genre. The only room that I can guarantee I've read everything is the horror room. ~ Guillermo del Toro,
384:I have yet to find a genre of music I enjoy; it’s basically audible physics, waves and energized particles, and, like most sane people, I have no interest in physics. ~ Gail Honeyman,
385:I love the romantic comedy genre. It's a genre rich with many of the best movies ever made and I try to treat it with the respect that Shakespeare treated it with. ~ Nicholas Stoller,
386:I think people do sci-fi a huge disservice by lumping it as some sort of bizarre subculture genre when I think everybody's lives are impacted by sci-fi at some point. ~ Mark Sheppard,
387:Star Wars, the original movie, was all the various old genre of pictures: the swashbucklers, the war movies, all those things were put n there in a different look. ~ Bruce Boxleitner,
388:The horror genre really makes the reader feel, and usually that feeling is terror. In horror, the antagonist is every bit as—if not more—important than the protagonist. ~ Emlyn Chand,
389:As a genre, videogames take our minds on journeys, and we can control and experience them much more interactively than passively - especially when they are well-designed. ~ John Maeda,
390:I never paid attention when people said, "That's gotta be poetry. That's gotta be fiction," except when I was in a graduate program, and you had to claim your genre. ~ Sandra Cisneros,
391:I think I'm part of a generation of crime writers all of whom woke up independently and recoiled with horror at the fact that we'd chosen this very conservative genre. ~ Laura Lippman,
392:Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it. ~ Marilyn Hacker,
393:Je n'ai plus d'amis, je n'ai que des complices. En revanche, leur nombre a augmenté, ils sont le genre humain, vous le premier. Celui qui est là est toujours le premier. ~ Albert Camus,
394:Reality is a genre that seems to be here to stay. I don't know how many of the new shows will last, but the more competition you have, the harder that pie is to slice up. ~ Jeff Probst,
395:I think when you're on TV, once you become associated with one genre or the other, it's near impossible to break into the other one, even if you have experience with both. ~ Natalie Zea,
396:I write in different genres for different audiences because that's the vision I have for that story's journey, not because I want to write in a specific genre. - Kailin Gow ~ Kailin Gow,
397:The error in the art-genre of Opera consists herein: a Means of expression (Music) has been made the end, while the End of expression (the Drama) has been made a means. ~ Richard Wagner,
398:But the point is this: stories grow out of other stories, poems out of other poems. And they don’t have to stick to genre. Poems can learn from plays, songs from novels. ~ Thomas C Foster,
399:All fiction, whether straight or genre, whether literature or Literature, is a personal reinterpretation of its writers’ existence during the time the fiction was written. ~ William Gibson,
400:A pioneer in this genre [ writing about the refugee crisis] : the book A Seventh Man, by the great John Berger, decades ago evoked the lives of migrant workers in Europe. ~ Adam Hochschild,
401:I always wanted to get into the horror genre. I like scary movies. I want to go to the fan shows and sign posters with my head hanging by a thread like a B-movie actress. ~ Illeana Douglas,
402:My advice is to write about what you are interested in. If you read science fiction and fantasy, then write in that genre. If you read romance novels, then try writing one. ~ Michael Scott,
403:I was a 12 year old kid in Northern Idaho listening to Billie Holiday and Lena Horne and Sarah Vaughan and Nat King Cole. This whole genre of music is a part of who I am. ~ Cheyenne Jackson,
404:Nico s’avança. – J’ai communiqué avec les morts hier soir. Il pouvait balancer ce genre de phrases comme ça, aussi facilement qu’il aurait dit : J’ai reçu un texto d’un pote. ~ Rick Riordan,
405:Horror movies scare me. I don't really watch them. I'm not a big horror genre fan. I like certain classic horror - like 'Alien', 'Jaws', 'The Exorcist', stuff like that. ~ Katharine Isabelle,
406:I feel like movies should stick to a genre and give the audience what they want, and then surprise them with the unexpected, and not just do the same thing you've always seen. ~ Paula Patton,
407:We're all given a window of opportunity, I think all artists are, of any genre. A window when you're truly relevant, the spotlight's on you and people are watching what you do. ~ Eric Church,
408:At some point, you have an opportunity to not be a first-time filmmaker anymore. You can embrace the genre and show the world how you can tell stories on a bigger scale. ~ Alfonso Gomez Rejon,
409:Holy shit! That’s a vampire. He’s writing a vampire novel. And I thought, this is the most tired cliche that anybody could dredge up out of the genre, and he just made it jump. ~ Peter Straub,
410:I think that the celebrity memoir as a genre is looked upon as a lesser form. One of my missions as a ghostwriter has been to elevate that form. Maybe that sounds pretentious! ~ Hilary Liftin,
411:There's always stress involved in any genre or art form, there's always going to be a struggle. If there's no struggle, you wouldn't do anything. What are you going do? Retire? ~ Van Morrison,
412:The seven Bogs of Octava.” “Seven too? One for each genre Mr. Poe?” “Now you’re catching on. The realms recyclable. The energies of characters go there after their life is over. ~ Lucian Bane,
413:Americans have known about mounting inequality and king-sized Wall Street bonuses for years. But we also had an entire genre of journalism dedicated to brushing the problem off. ~ Thomas Frank,
414:I knew I wanted to play around with genre-esque imagery, and the identity theft stuff came in the middle, when I was figuring out how the characters were connected to those images. ~ Dan Chaon,
415:I'm not comfortable with categorizing my own work, but I don't mind if others talk about it in relation to genre as long as they don't try to hold it up to some genre standard. ~ Karin Tidbeck,
416:John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in many ways defines the spy genre; it introduces the grand theme of ferreting out the Russian agent high up in British intelligence. ~ Nancy Pearl,
417:Motion-capture is not a genre. Motion-capture is a tool and technique and what we tried to do was to really use both motion-capture and traditional animation to build a system. ~ Peter Jackson,
418:Whatever kind of story you're telling, whether it's a genre piece for a comic book or whatever it is, it has importance because it's all a metaphor for the existence of our being. ~ Seth Gabel,
419:[D]e vlakheid van iets wordt nooit bepaald door het genre. Evenmin als de complexiteit. Bepalend is slechts het talent van de kunstenaar.
(Zeepijn, p. 171, editie 1999) ~ Charlotte Mutsaers,
420:"Most of the adventure genre is about how there is some enemy that's lurking, and someone rises up to confront it and maintain order. There's no getting away from that story." ~ Jordan Peterson,
421:SF isn't a genre; SF is the matrix in which genres are embedded, and because the SF field is never going in any one direction at any one time, there is hardly a way to cut it off. ~ Larry Niven,
422:There's been so many different types of musicals and it's a funny genre because there's a fine line between clever and stupid. It really takes a genius to know how to do it. ~ Melissa Etheridge,
423:twenty years after McCauley’s effort, I concluded that it was time to prove, once and for all, that the horror and suspense genre is a serious literary one. I had other reasons ~ Al Sarrantonio,
424:When people say, Your music was the music of the Seventies, I say, So was discoteque. The Seventies was also the highest peak of heavy metal. Pick a genre - they were all alive. ~ Gerry Beckley,
425:In television, women can really run anything. It can be a comedy, it can be a drama, it can be genre, it can be anything. But in films, women are still getting to the top ~ Sarah Michelle Gellar,
426:It is a different genre - a show about something other than doctors, lawyers and cops. Teachers are something completely different. I think it makes for very interesting television ~ Chi McBride,
427:I've always been fascinated by horror films and genre films. And horror films harbored a fascination for me and always have been something I've wanted to watch and wanted to make. ~ Edgar Wright,
428:Powerpoint presentations are a kind of theater, a kind of augmented stand-up. Too often it's a boring and tedious genre, and audiences are subjected to the bad as well as the good. ~ David Byrne,
429:That sentence should give you a sense of the entire story: the character of the protagonist, the character of the antagonist, the conflict, the setting, the tone, the genre. ~ Alexandra Sokoloff,
430:For a writer, and particularly a writer of my genre, which is the fantastical, I think that it's to my advantage to feel remote from and disconnected from the world of deal making. ~ Clive Barker,
431:He [ the son]'s grown up listening to all types of music, and the natural form of rebellion is to find the one genre that maybe he hasn't listened to and to make that his thing. ~ Solange Knowles,
432:I feel like you should always be questioning the genre you're doing. If you're doing something that sounds like a lullaby, it can be good to make it about someone stalking someone. ~ Nellie McKay,
433:In the meantime [1965-67], [Bob] Dylan was again writing some of the best love songs in the genre, like "Visions of Johanna," "Just Like a Woman," and "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." ~ Bob Dylan,
434:"Most of the adventure genre is about how there is some enemy that's lurking, and someone rises up to confront it and maintain order. There's no getting away from that story." ~ Jordan B Peterson,
435:Sometime female characters, especially in the genre of something that people consider rom-com, make mistakes in a cute way or they're a mess in a way that's palatable. I like that. ~ Greta Gerwig,
436:When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation. ~ Jane McGonigal,
437:Being gone for so long and coming back into the game, I'm the type of person to reinvent myself pretty often and I can adapt to pretty much whatever genre is popping at the moment. ~ Tony Sunshine,
438:I'm happy to try any genre, from drama to comedy and anything in between. Although, to be fair, for most of my career, I've been at the mercy of what people are willing to put me in. ~ Chris Pratt,
439:I love superheroes and I love weird horror films... I could definitely feel that there was a lack of movies like The Martian being made: smart genre movies that can appeal to adults. ~ Drew Goddard,
440:I'm a fantasy writer. I don't do SF. This is important to me. If you're not clear on what genre you're in, everything gets muddled, and it's hard to know which rules you're breaking. ~ Lev Grossman,
441:I think, especially when you're on TV, once you become associated with one genre or the other, it's near impossible to break into the other one, even if you have experience with both. ~ Natalie Zea,
442:Ce sont les quatre avant-gardes du genre humain allant aux quatre points cardinaux du progrès, Diderot vers le beau, Turgot vers l'utile, Voltaire vers le vrai, Rousseau vers le juste. ~ Victor Hugo,
443:I always stay in the urban comedy genre because it just never gets old. It's one of those things that people watch, again and again. This is that kind of movie. It gives you longevity. ~ Terry Crews,
444:I'd like to do a number of films. Westerns. Genre pieces. Maybe another film about Italian Americans where they're not gangsters, just to prove that not all Italians are gangsters. ~ Martin Scorsese,
445:I grew up really loving horror movies and genre movies. I was a big fan of Universal Monsters movies, read Famous Monsters magazine. I built monster models and creature effects... ~ Gregory Nicotero,
446:It seems like the Western genre has crept out of its casings during the last few years, and expanded to include books and movies we wouldn't originally have thought of as westerns. ~ Elizabeth Crook,
447:To be completely honest, I just like whatever tells a good story. Put me in whatever setting, scenario, genre. If you're telling a good story, it's great and it's fun to get caught up in. ~ Drew Roy,
448:I don't tend to say it's time for one of this or that genre. Things flow to you in a strange way, and why you bump into a certain kind of thing in one moment is...it's hard to explain. ~ Edward Norton,
449:I have never followed what people say it is 'fashionable'. I think that a woman must wear what fits her. That is why I created a style appropriated to my type and my artistical genre. ~ Carmen Miranda,
450:Some of my other stories are talked about as fantasy, some as horror, and some aren't talked about as genre at all. And the same story will be labeled differently depending on country. ~ Karin Tidbeck,
451:Usually with this genre the first thing that happens is a good fight sequence to show that you're in good hands. So we broke that rule. I think a lot of that comes from the western audience. ~ Ang Lee,
452:All I look for is good quality stuff. Whatever I read, if I like it, then I want to do it. It's as simple as that. I don't have a master plan of, "I should do this genre, and then this." ~ Karen Gillan,
453:Andrew Vachss, the best noir-ey writer in the history of the genre, called cats the lap dancers of the animal world. Give them attention, they’re there. Stop, they’re outta there. ~ MaryJanice Davidson,
454:Bunglers and pedants judge art according to genre; they approve of this and dismiss that genre, but instead of genres, the open-minded connoisseur appreciates only individual works. ~ Franz Grillparzer,
455:I could not flourish in the Hollywood system because the first thing spoken about is "What genre is it?" and "Who's it for?" It's a very strange question to me; it's for human beings. ~ Conor McPherson,
456:I don't stay in the genre because I just like all stories that have a smart hook in them and I can find a comic way through if it's a comedy or a suspenseful way through it if it's a drama. ~ Jay Roach,
457:I feel quite sad for the young musicians coming up because they may never get to pay their rent properly. It doesn't matter what the genre; nowadays, it's so much harder than it ever was. ~ Bryan Adams,
458:I like being able to do anything. I think that's healthy, doing anything and everything, rather than just getting completely obsessed with one particular genre or particular kind of work. ~ Dave McKean,
459:So, fuck ’em, we say. Fuck the mundane of Mainstream, the elitists of Literature. We’re GENRE FICTION and proud of it, proud to wear that brand painted on the backs of our biker’s jackets. ~ Hal Duncan,
460:I do think, even though I've made these genre movies, there's what happens in the movie and then there's what the movie's about. And for me, what the movie's about is so much more interesting. ~ Ti West,
461:What interests me about genre is that the public connects immediately with it, it has certain rules, certain codes the audience recognizes. I can use that to create something very big. ~ Jacques Audiard,
462:Chick Lit uses humor to reflect life back to us. It's a very comforting genre, and it's the first time our generation has had a voice. It's a very important genre for all of those reasons. ~ Marian Keyes,
463:I am a big fan of vampires. I've always been obsessed with the genre, and the beautiful romanticism and erotic kind of nature of the immortal being, the undead who lives on human blood. ~ Alex O Loughlin,
464:Il n'est pas du genre loquace mais il m'a raconté qu'il avait grandi dans le coin. J'imagine que le cœur et l'esprit aspirent à retrouver les chemins de l'enfance quand on vieillit. ~ Yrsa Sigur ard ttir,
465:I've never been very attached to genre labels and never set out intentionally to write historic fiction. Besides, what you consider historic depends on how far back your memory extends. ~ Charles Frazier,
466:My favorite kinds of stories are the ones that have these big crazy genre hijinks and then a real honest, meaty, emotional story where we're watching a character grapple with some real things. ~ Greg Pak,
467:I just have more fun when I get to try new things - and the action film genre has kind of painted itself into a corner, copied itself so many times and it has basically run out of bad buys. ~ Bruce Willis,
468:I've just looked for ideas and great characters that I relate to and that I think I can offer something to the audience, and I no longer look at them as experiments or genre exercises at all. ~ Ron Howard,
469:Looking back, it's funny how the lighter family-friendly version of these classic Universal movie monsters that were satirized in The Munsters seduced me like a gateway drug into the genre. ~ Bryan Fuller,
470:I haven't seen a lot of screwball comedies, and I don't think of myself as loving the genre. To me it sounds like, okay, you're going to be in a lot of crazy situations that are unbelievable. ~ Owen Wilson,
471:In the meantime [1963-65], [Bob] Dylan was writing some of the best love songs in the genre, like "Girl From the North Country," "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," and "It Ain't Me, Babe." ~ Jay Michaelson,
472:Science fiction as a genre has the benefit of being able to act as parable, to set up a story at a remove so you can make a real-world point without people throwing up a wall in front of it. ~ Joe Haldeman,
473:Yes, of course, the whole idea is utterly inane, but to let its predictable inanities blind you to its truly fabulous and breathtaking aspects is to do both oneself and the genre a disservice. ~ Alan Moore,
474:As long as the characterisation is strong, and the writing is fresh and truthful instead of lazy or clichéd, it doesn’t matter what genre your book falls into: good writing is good writing. ~ Thomas Mogford,
475:A studio session ... provides the greatest chance for control. Even though there is total freedom, I still dislike studio photography and the contrived images that usually stem from this genre. ~ Eve Arnold,
476: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. ~ Neil Gaiman,
477:The impulse to explain is the Achilles’ heel of all genre work, and the most sophisticated artists within every genre know better than to expose their worlds to the sharp knife of intellection. ~ Tom Bissell,
478:To me some of the funniest movies would be probably categorized in the dramatic genre, and likewise some of the most dramatic films, or films that have the most dramatic moments, are in comedies. ~ Paul Rudd,
479:about them makes them so different from the others? Is it genre? Target audience? Tone? By thinking about how these ideas differ, it will be easier to determine how the other ideas are the same. ~ Emlyn Chand,
480:A lot of times, actors and directors don't want to repeat something. I don't think we're repeating something, but I think there's certainly a genre that we're in, and we're happy to embrace it. ~ Skylar Astin,
481:I have been a reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy for a long time, since I was 11 or 12 I think, so I understand it and I'm not at all surprised that readers of the genre might enjoy my books. ~ Jean M Auel,
482:I just love music, and I'm not as genre specific as most songwriters. A lot of my buddies just listen to country, or just Americana, or whatever their style is, and I just listen to everything. ~ Kevin Fowler,
483:I read nonfiction almost exclusively - both for research and also for pleasure. When I read fiction, it's almost always in the thriller genre, and it needs to rivet me in the opening few chapters. ~ Dan Brown,
484:My dad brings a deep-seated knowledge of the British folk genre, and a lot of my love for guitar playing comes from learning from him and his influences, which eventually became my influences. ~ Joel Plaskett,
485:Parodies are hard to do well, as is shown by the mediocrity of so many recent attempts. No matter how ripe a genre is for satirizing, unless you know how to do it, there are no guarantees. ~ James Berardinelli,
486:Good writing is good writing no matter what genre you're writing in, and I believe that there are only a handful of fundamental craft tools that are essential for any genre-including nonfiction. ~ Georgia Heard,
487:how to think in the right genre?” “We already do it, every day. We tell ourselves what kind of story we’re in, and we’re often wrong, because life is mostly every genre, sometimes at once. ~ Michael R Underwood,
488:In horror, character development is often pushed aside in favor of the shock value. The best genre movies to me are movies like The Shining. You had a connection to the characters in that film. ~ Joshua Leonard,
489:in literature—no matter the genre—accomplishes this one thing for those readers who give themselves over to it. It takes them on a journey through time and space and includes them in the story. ~ David Gatewood,
490:Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,
491:I love music; I was never the type of singer to say, "This is my specific genre, or I only sing R&B music." I feel like as a singer, you should be limitless and you shouldn't be stuck in a box. ~ Heather Headley,
492:We believed even literary scholars didn’t truly understand Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. They thought it was simply a new type of fantasy novel, an accomplishment in the literary nonsense genre. ~ A G Riddle,
493:Im not really devoted or specified towards any specific genre at all. I really like it all. Theres good storytelling in all the genres, you know. I just want to tell good stories and do good work. ~ Angela Bettis,
494:I want everything, no matter what concept or genre, to feel real, because it is real. I want to keep making real music, I hope people remember me for that, that's a good thing to be remembered for. ~ Alessia Cara,
495:When I was in college, I had a friend who was an artist and her theory was that all the best art in the world is funny/sad. That was her favorite genre. Funny/sad are probably my two favorite tones. ~ Micah Perks,
496:In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre; they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc. ~ Juan Goytisolo,
497:I think the industry is oblivious to the fact that most people listen to all kinds of stuff. I personally don't know of anyone who listens to only one genre of music. It's vanity because no one does. ~ Keith Urban,
498:Patrick Rothfuss gives us a fabulous debut, standing firmly on the main stage of the fantasy genre and needing no warm-up act. Jordan and Goodkind must be looking nervously over their shoulders! ~ Kevin J Anderson,
499:The prose of Joe Pulver can take its place with that of the masters of our genre – E.A. Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti – while his imaginative reach is something uniquely his own. ~ S T Joshi,
500:The term 'genre' eventually becomes pejorative because you're referring to something that's so codified and ritualised that it ceases to have the power and meaning it had when it first started. ~ Christopher Nolan,
501:I'm a real gangster rapper and I'm a rapper. I just think my music takes different directions. I don't think you can pigeon hole me in one genre. I'm probably the most versatile in the game, period. ~ Freddie Gibbs,
502:I'm not coming from film school. I learned cinema in the cinema watching films, so you always have a curiosity. I say, 'Well, what if I make a film in this genre? What if I make this film like this?' ~ Wong Kar wai,
503:The Bee Gees were always heavily influenced by black music. As a songwriter, it's never been difficult to pick up on the changing styles of music out there, and soul has always been my favourite genre. ~ Robin Gibb,
504:I am a voracious reader myself. I don't stick to one genre. My only criteria is that it's a good story. I try to bring that to my work because I think people can read your excitement about a story. ~ Karin Slaughter,
505:If you want to successfully write to market, you need the right tropes, and you need to employ them like a master. Write great characters that match your genre, and your readers will follow you for life. ~ Chris Fox,
506:I've always been a prog rock fanatic, even before Vengeance. However I think I started to love the genre with Pink Floyd, yeah. I love them from the very beginning, also the Syd Barrett era. ~ Arjen Anthony Lucassen,
507:Fantasy gets a mixed reception - a lot of fantasy is formulaic but most of the award-winning fantasy on the contrary tends to be the stuff at the edges of the genre, rather than swimming in the middle. ~ Graham Joyce,
508:I found out about college radio and this whole noise genre blew me away. When I saw that guys could just get up there and have no traditional music ability and be in a band, it was really appealing to me. ~ Girl Talk,
509:I have really diverse tastes, which can be problematic sometimes, but it's good because it means I'm always listening to as much music as possible. I love listening to music, whatever genre it is. ~ Richard Fleeshman,
510:Imagine my delight and awe when I discovered such a thing was a real genre - contemporary fantasy or urban fantasy. It was like having my birthday twice in one week and cookie dough for breakfast. ~ Maggie Stiefvater,
511:Skyline is an alien invasion film that really takes an interesting look at the genre. The writers did an amazing job of creating a new take at how life from other planets come and plan to invade Earth. ~ Eric Balfour,
512:Long gone are the days of the stylised old James Bond films with Roger Moore karate chopping his way through the bad guys - audiences are not going to buy it anymore. The genre has got quite serious now. ~ Adam Rayner,
513:Rather than thinking in terms of a specific genre or specific kind of thing, I hope I can just stay relatively small and keep making my movies. If I can keep writing them and making them, I'll be happy. ~ Rian Johnson,
514:The best memoirs, to my mind, are those reaching far enough beyond an author's life that they leave the genre altogether, like an innocent prisoner, they succeed when they escape confinement. ~ William Least Heat Moon,
515:The talk show, as a genre, has been in decline for a while. It started with Jerry Springer, when the talk shows suffered a metamorphosis, going from the real and social issues to the hair-raising. ~ Cristina Saralegui,
516:Year after year, romance proves to be one of the most popular genres among readers, and for good reason. This genre lets the reader fall in love alongside its protagonists. Who doesn’t love that feeling? ~ Emlyn Chand,
517:I don't want to just make relationship movies. I would love to do whatever feels like it's important and timely and needs to be told. It doesn't matter what genre. It doesn't have to just be relationships. ~ Daryl Wein,
518:My feeling of the whole genre, of the terror tale, is this: The best thing that you can do for the readers in this field is to terrify them. It is something that is intellectual, it happens in your mind. ~ Stephen King,
519:Personally, I’d like to see the word genre taken out back and shot, a bullet in the back of its head, if it’s going to be so overloaded with meanings it’s just gibberish skewed to self-serving doublethink. ~ Hal Duncan,
520:The problem is that horror is not a genre, it is an emotion. Horror is not a kind of fiction. It's a progressive form of fiction that continually evolves to meet the fears and anxieties of its times. ~ Douglas E Winter,
521:The thing that makes a great genre movie is one that's not just entertainment, not just horror or sci-fi or whatever. The ones I love are the genre pictures with some subversive message underlying it all. ~ Ethan Hawke,
522:I love the unexpected and I think that's why documentary is an attractive genre to me because you don't know where it's going to go, so I tend to involve that as much as possible in the production process. ~ Seth Gordon,
523:You should never be afraid to be yourself, under any circumstances. The genre of cool is fleeting. What's cool today will not be cool a year from now. If you're yourself, you'll be at peace with yourself. ~ Jaleel White,
524:I admire Chris Martin. Coldplay have made some wonderful records for the genre they're involved in, but I would consider them to be more of a pop act. The music is much more cerebral than it is animalistic. ~ Ian Astbury,
525:I don't want to get locked into any one type of genre. I just want to constantly be working with amazing directors and amazing actors, and just always pushing the envelope on what I can do, as an actor. ~ Nico Tortorella,
526:I had never really done something that was more of a horror film, and its funny, because those are the kind of movies that I like probably more than any other genre. The script had images in it that I liked. ~ Tim Burton,
527:Something like 'Alien,' that was not so easy. If there's any genre I wouldn't mind not having to do anymore, it would be science fiction. It's just all to do with the toys, and there's so much hanging around. ~ John Hurt,
528:There are all the offsprings of people who are influenced by punk. It sounds completely different - but it's still rock 'n' roll. When hip-hop came on the scene, it was the last legitimate creation of a new genre. ~ El P,
529:I may be the person who put "dieselpunk" into the conversation. I have always been a reader who reads in a really broad way. I read genre writers and I read literary fiction and I read books by dead people. ~ Emily Barton,
530:I'm not fixed in any genre. I love all kinds of films. The essential thing is; you have to have good material. If you have the filmmaker, and the material, and the script is good, you can start from there. ~ Jason Statham,
531:What scares me is what scares you. We’re all afraid of the same things. That’s why horror is such a powerful genre. All you have to do is ask yourself what frightens you and you’ll know what frightens me. ~ John Carpenter,
532:Death metal uses a lot of white face paint and black hair dye to make its point. I quite enjoy this genre for its intensity, extremism and underlying irony: You have to be alive to play it and listen to it. ~ Henry Rollins,
533:I've always been sort of addicted to genre-jumping. I've never been in the mood to do the same thing I did last time. Hence, me going from 'Big Love' to romantic comedy, to period film I can't sit still. ~ Ginnifer Goodwin,
534:I've always found that whatever you say about indie rock, it is the most inclusive genre or title for anything. It doesn't pin you down too much, like other labels would. It's just newer, it has less baggage. ~ Andrew Bird,
535:When I speak of poetry I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality. So poetry becomes a philosophy to guide a man throughout his life. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky,
536:With horror movies, a bigger budget is actually your enemy. You want to feel the rough edges, the handmade quality to good horror films. Its a genre that benefits from not having everything at your disposal. ~ Drew Goddard,
537:I've done a lot of sci-fi, so I was a little hesitant because you get pigeonholed into that genre and world. But at the same time, I love sci-fi because the women are so strong and independent and smart. ~ Laura Vandervoort,
538:There is nothing I can't do writing in Fantasy. I can have romance, I can have mystery, I can have drama, I can have good characters - I can have everything you can do in any other genre... plus a dragon. ~ Patrick Rothfuss,
539:I feel like a lot of the singer-songwriters in my genre and in my generation have gotten more and more snooty about covering other people's songs. They believe that creativity is the intersect of expression. ~ Brandi Carlile,
540:I never pick a film based on the genre; I choose the characters I play. I will think it through thoroughly - whether I am the best person to play the character, able to excel in it and match with the other characters. ~ Rain,
541:I think I'm sort of blind to genre. As long as it has a sort of honesty about it, which I think you'll hear in whatever music you respond to, then I think it doesn't need to be called anything particularly. ~ Lianne La Havas,
542:What that means initially is that you have alot of products that are only slightly better games in the same genre on another machine - and the titles that really take advantage of the machine come along later. ~ Trip Hawkins,
543:Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers. ~ W H Auden,
544:As actors, we have that in common that we go for slightly out-of-the-box or genre stuff. They're great when they work, but they don't always work. Genre stuff is really hard to pull off, as any fans of it know. ~ Jason O Mara,
545:I don't care for horror and fantasy films. I never go to see them in the theater. I know I've played in many of them, but I didn't do them because of their genre - I did them just because I loved their scripts. ~ Peter Weller,
546:I listen to the Mars Volta and Fiona Apple every day. I feel if you do write music, you write what you listen to, and you couldn't possibly write in another genre. So those are the two that I usually use. ~ Christian Serratos,
547:There's always gonna be criticisms, no matter what movie you do, no matter what. You can't please everybody, and it doesn't matter what the genre is. There's always gonna be a positive to a negative comment. ~ Sam Worthington,
548:You like almost every genre, but you’re a binge genre reader. When you’re on a science-fiction kick, you stay with sci-fi for weeks. Then, all of a sudden, you’ll drop that genre and turn to historical fiction. ~ Ellery Adams,
549:Blogging has helped create an expanded awareness of the creative nonfiction genre, generally. But I suspect many bloggers continue to be unaware that they are (or have the potential to be) "literary" or "artful." ~ Lee Gutkind,
550:I like to use the leverage and distance genre offers to try to get into the meat of our fractured modern moment, when the real stuff happening outside our windows is big and strange and world-shaking and weird. ~ Max Gladstone,
551:It's chick flick disguised as a sword-and-sorcery picture. The only genre film with less balls is probably... freakin' Legend. Anyone who actually enjoys Ladyhawke is a bona fide USDA-choice pussy! ~ Ernest Cline,
552:I do like the idea of doing something different, maybe doing something that's more like a genre film. And there are certain actors that I'd like to work with that would go along with working with a bigger budget. ~ Joe Swanberg,
553:It was at our library that I found Nancy Drew and fell in love with the genre. I've been grateful ever since for those tolerant, book-loving librarians who allowed a child like me to read what I wanted to read. ~ Nancy Pickard,
554:I think mystery writers and thriller writers - whatever genre you want to call it - are taking on some of the biggest, most interesting kind of socioeconomic issues around in a really interesting, compelling way. ~ Gillian Flynn,
555:I think the genre of comics sometimes overtakes the medium, and people assume that they are kind of frivolous. If you have a good, strong story teller, they can be as affecting as any character in literature. Period. ~ Chip Kidd,
556:Painting figures is the hardest, certainly the most taxing genre, and you have to be the most on your game. If you have significant drawing problems, the figure will fall apart and it will read wrong emotionally. ~ Jacob Collins,
557:Science fiction is a literature that belongs to all humankind. It portrays events of interest to all of humanity, and thus science fiction should be the literary genre most accessible to readers of different nations. ~ Liu Cixin,
558:This is also why the (auto)biography so poorly encapsulates a person's life. As we saw in the previous step, it is far too linear and individualistic a genre to portray real life in all its dazzling complexity. ~ Svend Brinkmann,
559:I don't think I make genre films. I think studios try to sell films as genres because they know how to do that. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't know what I make. It's sort of a pot roast, all my films. ~ Darren Aronofsky,
560:I never actually wanted to write horror, oddly enough. It was a kind of misnomer, because I didn't ever actually write horror in the sense of the genre known for it. It was more a type of pigeon-holing in bookshops. ~ Peter James,
561:To think of writing poetry as a "career" is not only ridiculous, it's dangerous. To the imagination. To the way one thinks of art. The reason poetry as a genre is so special is because it cannot be made a commodity. ~ Cate Marvin,
562:I'm a storyteller, and there's some genres I like. I don't think I'm ever going to do science fiction, but I want to do a musical one day. I want to tell stories, I don't really try to get boxed in by a specific genre. ~ Spike Lee,
563:I'm not really much of a genre guy. I think that audiences don't need that anymore where you just need a very specific genre. Audiences are very sophisticated, and as long as it's fun, it's okay and entertaining. ~ Natalie Portman,
564:They [comic books] are not a genre, they are not something to get hot and cold from one year to the next, they're the exact same thing as books and plays: they are a source of great stories and colorful characters. ~ Michael Uslan,
565:Zachary Jernigan's short stories are in deep conversation with the history of the genre while maintaining a thoroughly modern sensibility. Here’s a new writer who has found his voice. Listen to him and enjoy! ~ James Patrick Kelly,
566:Everybody always talks about the science fiction genre, in particular, which always makes me think about people in spaceships. I can appreciate that, but that's not really where I think my dramatist aspect lies. ~ Quentin Tarantino,
567:Le duc finit son verre, puis énonça cette remarque :
— Ce qui me plaît dans l’essence de fenouil, c’est qu’il n’y a aucun autre mot qui rime avec. Avec fenouil.
— À moins qu’on ne change de genre, dit Lalix. ~ Raymond Queneau,
568:One of the things that separates a good genre movie from a bad genre movie, I always think, ironically, is when you care about the people. The dime a dozen ones are where you don't have any awareness of the character. ~ Ethan Hawke,
569:The coming-of-age story has sort of become a joke. It's something to capitalize on, and that is painful because when you are coming of age - when you are going through something like that - the genre is so meaningful. ~ Mae Whitman,
570:The novel is a hybrid genre and a large part of its charm arises from the alluvial nature of its materials. There is nothing that doesn't suit a novelist in action, when he's in the course of writing his novel. ~ Enrique Vila Matas,
571:Maybe I have a one-track mind, but the best writers and thinkers are focusing on nonfiction these days; this is the genre where a writer can make a mark and change an aspect of the world - much more so than in fiction. ~ Lee Gutkind,
572:My favourite genre lies inside myself, and as I follow my favourite stories, characters and images, it sums up to a certain genre. So at times even I have to try to guess which genre a film will be after I've made it. ~ Bong Joon ho,
573:Rap is the number one most influential thing, it's the only genre that really strikes a chord. When you sing, you feel a certain way and it makes you feel good, but when you rap, it just strikes a chord a whole different way. ~ Tyga,
574:The prejudice is still there, but it's breaking down. You have writers like Michael Chabon and The Yiddish Policemen's Union. He's a writer who's determined to break down genre barriers. He's done amazing things. ~ George R R Martin,
575:Well, you always worry about being pin holed. I haven't been yet. You always worry about that, no matter which genre you do. Luckily for me so far, every time I've done a movie it's been a completely different genre. ~ Sylvain White,
576:Composing is what I love most from what I do. Each genre has a unique expression that you cannot supplant with another. All the records co-inspire each other though they are not tied conceptually in any way to another. ~ Serj Tankian,
577:No matter what I put out, no matter what genre - because I feel like I'm going to experiment with everything - I hope people will see that it's true to me, that it's honest, and nobody ever thinks that I'm inauthentic. ~ Alessia Cara,
578:Some of my favorite artists are Jason Mraz, Eric Hutchinson, Ben Folds, Bruno Mars, Mumford and Sons, Maroon 5 - their vibe is slightly different from all the pop stuff on 'Glee,' although some do fall into that genre. ~ Grant Gustin,
579:When I finally got tired of arguing with her and decided to write a novel as if I was some kind of formulaic, genre writing drone, just to prove to her how awful it would be, I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files. ~ Jim Butcher,
580:I don't have a favorite genre. I mean, I always sort of base it on instinct. And it does seem to be that after I finish something that is very dramatic, I end up inevitably wanting to do a comedy or something like that. ~ Carla Gugino,
581:It's difficult to make the interesting feature films that don't fit easily into a genre, even on modest budgets. It's tough to get those films made, but I'd rather try to get those films made than compromise too much. ~ Julian Jarrold,
582:To be able to explore the genre of the musical is nice. It was great to be able to sing professionally, for the first time, and dance, which was something that I did growing up, but I had not done for many, many years. ~ Penelope Cruz,
583:And of course, if they do recognize that they are living through a historical crisis, it’s often too late—because, like it or not, the primary way that ordinary people create this distinct genre of history is by dying. ~ Steven Johnson,
584:— Bon, alors quel genre de chose t'apaise ?
[…]
— Tuer des démons. Une belle tuerie bien propre, ça me relaxe toujours. Quand ça tourne à la boucherie c'est plus embêtant, parce qu'il faut nettoyer après… — Jace ~ Cassandra Clare,
585:Historically, tantra denotes a particular style or genre of spiritual teachings beginning to achieve prominence in India about fifteen-hundred years ago—teachings that affirm the continuity between Spirit and matter. ~ Georg Feuerstein,
586:The great thing about sci-fi is that the fans and the audience are unlike any other genre out there. They are constantly looking for great content and good stuff. They don't care where it comes from, they'll latch onto it. ~ Mike Vogel,
587:The idea of doing a children's film is different, but quite honestly I like doing anything - any genre. I've only made one Western, which was 'Three Amigos,' but I would love to make a serious Western. I'm just wide open. ~ John Landis,
588:My first book was a historical novel. I started writing in 1974. In those days, historical novels meant ladies with swelling bosoms on the cover. Basically, it meant historical romance. It was not respectable as a genre. ~ Hilary Mantel,
589:There cannot exist in the future an economy which is still mercantile but which isn't capitalist anymore. Before capitalism there were economies which were partially mercantile, but capitalism is the last of this genre. ~ Amadeo Bordiga,
590:Unless a Western's made money - doesn't matter who made the money, doesn't matter what the subject is - if the last one didn't make any money, you can't make another one for a four-year period. Westerns more than any genre. ~ Val Kilmer,
591:As far as politically how country music goes, it's true that it's regarded from a distance as a genre of music that at different times, the more right elements of the political spectrum have claimed for their own. ~ Mary Chapin Carpenter,
592:Brainstormed and borrowed eight story ideas—not all of which you got to keep Used author research methods to define your ideal reader, and then printed out a photo to represent that reader Identified your genre(s) and style ~ Emlyn Chand,
593:I do teach fiction and non-fiction, and usually I'm interested in works that confuse genre, but I'm very new to teaching creative writing, I don't have an MFA, or a PhD, I tend to approach it just through my own practice. ~ Kate Zambreno,
594:I do think that once a horror genre is commonly parodied in other movies it sort kills that genre or that specific take on that genre. Once it sort of becomes a joke in and of itself, so you have to push and find something new. ~ Roy Lee,
595:If the fidelity [ in a book] isn't maintained, the reader will think your structure is extraneous, or superficial, or that you're trying to curry favor, or live up to the expectations of some sort of genre or structure. ~ David Bezmozgis,
596:I later spent a year studying Finnegans Wake with Norman O. Brown, an exercise in masturbatory obscurantism that Bryan would never have undertaken—and he had an eye for genre fiction, including westerns, that I lacked. ~ William Finnegan,
597:I'm not a fan of any genre but am a fan of movies that are intelligent and/or funny. That goes across all genres: a horror movie, a zombie movie, alien invaders, chick flick, or raunchy comedy. If it's well done, I'm a fan. ~ J K Simmons,
598:When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. However beautiful it looked, it needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable. ~ Mark Haddon,
599:As for the author, he is profoundly unaware of what the classical or romantic genre might consist of.... In literature, as in allthings, there is only the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false. ~ Victor Hugo,
600:Now, movies that postdate Hitch: The Vanishing, with its sucker-punch finale. Frantic, Polanski’s ode to the master. Side Effects, which begins as a Big Pharma screed before slithering like an eel into another genre altogether. ~ A J Finn,
601:That's how it always is with me: the thing that sets me down to start writing is usually not what I end up doing. Because, as much as I love genre, and I try to deliver the goods, I go off from it. I go do my own thing. ~ Quentin Tarantino,
602:There are no requirements when you're using a particular genre. It's not like the genre is your boss and you have to do what it says. You can make use of the genre any way you want to, as long as you can make it work. ~ Charlie Jane Anders,
603:I appreciate what others have done in the past especially for my genre, and my style of singing. And they sure put a footprint - you know, they got the foot in the door, but I'm going to put my foot straight through the door. ~ James Durbin,
604:I don't gravitate toward any particular genre. I like to do things that interest me, regardless of genre. I've had a blast doing Cosmos, and I'm said that it's coming to an end. I would like to do something else like that. ~ Seth MacFarlane,
605:I'm convinced Mr. Reagan would never be elected- I don't think his views are held by a majority of the American people...it's the Republican party that's going to be committing suicide by nominating candidates of that genre. ~ John Anderson,
606:I'm not so arrogant to consider mine the only legitimate art form. I can't in one breath make a fuss about someone compartmentalizing music into genre and then in the next accuse advertising and short film of not being art. ~ Brandi Carlile,
607:It doesn't matter to me whether I go back to outer space or not [while acting]. The job's the same and I don't have any sort of genre preferences. I'm looking for a good story and a good character, whether earthbound or not. ~ Harrison Ford,
608:I've never been able to control a first-person shooter, but as soon as I used the Revolution controller, I found it very easy to control the game. So, I think that's a genre that's particularly well suited for the controller. ~ Satoru Iwata,
609:On the first movie we got good reviews, but we were still dealing with genre stuff. It's going away. Judge the movie - is it a good one or a bad one? We know we made a great movie and it's being judged for just being a good film. ~ Avi Arad,
610:We can study files for decades, but every so often we are tempted to throw up our hands and declare that history is merely another literary genre: the past is autobiographical fiction pretending to be a parliamentary report. ~ Julian Barnes,
611:God the father, and even more often the devil himself, appears at times in the place of fate in the modern tragedy. Why is it thatthis has not induced any scholar to develop a theory of the diabolical genre? ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel,
612:I wasn't a big science fiction aficionado, there were a few films like 2001 or Blade Runner that were favorites of mine, but since I started this series I have gained more respect for the genre and become more of a fan myself. ~ Joe Flanigan,
613:Labels only confuse people. The smarter people recognize artists who transcend categories. But I always try to entertain. It's in my nature; writers are born to entertain. If that means working ostensibly within a genre, fine. ~ John Shirley,
614:Whatever the genre of film you're doing and whatever the source material is, you have to adapt to the different genre, but it's the same work, as an actor. You're just trying to ground it in reality and find your truth in it. ~ Ben Schnetzer,
615:'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both. ~ Junot Diaz,
616:Fantasy is a genre that allows me to create anything I want. That, in turn, allows me to explore any sort of idea I'm curious about. I love it because Fantasy is a genre that asks, "What if...?" That's my favorite question. ~ Patrick Rothfuss,
617:I really like the old stuff that I cut my musical teeth on, and I loved it when the industry was just like that, without really a genre. Today, country radio's more aimed at a demographic than a genre. It just softens everything. ~ Gary Allan,
618:Lui, il n'avait jamais vu ce que les autres trouvaient de bien à son visage. Trop maigre, trop tordu, pas assez pur à son goût. En aucune façon il ne serait tombé amoureux d'un type dans son genre. Mais les autres, oui, souvent. ~ Fred Vargas,
619:Poetry, I'm returning to it, never leaves me. It's my genre completely. In poetry I contemplate myself exuberantly. It's my unique strength. Force of gravity, electric and magnetic energy; in my own way, to make a synthesis. ~ Nicole Brossard,
620:Though poor, he had succeeded in gathering together, through patience, self-denial, and time, a valuable collection of rare volumes of every genre. He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two. ~ Victor Hugo,
621:Mystery, investigation, false leads, solution - we associate that structure with genre fiction, but it exists in our real lives, too. There's no reason why literary fiction shouldn't be able to acknowledge that and make it fresh. ~ Ned Beauman,
622:No matter what genre of music you play when you rack up a couple years of experience, you have your own point of view no matter who it is that is coming in front of you whether it's a pop artist or a country artist. Whoever. ~ Harry Connick Jr,
623:There can be no such thing as “philosophical horror”, at least as a premeditated genre. Why? Because philosophy implies enquiry, reflection and an open mind, whereas the genre of horror demands certain conclusions in advance. ~ Quentin S Crisp,
624:Be true to what you want to say, or whatever style it is that you've chosen or genre you've chosen. Do it well! My criteria always has been that the piece must stand the chance of succeeding on the level it's intended to succeed on. ~ John Hurt,
625:[Brion calls his working relationship with West a natural fit.] His knowledge and understanding of records across the board is great, ... That's the reason why we got along: We don't see music as something that happens in one genre. ~ Jon Brion,
626:Horror has been a genre since the beginning of cinema, all the way back to the days of silent films. I don't think it will ever go away because it's so universal. Humor doesn't always travel to other countries, but horror does. ~ John Carpenter,
627:I have a complex feeling about genre. I love it, but I hate it at the same time. I have the urge to make audiences thrill with the excitement of a genre, but I also try to betray and destroy the expectations placed on that genre. ~ Bong Joon ho,
628:I just watched so many Westerns as a kid that you end up using archetypes and sort of tropes of that genre, because there's a language there and you can twist it and turn it on its head or play to it or go sideways at any time. ~ Gore Verbinski,
629:I never wanted to stay in one genre; I never wanted to be pigeon-holed or defined as the actor who only worked in one genre. I want to be able to work in all different genres. For me it's fun, and that's how I grow as an actor. ~ Dwayne Johnson,
630:I think horror can and should be classy. I enjoy seeing it raised up not lowered down to the lowest common denominator.
There's prejudice against the horror genre and I think sometimes that's the fault of the authors involved. ~ Carole Gill,
631:No matter what the genre, I want to see me and my friends. I want to see reality. I want to see what we're really like. I loved 'Bridesmaids'. I thought it was the most honest portrayal of female friendship in such a long time. ~ Drew Barrymore,
632:Serial Killer Week got off to an inauspicious start when the opening wine and bean evening was invaded by a former prisoner who misinterpreted the poster, but he was at least able to give us the professional's view of the genre. ~ Colin Bateman,
633:The Mirror Empire is the most original fantasy I've read in a long time, set in a world full of new ideas, expanding the horizons of the genre. A complex and intricate book full of elegant ideas and finely-drawn characters. ~ Adrian Tchaikovsky,
634:We all have our genre. Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as if in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories. ~ Daniel Kahneman,
635:When I first put out music, people didn't know what I looked like. They called it a new type of something, they couldn't put a genre on it - it was where indie and urban kind of meet in the middle. I thought that was quite exciting. ~ FKA twigs,
636:I don't know who made up this sort of greatest-hits list for artists. If one artist isn't moving forward anymore, then it's assumed another one is going to take their place. With Francis Bacon's death, a whole genre of art died. ~ Georg Baselitz,
637:I'm grateful when anybody can start to have his or her limited perception of the genre open up a little bit. There's a lot of great music in the country genre that doesn't get heard because people say, 'Well, I don't like country.' ~ Keith Urban,
638:I've been lucky to have played a lot of women, over the years, especially in the sci-fi genre. All of them are special to me, in different ways, and I hate comparing them because it's like comparing people. They're different. ~ Laura Vandervoort,
639:Der Autor muß eine Fülle von Varitionen über das ausgewählte Thema bieten, die Entscheidungsmöglichkeiten des Lesers vervielfachen und den Stil mit dem Stil selbst hintergehen, indem er das Genre und die Distanz ständig wechselt. ~ Carlos Fuentes,
640:Hip-hop wasn't actually the genre that made me want to make sound, and I couldn't actually really pinpoint what genre it was. Growing up, my favorite music was my parents' music, and eventually I started to develop some taste of my own. ~ Grieves,
641:If a show is good, it helps people learn about themselves, in some way and in some function. Whatever the genre is, if it's executed well, audiences grow and learn from it, and that's where their passion and enthusiasm comes from. ~ Matthew Davis,
642:My dream is to be Endora in Bewitched. That's the part I want to do. I want to do a fabulous old woman. I want to be Maggie Smith someday. Not exactly like her, but that genre. I like that kind of humor - sophisticated, vain stuff. ~ Jackee Harry,
643:The safest genre is the horror film. But the most unsafe - the most dangerous - is comedy. Because even if your horror film isn't very good, you'll get a few screams and you're okay. With a comedy, if they don't laugh, you're dead. ~ Roger Corman,
644:I am completely open to doing a romantic comedy, but I will never do something just for the sake of doing a specific genre or because it's the time or place to do a different type of movie. I think that would be a huge mistake. ~ Leonardo DiCaprio,
645:Il savait qu'un être intelligent pouvait être neutralisé par la stupidité de ses supérieurs, et des semaines d'un travail patient, acharné - vingt-quatre heures sur vingt-quatre - annihilées par ce genre de personnages. (chapitre 6) ~ John le Carr,
646:When people see the conventions, they think they're going to get the straightforward genre - I don't give them that and they get mad. People see that and they think I don't understand the conventions because I'm not a good filmmaker. ~ Mary Harron,
647:I do also think it eludes genre a bit - not in any groundbreaking way but you can't quite call it a comedy and you can't quite call it a romantic anything. It's not quite a drama either really. But it has elements of all those things. ~ Colin Firth,
648:When 'American Pie' happened, I was so lucky to get that opportunity and I just tried to do a good job in that genre. But the films that inspired me as a kid were, like, Malcolm McDowall in 'A Clockwork Orange.' He was my hero. ~ Sean William Scott,
649:The crime genre's always been regarded very well by the literary end of the book world, whereas horror, although it had that spell in the late eighties, by and large, it's sort of ghetto-ized, and considered to be exploited literature. ~ Peter James,
650:The hardest thing, as a producer, is to find a director who does the picture for all the right reasons, and not just because they know it's successful or that they can do a good job, but in their bones, they love that genre. ~ Lorenzo di Bonaventura,
651:Today, the best-selling titles for blacks are in a genre most whites have never even heard of: “ghetto lit.” This is the pulp-novel equivalent of rap music—books that glorify drugs, violence, hot sex, easy money, and the pimping life. ~ Jared Taylor,
652:When I began to cover songs for YouTube, they all tended to be in the super pop-genre.. as in, smash-hit songs. My writing process was heavily influenced by this - I went from a more heavy punk rock style to straight up sugary-sweet pop. ~ Alex Goot,
653:After I tasted success with erotic thrillers, a time came when I was being offered only films belonging to that genre. The industry loves repeating a success formula, and the audience had formed a certain image of mine in their minds. ~ Emraan Hashmi,
654:I dusted my books off, placing each one—sorted alphabetically and by genre—on the shelves Dad installed. What some people might call “anal,” I’d call efficient. What good was it to have a book if you couldn’t find it when you wanted it? ~ Aileen Erin,
655:I just love where I am right now in my career. I love country music. I don't ever feel restricted by the genre. I've been able to have a solid career that we've built one step at a time and a family. I know that I'm in a good place. ~ Martina McBride,
656:The philosophy has always been pretty clean and straightforward, which is that if I see something that I like and I can see it's value to the audience and it's value to me then I'm going to take my shot at it regardless at the genre. ~ Dwayne Johnson,
657:Chacun exige d'e" tre innocent, a' tout prix, me" me si, pour cela, il faut accuser le genre humain et le ciel. Everyone insists on his or her innocence, at all costs, even if it means accusing the rest of the human race and heaven. ~ Albert Camus,
658:I don't have a checklist. Whatever material excites me, they'll call for a certain genre or combination of genres. It'll come naturally and I'll be eager to learn how that thing works. I learn the rules, and I'll probably break some of them. ~ Ang Lee,
659:I spent many years in grad school in English, so I've read a lot in a variety of genres. But adventure fantasy is my bread and butter as a reader, and probably always will be. So it's only natural that I came to that genre as a writer. ~ Saladin Ahmed,
660:It is not believed that a people capable of inventing the genre of "oral painting" could have spawned the viaduct killer, and in any case no ghetto resident is permitted access to any other area of the city. ("A Short Guide To The City") ~ Peter Straub,
661:You could call it that [urban Western], I guess, you could certainly call it that. A lot of these types of films are, really, if you get down to the core most suspense thrillers in this genre, the Western is sort of the birth of it all. ~ Antoine Fuqua,
662:I'm drawn to a good story, really, as I hope most people are. For me, it's the story that's going to stay with you eventually, not necessarily the genre. I go to watch a film because of the story, not because it was a Western or a comedy. ~ Ryan Kwanten,
663:People are very adamant about maintaining a certain sound or a certain era, like, "There were three years of rap that were great, so let's just keep doing that." The genre itself is just stuck in place. It's been treading water for a while. ~ Aesop Rock,
664:The ideal for me is to mix it up. When I have a writing workshop, I like to have people that are anthropologists and people who are poking around in other fields, I like to have them all in the same workshop, and not worry about genre. ~ Sandra Cisneros,
665:The reason why I always wanted to make an American film was because of the Western genre. It is something that I would very much like to make in the future, because it's very uniquely American, and I can't make a Western film in Korean. ~ Park Chan wook,
666:The present work is, then, the masterpiece of one particular literary genre that flourished in the fourth century BC in Greece, that of the rhetorical manual, and it is a remarkable fact that it should have fallen to Aristotle to write it. It ~ Aristotle,
667:The thing I like about the sci-fi genre is that you get to examine universal themes and polarizing moral choices. The characters have a lot on their shoulders and are often trying to survive in some very difficult and hostile environments. ~ Jaime Murray,
668:You can use the fun of the genre, but I also really wanted to come at it from the point of view of some really complex characterization. There was a lot that I wanted it to do, and I wanted it to be fun. It's fun, but it's not simple fun. ~ Adrian Hodges,
669:I had one woman come up to me in a bookstore and say, 'You know, everyone told me it was a horror book, but when I finished it, I realized that it was a love story.' And she's absolutely right. In some ways, genre is a marketing tool. ~ Mark Z Danielewski,
670:The fantasy genre is best defined by its vivid world-building and larger than life characters. These characters often include non-human races, although this is not a requirement. The practice of magic is also a common component of the genre. ~ Emlyn Chand,
671:I don't want to go to a foreign country and get lumped into that genre. I'm just looking at the bigger picture. This K-pop title might be good for now, but looking ahead it could hold me back, like a prison of sort. I'm a little wary about that. ~ G Dragon,
672:I was much more into romance as a teenager and it's been a kind of new discovery for me to learn about sci-fi adventure. I think it's a really interesting genre and it's all about imagination. It's boundless what you can do in these stories. ~ Olivia Wilde,
673:One of the wonderful things about making a film of any genre is that you have dialogue. You can take up a position. If you want to say something about your position, you can just say it. You don't have to spend massive amounts of screen time. ~ Woody Allen,
674:Readers respond to every genre intensely, if it's a genre that appeals to them. Again, who can say why anyone enjoys horror and dark fantasy? If I can't answer the question for myself, I wouldn't dream of trying to answer it for others ~ Laurell K Hamilton,
675:Reading is professionally important for me to keep tuned in to what's being written in my genre, let's not lie. But that's not the reason I read. I read for my own emotional and mental health. If I stopped reading, I'd probably just die. ~ Patrick Rothfuss,
676:The world changed and the companies haven’t yet figured out how to exploit it, exactly. Twilight and Harry Potter and manga have shown females will purchase genre books with a vengeance if given the opportunity and an enticing enough read. ~ Lynne M Thomas,
677:The built-in form is a window frame. You can use this genre [crime fiction] to go where you want to go, and explore what you want to explore. In some ways it gives you a lot of freedom because you have a framework readers are looking for. ~ Michael Connelly,
678:The distinction between literary and genre fiction is stupid and pernicious. It dates back to a feud between Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James. James won, and it split literature into two streams. But it's a totally false dichotomy. ~ George R R Martin,
679:The message is every genre, every person, is the real message. Some people just say it in different ways. What I learned today is that not only do I respect you and always have, but I'm also so inspired. I'm so motivated. I really appreciate it. ~ DJ Khaled,
680:There's always your initial trepidation about doing a remake, but that was alleviated by the fact that it was a prequel. Immediately, that gives you creative license to really recreate and explore and put a new stamp on the genre. ~ Adewale Akinnuoye Agbaje,
681:Contemporary fiction is kind of a catch-all genre. It has a great deal of overlap with the literary fiction genre, which will be discussed in great detail in the following chapter. However, not all contemporary fiction is also literary fiction. ~ Emlyn Chand,
682:According to the conventions of the genre, Augustus Waters kept his sense of humor till the end, did not for a moment waiver in his courage, and his spirit soared like an indomitable eagle until the world itself could not contain his joyous soul. ~ John Green,
683:Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction. ~ Joan D Vinge,
684:I would love a little bit of a change. I feel so fortunate to have been able to work so much, particularly in the horror-thriller genre, but I would love to be able to do something perhaps a little more dramatic or even a romantic comedy. ~ Danielle Panabaker,
685:The great thing about visual horror films is there's real potential for strong, beautiful imagery. It's the one genre that really lends itself to creating strong images. And I've always loved that idea of windmills - your mind aimlessly spinning. ~ Tim Burton,
686:We insist that this stuff we call science fiction is not SCI-FI. For some in the ghetto of Genre this is axiomatic, a secret truth known only to the genre kids, that there is proper science fiction and then there’s that SCI-FI shit. ~ Hal Duncan,
687:What we've done is make the categories of science fiction and fantasy larger, freer, and more inclusive than any other genre of contemporary literature. We have room for everybody, and we are extraordinarily open to genuine experimentation. ~ Orson Scott Card,
688:"Comic book" has come to mean a specific genre, not a story form, in people's minds. So someone will call Die Hard "a comic-book movie," when it has nothing to do with comic books. I'd rather have comics be the vehicle by which stories are told. ~ Frank Miller,
689:Fiction Historical fiction is a subset of the literary fiction genre, which we will discuss in greater detail in the next chapter. From romance to mystery to fantasy to adventure, historical fiction often crosses into a number of other co-genres. ~ Emlyn Chand,
690:I can hear some of you groaning as you read this section. “Great,” you’re saying. “I have to put a theme in my book? Themes are only for that ‘high literature’ stuff that gets taught in universities, not for my nice, entertaining genre fiction. ~ Libbie Hawker,
691:In the old days, a TV sync was perceived as not so cool or whittling away at your indie cred. Now it's seen as much more of an opportunity than a sellout, as a way to find fans who wouldn't have ordinarily come across their genre of music. ~ Alexandra Patsavas,
692:You want the secret off my succes; my recipe? I have always brought the same care to making an adventure novel, a serialized novel, that others would bring to the making of a poem. My ambition was to raise the level of this much maligned genre. ~ Gaston Leroux,
693:Que pouvions-nous faire, donc? Vivre? C'est exactement dans ce genre de situation qu'écrasés par le sentiment de leur propre insignifiance les gens se décident à faire des enfants; ainsi se reproduit l'espèce, de moins en moins il est vrai. ~ Michel Houellebecq,
694:When a woman reads a romance novel, she is putting her own pleasure first. That small act of rebellion is perceived as a threat to the status quo. It’s also why this eternally popular and profitable genre has been scorned, ridiculed and dismissed. ~ Maya Rodale,
695:Even as a child, when kids my age would watch cartoons, I preferred watching horror flicks. I had watched some Hollywood horror flicks and even films made by the Ramsay brothers by the time I was six! I have always been biased towards that genre. ~ Emraan Hashmi,
696:I don't have a particular genre that I want to stick to; if you work on a small piece, you take that experience with you when you work on a big piece and vice versa. You will take those experiences with you and they will make the next one richer. ~ Thea Sharrock,
697:In any genre it may happen that the first great example contains the whole potentiality of the genre. It has been said that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato. It can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote. ~ Lionel Trilling,
698:Read widely (in and outside of your own genre), keep a notebook with you at all times. Do something that scares you every now and then. Try to locate your own frequency, knowing that one year your voice is on AM 532 and the next it's on FM 92.8. ~ Matthea Harvey,
699:Television has - particularly at the HBO level in the United States - become a completely new genre. Something like Deadwood or The Wire is a whole new thing - there was no equivalent to that medium before. It's like a new way of telling stories. ~ William Gibson,
700:That's what happened when your heart broke. You remembered the good things first. The things you'd miss. Then when the anger set in, a new reel started to play. Your thoughts turned from a romantic comedy to psychological suspense. A genre switch. ~ Tarryn Fisher,
701:They said: "Make it in this amount of time and go for it now..." Which is why I was suddenly ambushed and we all found ourselves doing it. I suspect this wasn't quite recognisable in its genre to give people the confidence just to throw money at it. ~ Colin Firth,
702:When the publisher here in America wanted to put the word "memoir" on the title page [of 'Winter Journal'] and on the cover, I said, "No, no, no, no, no, no." No genre whatsoever. It's an independent work not really connected to those things at all. ~ Paul Auster,
703:I am flattered that they think that many people would enjoy my work. I don't approach any genre a different way than I may approach another one. I treat every role I do like a role worthy of applying whatever kind of tactic, process and talent I have. ~ Vin Diesel,
704:I am fortunate enough to have worked on, and continue to work on, evolutionary movies in all formats from just simple good story telling, which still matters most of all, to CG movies to tent-pole size 3D movies, and genre 3D movies like 'Piranha 3D. ~ Mark Canton,
705:We all know from growing up with TV that John Wells shows are usually very large ensembles with amazingly written characters. He tends to redefine the way stories are told in a specific genre, whether it's 'China Beach,' 'The West Wing,' or 'E.R. ~ Michael Cudlitz,
706:I have a song entitled "Just Ain't My Day" that is a straight country song almost. My vocals are very soulful it's a different kind of record but people's response to it is beyond powerful. Proving that good music is good music regardless of the genre. ~ K Michelle,
707:Purdom has created a major body of work. Thoughtful, humane, intelligent, extrapolative, involving, his stories are exactly the sort of thing our genre exists to make possible. If you don't like Tom Purdom, you don't like science fiction. Period. ~ Michael Swanwick,
708:Initially I explored the tension between illustration and fine art when I first encountered miniature painting in my late teens. Championing the formal aspects of the Indo-Persian miniature-painting genre has often been at the core of my practice. ~ Shahzia Sikander,
709:It's not fundamentally different to any other genre, that action is a particular thing. Being able to do action sounds like it should be straightforward, but it really isn't. I always want the action to be witty. I don't want it to be merely routine. ~ Adrian Hodges,
710:I go by the role pretty much. And I think the only genre I haven't gotten to do but I'd love to is a western, but no one has ever asked me to do that. Unfortunately they are very few and far between these days, but that is one type of film I'd love to do. ~ Sam Neill,
711:I've been singing for a really long time and I love a lot of genres, but country just seemed like the best fit. The people in that genre are just so nice and welcoming. And that seemed so appealing. Also my voice fit it and seemed like the way to go. ~ Sasha Pieterse,
712:Science fiction used to be a dangerous literature. Now, it is a very commercial genre, and whatever dangers might still lurk within seem to have been safely sanitized for the marketplace. The real crime is that the lobotomy has been self performed. I ~ Harlan Ellison,
713:I'd like to be remembered not only for my body of work but also for specific novels. Ideally, I want to be remembered in the same way as Stephen King, who defined and exemplified excellence in the horror genre in the late 20th and early 21st century. ~ Nicholas Sparks,
714:Light and funny has a more compelling quality when you're younger. But I haven't abandoned the genre: I love falling down; I love Lucille Ball. It's just that a lot of those stories revolve around problems that I can't convincingly portray at this age. ~ Julia Roberts,
715:We come away from the tragedies of [William] Shakespeare with a profound sense of having encountered reality in its most pristine form - yet the art-work is elaborately artificial, the very genre of tragedy in poetry an anti-naturalist perspective. ~ Joyce Carol Oates,
716:I felt more doubtful than usual with 'Goon Squad,' because I knew that the book's genre wasn't easily named - Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? - and I worried that its lack of a clear category would count against it. My hopes for it were pretty modest. ~ Jennifer Egan,
717:If you want to succeed as an author you need to work your ass off. Not only do you need to work, but you need to work intelligently. That means reading a LOT. You need to read in every genre, and you most especially need to read the genre you want to write. ~ Chris Fox,
718:Tu vois, c'est pas comme dans les films, où les filles préfèrent les salauds ou les mecs dans ce genre. C'est pas aussi simple. Elles aiment les garçons qui peuvent leur donner un but. En fait, avec les mecs, ce qu'elles aiment, c'est relever un défi. ~ Stephen Chbosky,
719:We really invented the genre of tracing family trees and going back as far as we could on the paper trail. When the paper trail disappeared, we used DNA analysis. The technology was just being invented that allowed you to trace ancestry through DNA. ~ Henry Louis Gates,
720:As Duke Ellington once said, “There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind.” In that sense, jazz and classical music are fundamentally the same. The pure joy one experiences listening to “good” music transcends questions of genre. ~ Haruki Murakami,
721:I like doing whatever interests me. It's a challenge for me to try to make good comics out of any genre I tackle. I trust my instincts in getting me through the more difficult genres for modern readers, like violent crime or horror stories. ~ Gilberto Hernandez Guerrero,
722:I'm open to doing any kind of role and any kind of genre as long as it's interesting and as long as I feel it could be a great character to play. I never take into my own personal opinions or my own public image into account when I chose movie roles. ~ Leonardo DiCaprio,
723:You want to play another kind of character in another genre, and it's been something I've been trying to do if I can in the career so far, and it's something I hope to continue because it's interesting to me and you get to do different things as an actor. ~ Keanu Reeves,
724:All words have the "taste" of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life. ~ Mikhail Bakhtin,
725:I just wanted to make sure that yes, that those horror - they worked as a genre. To me, I just wanted to be touched by the film in the way that I saw plausible. Which is the story about compassion - giving and receiving it in those desperate times of need. ~ Vera Farmiga,
726:I've grown up watching a lot of Western genre films on TV, and America is not just a country, but it's one of the most important countries in the world, and examining the process of how this nation came to be, it's an important thing, even for outsiders. ~ Park Chan wook,
727:The horror genre is an extremely delicate thing. You can talk to filmmakers and even psychologists who've studied the genre, and even they don't understand what works or what doesn't work. More importantly, they don't understand why it works when it works. ~ Stephen King,
728:Genre, then, as a means of study is a way we can examine and discuss the elements and functions of a type of practice. This work of identifying the features and characteristics is theoretical in one sense and critical in being able to understand how it works. ~ David Bate,
729:I'm just different. There are a handful of different types of genre of music that I would love to just jump into and people don't realize that I'm really good at those things. They just know me as Tony Sunshine, the guy that sang the hooks for Terror Squad. ~ Tony Sunshine,
730:The actors are different, although I didn't set out to be different. My inspiration came from people like Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence and Will Smith. The genre is what it is. My inspiration was drawn from great movies like 48 Hours, Bad Boys and Rush Hour. ~ Tracy Morgan,
731:The mainstream has lost its way. Crime fiction is an objective, realistic genre because it's about the real world, real bodies really being killed by somebody. And this involves the investigator in trying to understand the society that the person lived in. ~ Michael Dibdin,
732:When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now -- where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists. ~ Doris Lessing,
733:I always wanted to do a movie that deals with America's horrific past with slavery, but the way I wanted to deal with it is - as opposed to doing it as a huge historical movie with a capital H - I thought it could be better if it was wrapped up in genre. ~ Quentin Tarantino,
734:I definitely gravitate towards quality genre projects and genre of any kind whether it's science fiction, horror or really anything. I'm just drawn to quality. I don't think 'Darkness Falls' is horror; there isn't any gore by any stretch of the imagination. ~ Emma Caulfield,
735:Recherchez des personnes qui croient en vous, vous admirent et peuvent vous aider à atteindre vos objectifs. Il vous incombe de rechercher activement ce genre d’individus afin d’améliorer votre cercle d’influence – le hasard les met
rarement sur votre chemin. ~ Hal Elrod,
736:The world of French crime films is a particular place, informed by the French love for Hollywood film noir, a genre they identified and named. But the great French noirs of the 1950s are not copies of Hollywood; instead, they have a particularly French flavor. ~ Roger Ebert,
737:In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the horror genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials. ~ Stanley Kubrick,
738:I've read fantasy my whole life. Quite literally; my mom read me The Hobbit before I could read stuff to myself. So I love fantasy; that's what I read for fun, it's what I read professionally to keep abreast of what's in the genre - it's where my heart is. ~ Patrick Rothfuss,
739:...the materials of genre - specifically the paired genres of horror and the fantastic - in no way require the constrictions of formulaic treatment, and in fact naturally extend and evolve into the methods and concerns of its wider context, general literature. ~ Peter Straub,
740:There are three huge, titanic, space movies which if you ever make a film [about space] you cannot avoid. You may want to avoid them but you cannot. I've never known a genre like it where you are dictated to by these films, 2001, Alien, and Tarkovsky's Solaris. ~ Danny Boyle,
741:I don't like rock. Honestly, I like to listen to it, but it's not for me. There's a lot of musical genres that I find interesting, but they don't suit me. It's one thing to listen to different genres, but to perform a genre that isn't yours is counterproductive. ~ Luis Miguel,
742:I owe a lot to my parents, because they kept no genre off limits. Music was always playing in the house. They never told me to be quiet, turn the music down or anything like that. So I felt pretty free and experimental as a kid to kind of figure out my own voice. ~ Tori Kelly,
743:What we're really trying to tell, even though it's very much a genre show, is a very human story. Even in this heightened situation, it still comes down to people being people, and dealing with people as people. It really is about the seven people in that town. ~ Remi Aubuchon,
744:Whenever I study a genre of film-making, Steve Spielberg is the first guy I go to. Even Catch Me If You Can, which is a very lightweight kind of thing, if you just look at the economy of the way he designs his shots and works around actors, the craft is amazing. ~ Tim Matheson,
745:Its difficult to do a genre film well, and it doesnt matter if youre talking vampire movies or Dawn of the Dead or The Thing or Escape From New York. Those kind of movies, they understand what the old-school B-movie is supposed to be, they get the throwback of it. ~ Ethan Hawke,
746:I’ve always loved the hopeful nature of the romance genre. We can go to terrible places, dark places with our hero and heroine, explore wounds painful and old, because we know that there is hope even in the darkness.
(Interview with Read-A-Romance Month, 2013) ~ Nalini Singh,
747:Recasting fairy tales has become a publishing sub-genre in itself, and has been done both well and to the point of entropy. More interesting are those works where the structures of fairytales are abandoned but the world of 'fairy' is imported as a delicate spice. ~ Graham Joyce,
748:We may need simple and heroic legends for that peculiar genre of literature known as the textbook. But historians must also labor to rescue human beings from their legends in science if only so that we may understand the process of scientific thought aright. ~ Stephen Jay Gould,
749:He had a voice that was the truth, raw and unfiltered. You can't get any realer, any more tortured or any more alive. No one can do what George Jones does, and that's why 50 years later, he still stands out as one of the greatest singers in any genre of all time. ~ Kenny Chesney,
750:I love romantic comedies. I feel almost sheepish writing that, because the genre has been so degraded in the past twenty years or so that admitting you like these movies is essentially an admission of mild stupidity. But that has not stopped me from watching them. ~ Mindy Kaling,
751:The romance genre is the only genre where readers are guaranteed novels that place the heroine at the heart of the story. These are books that celebrate women's heroic virtues and values: courage, honor, determination and a belief in the healing power of love. ~ Jayne Ann Krentz,
752:The important thing for me is, and what I'd like people to know is that, one particular genre does not make it whole. There are many, many different genres and if you ever gave it an opportunity open mindedly, I think you'd find some pretty interesting things there. ~ Tyler Perry,
753:You have to know the rules, otherwise you have no tools to communicate to the audience, but to keep it fresh you have to break some. I don't choose genres as the element, but the material itself is the element, then I'll decide what genre I need. That's just how I work. ~ Ang Lee,
754:Although I'm up for working in any genre, I do love the passion and dynamic storytelling that horror stories can provide. Dealing with big questions and possibilities of all sorts of stories with life and death consequences is enthralling and exhilarating to me. ~ Barbara Crampton,
755:Documentary photography has amassed mountains of evidence. And yet... the genre has simultaneously contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror, envy and nostalgia, and only a little to the critical understanding of the social world. ~ Allan Sekula,
756:Horror is one of the few genres - romance and comedy are the other two that come to mind - that's all emotion-driven. It's not a rational genre, like science fiction is. It's irrational by nature. And it is capable of exploring all aspects of human experience. ~ Stephen R Bissette,
757:If you talk about genres - I don't care if you're talking about war, Westerns, science fiction, horror, fantasy, humor, romance - anything you can find, strolling the aisles of a Borders or a Barnes & Noble, I can bring you many comic books representing each genre. ~ Michael Uslan,
758:I got the part [in Into the Forest], I started taking ballet again to try to regain my strength back. I actually love that it was changed to Crystal Pite's modern dance. And I wouldn't even really call it modern dance because it feels like it's in its own genre. ~ Evan Rachel Wood,
759:I think the one thing specifically that is most consistent, is that we want to harken back to martial arts movies because that's kind of the genre we're paying tribute to, so there are some similarities to a lot of films, because they all feed off each other! ~ Jennifer Yuh Nelson,
760:I think the war movie genre is a very important genre in film. Film gives you a visceral experience of something that you would never otherwise experience. To give the audience a real feeling of what maybe a certain kind of warfare would be like I thought was great. ~ Helen Mirren,
761:My feeling about fiction, regardless of the genre, is that it is meant to be a representation of life. I want my books to give a whole spectrum of experiences to my readers. Not just fear or terror or revulsion, but excitement, laughter, pain, sorrow, desire, etc. ~ Richard Laymon,
762:The situation that women were in, at the time, was something that Dumas doesn't really go into, but it's a great subject to look at. It's a great genre because you can do a lot. Sometimes in thrillers, you can really explore things, and it's the same in this genre. ~ Adrian Hodges,
763:As far as being territorial about one's own life, that's a mistake for ANY writer. All writers everywhere, in every genre, are drawing from their life and the lives of those around them for "material." Memoirs just make transparent and even amplify that activity. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch,
764:I can pretty much spend an entire week talking about how the writing process works, to be honest! It can really vary from project to project and is often dependent on when you're brought on board, the genre, the platform and the narrative desires of the project. ~ Rhianna Pratchett,
765:I have been blessed to have been working since I was 11. I think horror is an underrated genre. When done really well like in 'The Ruins', it pays homage to some of the stuff I really love in the '70s and incurs some of that energy the fanbase really wants to see. ~ Jonathan Tucker,
766:I'm a huge fan of horror. I can't handle all the blood and gore, but that's what The Following was meant to be. It was meant to be a genre show, a little movie, a little scary genre film every week. That was our goal. That's what Kevin Bacon and I wanted to do. ~ Kevin D Williamson,
767:I ended up working on "Chicago Hope" and other things, but always with the idea that, eventually, I would want to take what I'd learned in character drama and try to apply that to the genre that I love, which is science fiction and "The Twilight Zone" type mysteries. ~ Remi Aubuchon,
768:It's very important, at least to me as a writer, that there be some rules on the table when I'm writing. Rules come from genres. You're writing in a genre, there are rules, which is great because then you can break the rules. That's when really exciting things happen. ~ Lev Grossman,
769:When you see millions and billions of dollars being made in a genre, there are going to be copycats and people who jump in for the wrong reasons. Ten years ago, nobody was going to make dance music to try and get rich or even make a living. You couldn't! It was impossible. ~ Kaskade,
770:Anime has been good to me. I made and continue to make very little money at it, but the undying, feverish loyalty of the fans of the genre has been such a life-changing influence for me that I wanted to do everything I possibly could to help give something back to them. ~ Steven Blum,
771:I would love to compose more fantasy music, whether it's for a film or a game. That genre has so much opportunity for harmonic experimentation, not to mention all the interesting instruments that become available when composing music for alien species and other worlds. ~ Jason Graves,
772:The range of genre that we is very diverse, which makes for a fun and multi-dimensional show, but creating something that flows, depending on what kind of vibe the show is going to be [loud dive bar, small theatre, festival] is a bit of an art a haphazard art at times. ~ Sarah Burton,
773:What both hardened fundamentalists and strident atheists seem to have in common is the conviction that any trace of myth, embellishment, or cultural influence in an origin story renders it untrue. But this represents a massive misunderstanding of the genre itself. ~ Rachel Held Evans,
774:I'm always so pleased when I can get a song or be given a song that really speaks to me and I can interpret, but if given the opportunity to really write from the heart and try and bring some personality to whatever this genre would be, it was a great opportunity for me. ~ Josh Groban,
775:Le droit de me lire ne donne pas au lecteur le droit de m'agresser s'il n'aime pas mes idées. Ce genre d'attitudes appartiennent à un autre âge, à une autre époque, celle de l'inquisition, celle du règne de la volonté du groupe, le règne de la négation de l'individu. ~ Fatema Mernissi,
776:Horror. I can't manage it. I become--well--horrified. Self-help books have a similar effect.

When asked, "Any literary genre you simply can't be bothered with?" - (By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from the NYT Book Review, by Pamela Paul) ~ Emma Thompson,
777:I am genuinely into soul, R&B and hip hop - all these genres that get slapped under the 'soul' genre. That spoke to me more than it did to my punk-rock friends. And punk spoke more to me than it did to my soul friends. I basically didn't fit comfortably in either world. ~ Patrick Stump,
778:I think every filmmaker wants... I don't know about every filmmaker. I certainly want my films to just exist. I want them to be judged for what they are and analyzed, accepted, criticized, whatever you want to call it, on their own terms, not as part of some mall-cop genre. ~ Jody Hill,
779:There is no other genre that deals with America better, in a subtextual way, than the Westerns being made in the different decades. The '50s Westerns very much put forth an Eisenhower idea of America, whereas the Westerns of the '70s were very cynical about America. ~ Quentin Tarantino,
780:Doing a love story as a genre, and looking at love stories in movies, and feeling like I learned stuff about that, and that it broadened my view and my idea of what I can do, and how I can work with the people around me, that was such a great, really satisfying experience. ~ Todd Haynes,
781:Film noir is not a genre. It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood. It is a film 'noir', as opposed to the possible variants of film gray or film off-white. ~ Paul Schrader,
782:I get very frustrated by this term 'genre exercise.' I mean, what exactly is that? Genre is not really relevant when you are writing a song; hopefully you are doing it to explore something, to create something, and I don't agree that any of my albums are genre exercises. ~ Elvis Costello,
783:The BBC came to me and they wanted to adapt the book [Three Musketeers] again, in the straightforward way, and I said no to that. I didn't want to do that. But what I did want to do was have a real look at the adventure genre because I thought it was ripe for reinvention. ~ Adrian Hodges,
784:I'll always have a totally open mind to endless possibilities. I want to do a dance album. Not Techno, but a record that's exclusively designed for people to dance to. That whole dance genre is kinda into its own world. I'd just like to get in there and mess around with that. ~ Rob Halford,
785:My novels are in the literature section as opposed to the romance section of bookstores because they're not romance novels. If I tried to have them published as romances, they'd be rejected. I write dramatic fiction; a further sub-genre would classify them as love stories. ~ Nicholas Sparks,
786:Thomas Mann used to write education novels and now you can write an education memoir, and there are all these memoirs coming out now about people's relationships with books. Like anything else, these can be good or bad. The genre doesn't make it good or bad, it's the execution. ~ Marco Roth,
787:It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational - and I'm speaking the written science fiction, not 'Star Trek.' Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they're clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff. ~ Terry Pratchett,
788:l'Histoire a plus d'imagination que les hommes ? le Diable plus que l'Histoire ? et il n'est pas du genre, le Diable, à commettre l'erreur d'amateur de nous resservir un génocide en tous points semblable à l'étalon du genre ?
(ch. 57 La Shoah au coeur et dans la tête) ~ Bernard Henri L vy,
789:Performance capture is a genre of acting which is not going to go away, it's going to proliferate more and more. I'm passionate about it, and I love it. It's the most liberating tool an actor has, because you are not limited by your own physicality, look, or color of your eyes. ~ Andy Serkis,
790:There is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you’re involved in, whether it’s a fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agents or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things. ~ Gary Gygax,
791:The show definitely has a romantic construct, and that's a genre that I've never had access to, in a significant way. This interesting for me to see, as an Asian guy, just standing back. I just wanted to break my way into a different genre. I was tickled that it was offered to me. ~ John Cho,
792:There is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you're involved in, whether it's a fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agents or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things. ~ Gary Gygax,
793:What I'd really like to write is a romantic comedy. This is my favorite kind of movie. I feel almost embarrassed revealing this, because the genre has been so degraded in the past twenty years that saying you like romantic comedies is essentially an admission of mild stupidity. ~ Mindy Kaling,
794:I'm not sure anybody's ready to see me in a drama. And loving movies so much, I've seen a lot of comics try to make that transition too fast, and it can be detrimental. And I don't think I've had as much success as I need in the comedy genre to open up those opportunities. ~ Sean William Scott,
795:Ricky's [Reed] a lot like me. He always says we have the same brain. He does all different genres, and it just happens his first big hit as a producer was [Derulo's] "Talk Dirty to Me," and that Pitbull is his best friend. But he can actually - I swear - he can do every genre. ~ Meghan Trainor,
796:I'm really curious how the private listening - iPods, people listening on their phones - how that might eventual effect music. There'll be a whole genre of music that really works on a kind of one to one headphone or earbud level but doesn't really work when you play it in a room. ~ David Byrne,
797:I think that genre distinctions basically boil down to marketing categories, which are outdated. Any time people have an argument about them, they're arguing about something that doesn't exist in any meaningful way that has to do with style or substance or actual content of books. ~ Emily Gould,
798:Je souhaiterais rappeler à mes compatriotes qu’il sont avant tout des hommes, et qu’ils ne sont des Américains qu’en second lieu. Qu’importe une loi qui protège vos biens et qui préserve votre âme et votre corps, si elle ne vous maintient pas dans les rangs du genre humain. ~ Henry David Thoreau,
799:Living a life where you are true to yourself takes more courage than hiding under a false life such as a pen name or alias. Never be ashamed of what you write, what genre you write where you have to hide who you are. - STRONG: Powerful Philosophy for Timeless Thoughts by Kailin Gow. ~ Kailin Gow,
800:There's a hardening of the culture. Reality TV has lowered the standards of entertainment. You're left wondering about the legitimacy of relationships. It's probably harder to entertain the same people with a more classic form of writing, and romantic comedies are a classic genre. ~ Nancy Meyers,
801:You move your life across the country and make a commitment to a place, and to a genre, and then you realize that neither the place nor the genre might be what you thought they were going to be, or that the world you thought you were going to find in school doesn't actually exist. ~ John D Agata,
802:Honestly, I love movies so much that I don't really have a favorite type. It's all script-related. Whatever genre it is, if it's cinematic at all or has a tone and a feel that I think is gonna be exciting to put up on screen, then I'm there and I'll put everything I have into it. ~ Scott Speedman,
803:One of the problems of this genre is that there are cliches everywhere, and you've got to be careful and watch out. Our rule with cliches is to either gently acknowledge them and make fun of them, or do something else. Milady is, in one sense, a villain because she does bad things. ~ Adrian Hodges,
804:I feel like I have a very unique perspective especially for someone in the hip-hop genre. I'm not afraid to explore it, and how my upbringing then shapes my music and being a New York kid and all of that stuff...that's really the most unique thing I can offer to the music in general. ~ Hoodie Allen,
805:Repetitiveness is one of the things that's most difficult to get away from in genre pictures, because people come specifically to see certain kinds of things but get disappointed if they're presented in the same way. So to try to find a new way to show old stuff is always the challenge. ~ Joe Dante,
806:The American independent cinema is as formulaic as Hollywood and one genre is what you might call the 'inaction movie'. The setting is invariably a decaying town in a regional backwater where a catalytic stranger or returning native meets up with a group of sad, eccentric outsiders. ~ Philip French,
807:George Jones was a big, huge name in our household. George Jones-he is considered country, but in every genre he is known. Everybody knows George Jones. But George has such a unique voice. And he made such timeless songs, like "Color of the Blues", just real hard-core country stuff. ~ Patty Loveless,
808:I do believe there's been a lull of slasher films. There have been a few that I guess would fall under the genre of slasher. Like You're Next, which I thought was fun. There have been a few really good slasher films, but for the most part, that's sort of died away at the moment. ~ Kevin D Williamson,
809:I think there are fans who love the genre to begin with, and there are fans who love the comic book to begin with, but fans of the comic book aren't necessarily fans of the genre. There are obviously a lot of those people who love both, but I'm not a huge fan of that genre, personally. ~ Steven Yeun,
810:Being black, Latino, or Asian is not a genre. Romantic comedies, thrillers, action - those are genres. I think there's a lot of people who want to have the conversation. I don't think people are afraid of it, I just think it's the time to have that conversation. Race is not a genre. ~ Mara Brock Akil,
811:bestselling and award-winning author Wanda E. Brunstetter is one of the founders of the Amish fiction genre. She has written close to 90 books translated in four languages. With over 10 million copies sold, Wanda’s stories consistently earn spots on the nation’s most prestigious ~ Wanda E Brunstetter,
812:I decided to "find myself" in monumental sculpture. Alas, monumental sculpture is a very conservative genre. The cause is the monumentality itself. You can secretly write novels and symphonies. You can secretly experiment on canvas. But just try to hide a twelve-foot-high sculpture! ~ Sergei Dovlatov,
813:I think you need humour and a sense of fun, which is what I try to bring to my books to leaven the danger and action. The ones that really transcend the genre always have a great laugh in them, such as 'Fright Night,' 'Lost Boys,' 'American Werewolf in London' - just to name a few. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,
814:Most of my influences from outside the commerical strange fiction genre came in with university, discovering James Joyce and Wallace Stevens, Blake and Yeats, Pinter and Borges. And meanwhile within those genres I was discovering Gibson and Shepard, Jeter and Powers, Lovecraft and Peake. ~ Hal Duncan,
815:Science fiction used to be a dangerous literature. Now, it is a very commercial genre, and whatever dangers might still lurk within seem to have been safely sanitized for the marketplace. The real crime is that the lobotomy has been self performed.

[David Gerrold - Afterword] ~ Harlan Ellison,
816:This use of ordinary people as the principal characters was fairly rare in science fiction when the book came out, and even now the genre slips easily into elitism—superbrilliant minds, extraordinary talents, officers not crew, the corridors of power not the working-class kitchen. ~ Arkady Strugatsky,
817:I think authors are just realizing there's no real reason to feel limited to a narrow set of genre rules in their writing. There's no reason a mystery novel can't have fantastic elements in it. Similarly, there's no reason why your epic fantasy series can't have elements of a mystery. ~ Patrick Rothfuss,
818:And there are two types of stories. One type is one's own story. The other type is telling the stories of others. Thanks to this genre, writers of nonfiction can now use the tools of the reporter, the points of view and ear for dialog of a novelist, and the passion and wordplay of the poet. ~ Lee Gutkind,
819:At the time, sword and sorcery stories were quite popular. There were female warriors waving swords around as well, but the genre is populated entirely with people who have absolutely no responsibility to anyone, so I knew my story would have to be completely different from any of these. ~ Hayao Miyazaki,
820:Science fiction is an incredibly diverse genre. From space operas to alternate histories to steampunk, the boundaries of this genre reach as far as the author’s imagination. The only hard and fast rule is the world, actions, characters, inventions, and plot must be scientifically plausible. ~ Emlyn Chand,
821:What I'm really trying to do is recreate classic Hollywood cinema and classic genre cinema from a woman's point of view. Because most cinema is really made for men, how can you create cinema that's for women without having it be relegated to a ghetto of "chick flick" or something like that? ~ Anna Biller,
822:When the plain sense of prophecy makes sense, beware your own bias and seek the genre sense. Take every word at its primary, extraordinary, symbolic meaning unless the facts of the immediate context, studied in the light of related passages and historical facts, indicate clearly otherwise. ~ Brian Godawa,
823:Country music is different because we [musicians] are all actually happy for each other. We're all friends. It's a little family. So if you don't win [an award], usually one of your friends does. So it's kind of a cool thing. I think it's the only genre of music to have that camaraderie. ~ Miranda Lambert,
824:I dont have a favorite genre. I love to work and live vicariously through every character. Its all about trying to bring the character to life and get the story across in a way that resonates with the audience. Its always interesting and challenging in a gratifying and unique way. ~ Catherine Mary Stewart,
825:I'm a big fan of certain new acts. I love any genre of music, and I think it's really great to see that there are new artists coming through. It's kinda funny to think that I'm like the old man on campus now. But I'm really happy for groups like One Direction. I think they're really good guys. ~ Joe Jonas,
826:I've tended to find that myths of the near future give people the ability to really kind of explore the present, so say for example if look at William Gibson and his book Neuromancer or if you look at J.G. Ballard or Samuel Delaney those are probably three of my favorite writers in that genre. ~ DJ Spooky,
827:Buffy the Vampire Slayer showed the whole world, and an entire sprawling industry, that writing monsters and demons and end-of-the-world is not hack-work, it can challenge the best. Joss Whedon raised the bar for every writer - not just genre or niche writers, but every single one of us. ~ Russell T Davies,
828:There is a lot of stigma and snobbiness about the self-help genre, and I can't vouch for everything out there, but for me, the idea of giving someone else the gift of inspiration and making them feel passionate and capable in an area of their life is the most incredible thing in the world. ~ Matthew Hussey,
829:For me, Christianity is not a genre. It's faith. The Gospel is not a genre either. It's faith. I definitely understand the semantics of naming things to give them some kind of distinction but I think my faith is pretty distinct. If you want to call it hip hop, essentially it is. That's the art form. ~ LeCrae,
830:I like the structure of the crime story, but most of all I like the ecosystem in which the genre flourishes: the festivals, the websites, the fans, the fact that you have your own special section of the bookshop. And crime is cool, too. It’s dark and edgy and funny and intelligent. I love it. ~ Harry Bingham,
831:We sometimes hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre, but literature doesn't die, just as it doesn't 'progress' or 'decay.' It expands, it increases. When we feel that it has become stagnant or stale, that usually just means we ourselves are not paying sufficient attention. ~ Thomas C Foster,
832:I try to follow my instinct as a moviegoer and I do the thing I would love to see it at a movie. I'm like everyone, almost, I go to a movie once a week. I like every kind of film if it’s well made. I’m fine. I’m not a specialist fighting for a genre of film. You just have to follow your instinct. ~ Luc Besson,
833:Memoir is actually the most egoless genre, even though it might seem ostensibly so much ego-driven. In order for it to succeed, you have to dissolve the self into these larger universal truths, and explore these deeper mysteries. If it’s purely autobiographical and ego-driven, it’s going to fail. ~ Nick Flynn,
834:I'm a hybrid-genre person, which a lot of people find confusing. I grew up listening to American country music and rock n' roll made between 1955 and 1959. The Everly Brothers and Chuck Berry were my first musical loves and are still what I am most moved by. Roy Orbison came a little bit later. ~ Teddy Thompson,
835:I just grew up watching a lot of movies. I'm attracted to this genre and that genre, this type of story and that type of story. As I watch movies I make some version of it in my head that isn't quite what I'm seeing - taking the things I like and mixing them with stuff I've never seen before. ~ Quentin Tarantino,
836:I think the violence is important. It all depends on the genre. Rambo was ultra-violent, and I think it worked. You have to give Stallone credit. You have to respect him for taking that shot, and taking the violence all the way. He was the first one to do that in a long time. It fricking worked. ~ Dolph Lundgren,
837:Sometimes I write music, sometimes I don't. I think I'm just writing more what's close to my heart, and musical stuff is close to my heart, and it's fun to write, and when something's fun to write you don't think about what statement you're trying to make or what genre you're trying to hone in on. ~ Rachel Bloom,
838:The steampunk genre often works as a form of alternate history, showing us how small changes to what actually happened might have resulted in momentous differences: clockwork Victorian-era computers, commercial transcontinental dirigible lines, and a host of other wonders. This is that kind of book. ~ Nisi Shawl,
839:Literary works are pieces of rhetoric as well as reports. They demand a peculiarly vigilant kind of reading, one which is alert to tone, mood, pace, genre, syntax, grammar, texture, rhythm, narrative structure, punctuation, ambiguity – in fact to everything that comes under the heading of ‘form’. ~ Terry Eagleton,
840:The mommy-porn genre currently sweeping the book industry and the Babylonian excess of most television shows probably fall within the historical norm in our culture's sleaze index and are not omens of the imminent collapse of civilization, though if I were not so busy, I might start building an ark. ~ Dean Koontz,
841:Verse is everywhere in language where there is rhythm, everywhere, except in notices and on page four of the papers. In the genre called prose, there are verses [...] of all rhythms. But in truth there is no prose: there is the alphabet, and then verses more or less tight, more or less diffuse. ~ St phane Mallarm,
842:What is good for you creatively is usually bad commercially. You thrive financially by sticking to a series and not fiddling about too much. You do yourself harm by moving away from the series and the genre. By trying things not based in that particular mode of writing, you will just lose readers. ~ John Connolly,
843:Each form of the acting is different. I think it keeps your mind active. TV, film and theater are different disciplines, as are independent films, opposed to studio films. There are differences in the size and the genre, or a period drama as opposed to a contemporary drama, or the types of characters. ~ Luke Evans,
844:I consider fantasy the heir of mythology, addressing a real human need to seek out answers to life’s many mysteries. It is a genre that can tell an entertaining and enthralling story on the surface, and yet deliver a potent message underneath, where everything becomes a symbol of something greater. ~ Dean F Wilson,
845:I think what all the Universal monster movies are defined by, and what makes them very special, is that it's really the only genre entirely unto itself, in which you fear the monster and fear for the monster. That's a very hard thing to do. To fear for and fear at the same time is extremely unique. ~ Alex Kurtzman,
846:Thrillers provide the reader with a safe escape into a dangerous world where the stakes are as high as can be imagined with unpredictable outcomes. It's a perfect genre in which to explore hard issues of good and evil, a mirror that allows the reader to see both the good and not so good in themselves. ~ Ted Dekker,
847:I love outsider stories. And I also like a lot of genre fiction, too. So I wanted to write a literary book that flirted with thriller and fantasy and even science fiction. I wanted the coming-of-age story and the love story to be about "outsiderdom" - one of the themes I am most interested in. ~ Porochista Khakpour,
848:I ride really well and I shoot a gun really well. I love the genre. Once I did Westerns, I was hooked. I love them, but there's been very few of them made. I never wanted to play a guy who was acting like a cowboy. I wanted to play someone who had a real life, but was also trapped into situations. ~ Lance Henriksen,
849:It's not my job at the Institute to teach where people are in the art world - in the world of art historically. My job is to teach the creative process and let the chips fall where they may and people can then come along and form their opinions as to whether you fall into this genre or that genre. ~ Lawrence Jordan,
850:For those who resist the notion that the mainstream is a genre, we recommend that they browse the shelves of their local bookstore. For if the mainstream is not a genre, then it must necessarily embrace all kinds of writing: romance, adventure, horror, thriller, crime, and, yes, science fiction. ~ James Patrick Kelly,
851:In some ways it's hard to see electronic music as a genre because the word "electronic" just refers to how it's made. Hip-hop is electronic music. Most reggae is electronic. Pop is electronic. House music, techno, all these sorts of ostensibly disparate genres are sort of being created with the same equipment. ~ Moby,
852:Like almost all of Beefheart's recorded work, it was not even "ahead" of its time in 1969. Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees, constituting a genre unto itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one. ~ Lester Bangs,
853:I had always loved horror films, so I wanted to do something in the horror genre but wanted it to be sweet and charming at the same time. Because there's a difference between watching horror, where you can leave it behind, and writing horror, where you have to live in it for months and months at a time. ~ Bryan Fuller,
854:When I was a kid, I was watching the movies my parents wanted to watch. I came from a working class family, not specifically educated, so we were watching popular movies. My dad liked cowboy movies, so we were watching cowboy movies. Some of them were amazing. It’s a genre of movie I like very much. ~ Olivier Martinez,
855:    La loi, dont le regne vous epouvante, a son glaive leve sur vous:     elle vous frappera tous:  le genre humain a besoin de cet     exemple. — Couthon.       (The law, whose reign terrifies you, has its sword raised against     you; it will strike you all:  humanity has need of this example.) ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton,
856:My norm for watching scary movies, what I love about it, is when they work and they scare me, which is not that often I'm afraid. The more you know the genre, your taste becomes a little more rarefied and you take a very particular route to the type of movies you like in the genre. But I still get scared. ~ Katie Holmes,
857:The lovely thing about writing comics for so many years is that comics is a medium that is mistaken for a genre. It's not that there are not genres within comics, but because comics tend to be regarded as a genre in itself, content becomes secondary; as long as I was doing a comic, people would pick it up. ~ Neil Gaiman,
858:Successful prime-time television of any genre produces some kind of emotional reaction in the viewers. There are a lot of different emotions to tap into. The emotion of the reward of discovery, the feeling of righteous anger, the feelings of pathos and sadness, or sentimentality of being moved by something. ~ Chris Hayes,
859:When you're a young writer and you look at people praising a big hefty anthology that has uncovered a long lost genre, it can be disorienting to look inside it and think, "But what it's uncovered still isn't me. What does this mean? Do I not belong in this genre, or is there more of the genre yet to find?" ~ John D Agata,
860:I read this in a book about hauntings.” “I thought you said this wouldn’t be scary?” “It’s not really,” Gary said. “But by its definition ‘haunting’ is a scary thing.” “It’s not.” “You know, because I’m pretty maxed out already with this whole zombie thing. I don’t need another genre to keep me awake at night. ~ Mark Tufo,
861:Je suis plutôt King Kong que Kate Moss, comme fille. Je suis ce genre de femme qu’on n’épouse pas, avec qui on ne fait pas d’enfant, je parle de ma place de femme toujours trop tout ce qu’elle est, trop agressive, trop bruyante, trop grosse, trop brutale, trop hirsute, toujours trop virile, me dit-on. ~ Virginie Despentes,
862:Mais quel genre de vie est-ce là ? Jensen ressentais pas vraiment le vide, je m'étonnais seulement de ne pouvoir distinguer la veille du lendemain. Simplement parce que j'étais complètement accaparée, englobée par cette vie-là. Et quel vent effaçait les traces de mes pas avant même que j'aie pu les voir. ~ Haruki Murakami,
863:Or in a gothic version of the genre, the asshole is the jerk who’s the first to get chopped up in a slasher film or the first to be chomped up in one of the Hannibal Lecter movies. But Lecter himself is the furthest thing in the world from an asshole. Whatever else he may be, he’s scarcely self-deluded. ~ Geoffrey Nunberg,
864:Des quantités de livres dorment ainsi en moi, des bons et des mauvais, de tout genre. Des phrases, des mots, des alinéas et des vers qui, pareils à des locataires remuants, reviennent brusquement à la vie, errent solitaires ou entament dans ma tête de bruyants bavardages que je suis incapable de faire taire. ~ Imre Kert sz,
865:It is, perhaps, the prerogative of every man or woman to imagine, and thus force a shape, a meaning, onto that wild and meandering narrative of their lives, by choosing genre. A princess is rescued by a prince; a vampire stalks a victim in the dark; a student becomes a master. A circle is completed. An so on. ~ Lavie Tidhar,
866:When you're playing the devil, you're playing the ultimate evil. There are no boundaries. In doing a film in the horror genre or a psychological thriller, you're really pushed as an actress, you're pushed way outside of your comfort zone. Emotionally, mentally, and physically. That's when things really get fun. ~ Ashley Bell,
867:I do not think novels are necessarily more worthwhile than games. A novel can be a trivial waste of time, and a game can teach. Whatever the genre, I think a successful narrative allows us to participate, to try on new roles and points of view. At their best, novels and games serve as vehicles for discovery. ~ Allegra Goodman,
868:People say 'Scott's [Derrickson] movies are kind of scary, is this a horror movie?' Of course, [Doctor Strange] it's not a horror movie. But what Scott has done so well in the best of his films is have one foot completely in the real world and one foot in this whatever supernatural sub-genre he was playing with. ~ Kevin Feige,
869:Within the world of TV land, into which American life has been reduced as well as reproduced, the phenomenon of the talk show has emerged as a genre located somewhere on the spectrum between coffee klatch and town meeting, or perhaps between the psychiatrist's couch and the crowd scene at a bad accident. ~ Patricia J Williams,
870:A lot of people still maintain genre prejudice. I still meet matrons who tell me kindly that their children enjoyed my books but of course they never read them, and people who make sure I know they don’t read that space-ship stuff. No, no, they read Literature—realism. Like The Help, or Fifty Shades of Grey. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,
871:Il faut bien comprendre qu’il ne s’agit point, dans notre pensée, de déclarer illégitime en elle-même une connaissance quelconque, même inférieure ; ce qui est illégitime, c’est seulement l’abus qui se produit lorsque des choses de ce genre absorbent toute l’activité humaine, ainsi que nous le voyons actuellement. ~ Ren Gu non,
872:I suppose there is something appealing about a word that everyone uses with absolute confidence but on whose exact meaning no two people can agree. The word that I'm thinking of right now is genre, one of those French words, like crêpe, that no one can pronounce both correctly and without sounding pretentious. ~ Michael Chabon,
873:I’ve never used music to sell my faith and I’ve never used faith to sell my music. I think they are both intrinsic parts of who I am. We’ve always tried to define our music outside of genres…what is a genre? A genre’s a cage or a box and for us our music is best with fangs and some claws running free in the wild. ~ Jon Foreman,
874:There's a level where the themes of a film are very relevant to me and also the idea of finding out how relevant one genre is to another. I think that westerns and samurai films and superhero films have a lot in common. It's just that the scale of the visuals in tentpole films can sometimes overwhelm the drama. ~ James Mangold,
875:Ce genre de communication (mass-médias) ne sert pas à faire "communiquer" les hommes et les peuples, à enrichir leur expérience de la vie par l'expérience des autres, mais au contraire, à abêtir, à manipuler, à conditionner (pour faire acheter un produit, faire voter pour un parti, ou faire accepter une guerre). ~ Roger Garaudy,
876:I don't have a problem with many uses of the word genre, just certain ones. I have the most trouble when these labels are used to prevent discussion, to prevent a work from being taken seriously as literature. When we say "genre," we generally mean "something crappy," something that would be sold in an airport. ~ Michael Chabon,
877:The spy genre is something I loved.It also extends to the bad guy because I think, to me, what I love the most about the spy genre is when you have a great bad guy. What makes a great bad guy, to me, is the logic. What he's about has to make sense to me, that if I was in his shoes, yeah, right, that makes sense. ~ John Lasseter,
878:I was voted Most Humorous in my senior class in high school, and I was a fan of comedy, my whole life. I never got into the horror genre, and action was fine, but I just loved comedy. Any comedy I could get my hands on, I would. I watched Saturday Night Live religiously. I've just been a fan of comedy, my whole life. ~ Rob Riggle,
879:Many of the early greats of sf — Hugo Gernsback (publisher of Amazing Stories) in particular — saw themselves as educators. The didactic thrust of science fiction got the genre initially pegged as children's fare. It was seen, at its best, as an extension of school and, at its worst, as teenage wish fulfillment. ~ Samuel R Delany,
880:To me, the most interesting approach to film noir is subjective. The genre is really all about not knowing what's going on around you, and that fear of the unknown. The only way to do that effectively is to really get into the maze, rather than look at the maze from above, so that's where I sort of come at it. ~ Christopher Nolan,
881:You must worry about the truth of your characters and that it fits your vision. The rest will come naturally if you've done your job properly. I love the horror genre but I want to transcend it too. Allow the hardcore audience to see possibilities beyond the easy scare, to embrace its multi-faceted richness. ~ Juan Antonio Bayona,
882:I know in Britain with 'Doctor Who' all the classic actors, and the people who you'd really want to, work on the show. I like that the fact that 'Torchwood' has actors that want to be involved from the stage. It has raised our game, and I'm just happy for good actors who want to be in sci-fi shows who love the genre. ~ Burn Gorman,
883:People will less and less need to put an identity on genres, such as "hip hop," "electronica" and so forth. That's what I try to do with Princess Superstar. Why should a musician be limited to only one form or one genre of music? And so, I think the same will hold true for the whole male/female categorization. ~ Princess Superstar,
884:I've had a chance to really stretch and do a lot of different genres. When I started acting, my whole focus and intention was to work as a stage actor in a company where you're asked to different roles - do a comedy, do a tragedy, etc. I haven't had any reservations about jumping from one type of genre to another. ~ Kyle MacLachlan,
885:The essay community should have hundreds of anthologies from hundreds of different perspectives that are constantly introducing us to new writers, new work, and new visions for our genre. The whole spirit of these anthologies is that there should never be a last word in how essays are interpreted or what they can be. ~ John D Agata,
886:I love Florida Georgia Line. I love 'Round Here.' So if a fan wants to listen to that, and if a fan that wasn't listening to country music before is listening to 'Cruise' on Pandora, and after that a song by George Jones comes on, they may have never heard George Jones before. I think it's a good thing for the genre. ~ Scotty McCreery,
887:Like almost all of Beefheart's recorded work, [Trout Mask Replica] was not even "ahead" of its time in 1969. Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees, constituting a genre unto itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one. ~ Lester Bangs,
888:Few photographers have ever considered the photography of wild animals, as distinctly opposed to the genre of Wildlife Photography, as an art form. The emphasis has generally been on capturing the drama of wild animals IN ACTION, on capturing that dramatic single moment, as opposed to simply animals in the state of being. ~ Nick Brandt,
889:At some point, every science fiction and fantasy story must challenge the reader's experience and learning. That's much of the reason why the genre is so open to experimentation and innovation that other genres reject--strangeness is our bread and butter. Spread it thick or slice it thin, it's still our staff of life. ~ Orson Scott Card,
890:It may be a mistake to say this, but I know my limitations as an actor and I know what I can and can not do. Robert De Niro can do everything. I can't. A 'Highlander' movie is basically my thing. What I'm attempting to do is develop my ability as an actor and try to be the best I can be in the fantasy/action genre. ~ Christopher Lambert,
891:I would say that most of my books are contemporary realistic fiction... a couple, maybe three, fall into the 'historic fiction' category. Science fiction is not a favorite genre of mine, though I have greatly enjoyed some of the work of Ursula LeGuin. I haven't read much science fiction so I don't know other sci-fi authors. ~ Lois Lowry,
892:Snack consumption was legal but Joe expected anyone dining on the distracting shit to synchronize chewing with car chases and shootouts regardless of the genre. The Popcorn Pig was treating the space like a pie eating contest. The buttery snack was his instrument and he was doing a sound check with the venue's acoustics. ~ Michael Ebner,
893:Un jour la duchesse Josiane avait dit à Swift : — Vous vous figurez, vous autres, que votre mépris existe. Vous autres, c’était le genre humain. (Oneday the Duchess Josiana said to Swift : "You people fancy that your scorn does exist."You people" meant the human race ) Victor HUGO. L'homme qui rit. 2ème partie. Chapitre 3. ~ Victor Hugo,
894:It came from my mother. She was a singer, and literally every day of the week she sang at a different club in a different genre of music: country, R&B clubs, jazz clubs, church on Sunday morning where she was the music director, pop hits, soft rock. I grew up listening to all this music, so it was never one thing for me. ~ Robert Glasper,
895:'New' movies are almost always hipper, faster, they mix genres aggressively, they smother their genre origins in new form, there are fewer of them, and they tend to cost a lot more money because you usually make more money on the megahit than you do on the steady progression of break-eveners. Except for the horror movie. ~ Stephen Hunter,
896:Stayed is also a book of the heart and I couldn’t be more thrilled to see its publication. In my twenty-six years of publishing, it’s my first major hardcover release and brings me full circle to work with Lou Aronica, whom I first had the pleasure of working with while at Avon Books. It’s also my very first non-genre ~ Tanya Anne Crosby,
897:There has to be the popcorn genre element, or I don't engage the same way. I like action and vehicle design and guns and computer graphics as much as I like allegory. It's a constant balancing game. I want audiences to be on this rollercoaster that fits the Hollywood mould, but I also want them to absorb my observations. ~ Neill Blomkamp,
898:Donald E. Westlake It’s an accepted fact that Donald E. Westlake has excelled at every single sub-genre the mystery field has to offer—humorous books (Scared Monster); terrifying books (The Ax, about a man who wants vengeance on the company that downsized him out of a job, and probably Westlake’s most accomplished novel); ~ Jeffery Deaver,
899:I’m always thrilled,” wrote Alan Cheuse, emphasizing the novelty and, perhaps, the faint air of slumming that attends the notion of McCarthy’s move to the science-fiction neighborhood, “when a fine writer of first-class fiction takes up the genre of science fiction and matches its possibilities with his or her own powers. ~ Michael Chabon,
900:In the genre of “making you feel like you’re not having an awesome American high school experience,” the worst offender is actually a song: John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Jack & Diane.” It’s one of those songs—like Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven”—that everyone knows all the words to without ever having chosen to learn them. ~ Mindy Kaling,
901:In the manuscript and on True Crime Diary, Michelle always found the perfect balance between the typical extremes of the genre. She didn’t flinch from evoking key elements of the horror and yet avoided lurid overindulgence in grisly details, as well as sidestepping self-righteous justice crusading or victim hagiography. ~ Michelle McNamara,
902:I can tell you as a fact that if you'd asked anyone in Hollywood one year before 'Pirates of the Caribbean' had come out, they'd have told you the pirate movie was a dead genre. And it's not that it's a dead genre. If you make a bad pirate movie, no one will want to see it. If you make a good one, everyone will want to see it. ~ Dean Devlin,
903:It [horror genre] never dies. It just keeps getting re­invented and it always will. Horror is a universal language; we're all afraid. We're born afraid, we're all afraid of things: death, disfigurement, loss of a loved one. Everything that I'm afraid of, you're afraid of and vice versa. So everybody feels fear and suspense. ~ John Carpenter,
904:The fact that 'A Dirty Job' has comedy and supernatural horror in it, that both are woven in and out of it with a whimsical tone, despite the fact that it's about death, makes it hard to characterize with standard genre labels - but I have no problem with that. I'd call it a funny story about death, and leave it at that. ~ Christopher Moore,
905:I have yet to find a genre of music I enjoy; it’s basically audible physics, waves and energized particles, and, like most sane people, I have no interest in physics. It therefore struck me as bizarre that I was humming a tune from Oliver! I mentally added the exclamation mark, which, for the first time ever, was appropriate. ~ Gail Honeyman,
906:I usually just pick a genre of movie that I feel like saluting and then go off and come up with something that I can sort of pay homage to. That's the great thing about our show is we've sort of created a landscape for 'Psych' where we're kind of allowed to go off and give shout-outs to movies that we love, genres that we love. ~ James Roday,
907:Votre Dieu n'est pas le nôtre, dirais-je à ses sectateurs. Celui qui commence par se choisir un seul peuple et proscrire le reste du genre humain, n'est pas le père commun des hommes ; celui qui destine au supplice éternel le plus grand nombre de ses créatures n'est pas le Dieu clément et bon que ma raison m'a montré. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau,
908:Many fantasy novels - 'Lord of the Rings', for instance, or 'Lavondyss' by Robert Holdstock - are beautifully written. Geoff Ryman's 'The Child Garden' is exquisite and utterly beguiling. Mervyn Peake's 'Gormenghast' trilogy is an astonishing piece of multi-faceted storytelling. So quality of writing does not condemn the genre. ~ David Gemmell,
909:s’il est « difficile de déterminer les commencements du Soufisme dans l’Islam », c’est que, traditionnellement, il n’a et ne peut avoir d’autre « commencement » que celui de l’Islam lui-même, et c’est dans des questions de ce genre qu’il conviendrait tout particulièrement de se méfier des abus de la moderne « méthode historique ». ~ Ren Gu non,
910:When you write a scene where somebody is afraid of something you instantly go to decades of genre cinema: horror, suspense, and thrillers. Those are very cinematic genres, when you shoot a close-up of someone and you can see fear in the person's face, or anticipation, or some kind of anxiety, it's a very cinematic image. ~ Kleber Mendonca Filho,
911:I do think we've looked at this film [Doctor Strange] not with any direct genre comparison but as a play on the supernatural genre. Certainly more so than we've done in the past, which is what makes his journey from person that doesn't wear a cape to person who does wear a cape - cloak, much more unique than we've seen in the past. ~ Kevin Feige,
912:I describe me sound as international: reggae, pop, rap, R&B all in one. I think I have my own style. I can't really even describe it. People say, "What type of genre is your music?" It's Sean Kingston genre. I have my own genre. No disrespect to no artist or dudes out there. I feel like I am my own person. I am doing my own thing. ~ Sean Kingston,
913:People tell me I'm in a genre kind of movie, but it never crossed my mind that The Matrix was genre. To me it was about, for me anyway, my character, I had this rock outside my door which said "faith" or "believe" or something, and I remember felt like that was my key into her, into Trinity. It was like she was the heart of it. ~ Carrie Anne Moss,
914:A scientific autobiography belongs to a most awkward literary genre. If the difficulties facing a man trying to record his life are great - and few have overcome them successfully - they are compounded in the case of scientists, of whom many lead monotonous and uneventful lives and who, besides, often do not know how to write . . . ~ Erwin Chargaff,
915:I think that a lot of the time I don't go for something in particular. I see what comes to me, I filter it out. I never really strive to play a particular character or do a particular genre of film. As long as it's a good script and a great range of people and my character is really interesting I can't see any reason not to do it. ~ Asa Butterfield,
916:And our experience in England was that. It was a delight. I had never even been to England and I got to spend five months there in a beautiful estate and just party with these gorgeous men and women and poke fun at their beloved genre, which they all loved. We teased it, but it's so gentle, that you're still swept away the whole time. ~ Jerusha Hess,
917:Our whole mission is about breaking the rules. Cibo Matto doesn't fit into any one genre and when people ask about what kind of genre is it, it's hard to say. We try to do a lot of stuff. People like to categorize, basically. So we always have trouble giving an answer. Pop music has a lot of different elements of music. Even polka too. ~ Miho Hatori,
918:There's something about the sci-fi genre that gets an audience interested in it, so maybe you can take some risks that you couldn't, if you were just doing a drama. It lets you maybe reach a little further and surprise people a little bit more because there's still that little safety base of working on that genre that everybody loves. ~ Rian Johnson,
919:Although The Terminator is arguably the more visionary of the first two films, [Terminator 2] is the more visually and viscerally satisfying. It's an exhausting experience and, even 18 years after its release (as I write this review), few films have matched it within the science fiction genre for sheer white-knuckle exhilaration. ~ James Berardinelli,
920:I’d spend hours in HMVs, Virgin Megastores and second-hand record shops staffed by greasy-haired 40-year-olds dressed as 20-year-olds, listening to contemporary music of every genre – Britrock, heavy maiden, gang rap, brakebeat. And I came to a startling but unshakeable conclusion: no genuinely good music has been created since 1988. ~ Alan Partridge,
921:A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged. ~ William Gibson,
922:Good writing is good writing. In many ways, it’s the audience and their expectations that define a genre. A reader of literary fiction expects the writing to illuminate the human condition, some aspect of our world and our role in it. A reader of genre fiction likes that, too, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the story. ~ Rosemary Clement Moore,
923:It's a tract against capital punishment in the genre of Swift's Modest Proposal. I was simply following a formula to its logical conclusion. Some people appear to have understood it. The publication of Naked Lunch in England practically coincided with their abolition of capital punishment. The book obviously had a certain effect. ~ William S Burroughs,
924:... c'est peut-être ça la vie : beaucoup de désespoir mais aussi quelques moments de beauté où le temps n'est plus le même. C'est comme si les notes de musique faisaient un genre de parenthèses dans le temps, de supension, un ailleurs ici même, un toujours dans le jamais.

Oui, c'est ça, un toujours dans le jamais. ~ Muriel Barbery,
925:If any city was a study in noir et blanc—be it black-and-white photography, film, or literature—Paris was it. The French versions of all three techniques were born during the Age of Romanticism. So was the concept of the daredevil avenger-antihero of the noir crime novel genre, the so-called polar, a Parisian specialty I learned to love. ~ David Downie,
926:I get emails from students at programs all over the country who want to transfer to Iowa, and in most cases their frustrations have absolutely nothing to do with the programs they're attending. They have to do with the growing pains that they're undergoing as writers and with the growing pains that our own genre is constantly undergoing. ~ John D Agata,
927:The paranormal genre does not require vampires, werewolves, or fey. It only requires a hidden supernatural underbelly to the real world as we know it. Urban fantasy is another variation of the paranormal genre, featuring similar themes and elements but amidst the backdrop of a metropolitan area. Paranormal stories can take place anywhere. ~ Emlyn Chand,
928:The superhero genre speaks to a vast swath of humanity these days, and studios are in the business of constantly renewing their money-printing licenses. I sense we're nearing a saturation point with some of these icons, where it becomes more about the action figures and Happy Meals than it does the mythological heartbeat of the core ideas. ~ Mark Frost,
929:He liked fiction better than fact, because fact often wasn’t. Like most people he knew a couple of things for sure, up close and eyeballed, and when he saw them in books they were wrong. So he liked made-up stories better, because everyone knew where they were from the get-go. He wasn’t strict about genre. Either shit happened, or it didn’t. ~ Lee Child,
930:I do love science fiction, but it's not really a genre unto itself; it always seems to merge with another genre. With the few movies I've done, I've ended up playing with genre in some way or another, so any genre that's made to mix with others is like candy to me. It allows you to use big, mythic situations to talk about ordinary things. ~ Rian Johnson,
931:My tastes range all over the place, from vocal standards to Motown to 70s funk & soul to 80s pop to film scores to artists like R.E.M., Ben Folds, Prince, Annie Lennox, the Police, Elvis Costello, Cat Stevens, the Ditty Bops, local bands that friends of mine are in, and the list goes on... I have no single favorite genre or artist. ~ Stephanie D Abruzzo,
932:I've always been a sci-fi geek, and I've always loved it. It's my favorite genre of all. The irony of ironies is that, in my early career, I just really never worked in it. "Star Trek" was very interested in me, partially because I did "From the Earth to the Moon," and I was really interested in them, but the timing just never worked out. ~ Remi Aubuchon,
933:The goal with me, and the way I challenge myself as an actor, is to go from genre to genre. I like that. A lot of actors always challenge themselves. But for me the challenge lies not only in getting better, but going from drama to comedy to action or whatever the case may be, and having a wide array of movies in terms of my filmography. ~ Dwayne Johnson,
934:You used to have to make a choice. Is it a serialized television show, or is it a stand-alone or procedural? We were wildly influenced by The X-Files. Even when we created Fringe, it was the same thing. It's the gold standard of all gold standards, in genre television, and it was so wonderful because you felt so much for those characters. ~ Alex Kurtzman,
935:If I were to put the current state of the science fiction genre into SF terms, it would be a space ship under attack. I won’t say which ship I’m thinking of, because this introduction would quickly dissolve into insufferable megafans arguing about whether or not the Enterprise could take down an Imperial Star Destroyer (no way in hell). ~ Milo Yiannopoulos,
936:I watched a lot of silent directors who were absolutely great like John Ford and Fritz Lang, Tod Browning, and also some very modern directors like The Coen Brothers. The directors take the freedom within their own movies to be melodramatic or funny when they chose to be. They do whatever they want and they don't care about the genre. ~ Michel Hazanavicius,
937:There's no denying that the way horror has been packaged in the past has done it no favours. Lurid black covers adorned with skulls, corpses crawling with insects and scantily clad maidens being chewed into by vampires -- all good clean fun, but it doesn't do much to give the genre an air of respectability or seriousness to the casual browser. ~ Tim Lebbon,
938:Fantasy is my favorite genre for reading and writing. We have more options than anyone else, and the best props and special effects. That means if you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. ~ Patrick Rothfuss,
939:What bother me, not "bother me," exactly; that's not the right way to put it. But especially in the horror genre, once a movie like Paranormal Activity comes out and becomes popular - and that's a totally fine and valid movie - everyone starts copying it. Everything becomes a found-footage movie that looks like somebody shot it with their phone. ~ Rob Zombie,
940:Anthony Ryan is a new fantasy author destined to make his mark on the genre. His debut novel, Blood Song, certainly has it all: great coming of age tale, compelling character, and a fast-paced plot. If his first book is any indication of things to come, then all fantasy readers should rejoice as a new master storyteller has hit the scene. ~ Michael J Sullivan,
941:I don't think you can take a whole genre of very popular books and say, "This is all trash!" When we read a memoir that isn't by a celebrity, we feel like we're about to go on a journey and we don't know where the journey will lead. But when we read a memoir by a celebrity we feel like we already know the journey and we just want to travel it. ~ Hilary Liftin,
942:My favorite term for a new kind of performance is "security theater." In this genre, we watch as ritualized inspections and patdowns create the illusion of security. It's a form that has become common since 9/11, and even the government agencies that participate in this activity acknowledge,off the record, that it is indeed a species of theater. ~ David Byrne,
943:There are things that are about the entire genre, so it's weird when you look on Wikipedia and people say, "The scene where Angel grabs his fist is from Superman II," and you're thinking, "Ummm, no it's not." Or, "There's a shot from Matrix Revolutions." I'm thinking, "I've only seen Matrix Revolutions once, and will never watch it ever again." ~ Edgar Wright,
944:There are very real differences between science fiction and realistic fiction, between horror and fantasy, between romance and mystery. Differences in writing them, in reading them, in criticizing them. Vive les différences! They're what gives each genre its singular flavor and savor, its particular interest for the reader - and the writer. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,
945:What is genre?...Just recently Teresa Nielsen Hayden told me it wasn't actually telling you what to look at, where to go. It was telling you what aisles not to bother going down. Which I thought was astonishingly perceptive. There are too many books out there... That's the simplicity of book shelving in bookstores. It tells you what not to read. ~ Neil Gaiman,
946:I think as consumers Europeans are a lot more artist loyal irrespective of the genre of music or the type of project or the collaborative effort, and Americans are more media-loyal, because they need to be fed that media to know what's going on, because we're so inundated with promotion and marketing and everything that's going on - advertising. ~ Serj Tankian,
947:Storytelling is more like a skin. You start with the outermost layer, what it's going to look like, then you kind of get deeper into it. What's actually going on beneath the surface is not really dictated by or related to the surface genre. It's more about what's going to happen between the characters and what's taking place in the story. ~ Charlie Jane Anders,
948:For me it's about the character, not as much about the genre of it [movie]. I'm excited that I get to work and play interesting characters and I'm not just the girl who gets to play the girlfriend or the wife. I get to play real women who have struggles and troubles and passions and that's always what I hope to do no matter what format that lies in. ~ Ali Larter,
949:I've always said if I came up with a story that wasn't fear based that I was passionate about, that I would explore it. It's just that for as long as I can remember when I sit down in front of a piece of paper it's usually something scary in my head that I end up spilling out. So until that changes, yeah I love the genre and really believe in it. ~ Bryan Bertino,
950:The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction. ~ Susan Sontag,
951:Aaron Spelling was a huge fan of vampires, and everything in that genre. He just really loved the entire subject of vampires and he was really passionate about it. If you really like the idea of this other world and the intricacies of it, because there were a lot of them, and once you're hooked, it's always something that's a fascination to you. ~ Brigid Brannagh,
952:I came from advertising. For me it's about protecting the director's vision. That's always the goal. There's keeping things on budget and on time and dealing with selling the movie so that to me is a focus. But also it's about serving the script. We are genre filmmakers, those are the films we love to make, so my perspective is a little different. ~ Charles Roven,
953:I don't like to put tags on my music. I leave that to others. Seems like some people see me as the founder of "space disco", although that's a bit weird since there were lots of music from the late 70s and early 80s that easily fits into this genre. I can understand why we need genres, but I don't feel comfortable using any on my own music. ~ Hans Peter Lindstrom,
954:Today, fantasy is, for better or for worse, just another genre, a place in a bookshop to find books that, too often, remind one of far too many other books; it is an irony, and not entirely a pleasant one, that what should be, by definition, the most imaginative of all types of literature has become so staid, and, too often, downright unimaginative. ~ Neil Gaiman,
955:I'd like to get into the superhero genre. I'd love to do either a DC or a Marvel character. I just love the way they're approaching these characters in these films. I also would love to get back into some romantic films. I love romance films, especially between people of color, because we don't really explore that enough. I would love to do that. ~ Dennis Haysbert,
956:Mention the gothic, and many readers will probably picture gloomy castles and an assortment of sinister Victoriana. However, the truth is that the gothic genre has continued to flourish and evolve since the days of Bram Stoker, producing some of its most interesting and accomplished examples in the 20th century - in literature, film and beyond. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon,
957:The story [for the western genre] is everything. Whether it's a book or a screenplay, the story drives everything. And if you just go out and try to make one by putting on boots and jumping on a horse and riding off... If you don't have the material, the characters and the things to overcome and conflicts that give life to drama, you don't have it. ~ Clint Eastwood,
958:When I started playing solo 10 years ago, I had some ham-fisted idea about trying to subvert the "singer-songwriter" tag/genre, and I tried to obscure my identity into the identity of a collective or band or whatever. That's part of the reason that I used to play with backing tapes and why so much of my early stuff was so awash in tape hiss and echo noise. ~ Ted Leo,
959:You ever hear guys with small cocks talk about sex? Can't talk about it enough. They even got poems. They'll say, 'It's not the motion of the ocean, it's the boat of the lotion.' I've even heard variants..., it's not the tree or the size, it's the axe that you wax.' It's a whole sub-genre of poetry now that's taught in many of our finer institutions. ~ Norm MacDonald,
960:I'm not particularly an expert on the genre. Correct me if I'm wrong, but usually you see most of the super-villain in his villainous role. He's the Green Goblin, or whatever various bad guys in Batman, or something like that. It's the excessive, larger than life, cartoon-ish, costumed character that is the personification of evil and has to be destroyed. ~ James Frain,
961:Your thoughts turned from a romantic comedy to a psychological suspense. A genre switch. What a joke. Wedged in-between all of the good memories were dark slivers: fights, text messages, dissonance. You remembered how lonely you’d been feeling, and the dark slivers became more pronounced. They pushed apart the good memories until they stood on their own. ~ Tarryn Fisher,
962:Q: What genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

A: I love reading anything about gigantic animate blobs of molten iron who secretly long to be concert pianists. It’s not a particularly well-populated genre, but in particular I’d mention, “Grog, Who Loved Chopin,” as well as the somewhat derivative “Clom, Big Fan of Mozart. ~ George Saunders,
963:What is fantastic for me is that the Romantic movement comes out as a counter balance to everything that has been accumulating since the Age of Reason. I think the downfall of imagination as a genre or as a perception starts with the Age of Reason, which says everything else that came before us, all those superstitions, all those myths, are childish. ~ Guillermo del Toro,
964:Each genre has its own process. I'm very intuitive about poetry. I usually write first and second drafts out by hand. The other end of the spectrum is journalism, which is much more cerebral, more thought-out and planned. Fiction lies somewhere in between. I usually start intuitively but eventually I need to stop and consider structure, or research, or both. ~ Achy Obejas,
965:I'd love to do a Paul Greengrass movie, or something like that, that's a character-driven action film. I'd like someone to make me go to the gym every day, and all that stuff. I don't know. Wherever the good characters are, I tend to try to get a job. It was nice because this was dipping my toe in the action genre. Maybe I might put my foot in, next time. ~ Carey Mulligan,
966:No matter what though, there's always rock & roll. There's rock 'n' roll in hip-hop, there's rock & roll in pop music, there's rock 'n' roll in soul, there's rock 'n' roll in country. When you see people dress and their style has an edge to it, that rebellious edge that bubbles up in every genre, that's rock & roll. Everybody still wants to be a rock star. ~ John Varvatos,
967:People always say, "What do you want to do next, what kind of movie do you want to do next?" And I say, "I wanna do whatever script that is the best one that comes my way." I certainly would never say, "Oh, I'm gonna do a Western next," and sit around waitin' for a Western to come along when there's some other genre's brilliant script sitting right there. ~ Christian Bale,
968:The great thing about television is that you get to tell, like with "The Walking Dead", 16 hours worth of character-driven storytelling in less time than it takes to make a feature film. So, it really is a medium at least for storytellers who are passionate about not only the genre but also the character-driven genre stories. It's probably a better medium. ~ Gale Anne Hurd,
969:There's no question about it. Beaumarie St. Claire and I, we created Irish DreamTime after GoldenEye hit. We made movies like Thomas Crown and The Matador. And in between my stints as James Bond, I'd go off and I'd do something like The Matador or Tailor of Panama, which was spy related, just so I could shake it up. It's a genre which really appeals to me. ~ Pierce Brosnan,
970:I gravitate towards anything that feels challenging to me, that feels like it's gonna be saying something a bit different and new to the audience, and anything that moves me. I do movies that I would want to see, so I don't necessarily gravitate towards any genre in particular. I just try and do the best work I can and also try to keep the audience guessing. ~ David Oyelowo,
971:Cinema – all art really – has great power. Power to illuminate. Power to transform. For those of us who experience film as literature, classic movies comprised an introductory education in the genre. As kids, many of us went searching through library shelves for obscure source novels after seeing some old movie or other. It was the start of many an adventure. ~ Robert Dunbar,
972:Gay is a subculture, a slur, a set of gestures, a slang, a look, a posture, a parade, a rainbow flag, a film genre, a taste in music, a hairstyle, a marketing demographic, a bumper sticker, a political agenda and philosophical viewpoint. Gay is a pre-packaged, superficial persona-a lifestyle. It's a sexual identity that has almost nothing to do with sexuality. ~ Jack Donovan,
973:Journeys up the Metaphoric River are hugely enjoyable and highly recommended. Since every genre is nourished by its heady waters, a paddle steamer can take even the most walk-shy tourists to their chosen destination. As a bonus, there is traditionally at least one murder on board each trip--a "consideration" to the head steward will ensure that it is not you. ~ Jasper Fforde,
974:My music doesn't really sound like punk music, it's acoustic. And it doesn't really sound like folk music 'cause I'm thrashing too hard and emoting a little too much for the sort of introspective, respectful, sort-of folk genre thing. I'm really into punk and folk as music that comes out of communities and is very genuine and very immediate and not commercial. ~ Ani DiFranco,
975:I got an email from my dad after the Super Bowl, and he was like, "Will you send me all of the Beyoncé Knowles songs that you have on your computer?" I'm like, "You never listen to Beyoncé. I'm so excited right now." It's good to embrace new things. I like when I can show people that it's not all one genre, and everything is very much inspired by everything else. ~ Caitlin Rose,
976:I have always liked reading biographies. It is the ideal literary genre for someone too prim, like me, to acknowledge a gossipy interest in the living - don't you hate gossips, aren't they too awful? - but avid for any nuggets from the private lives of the dead because that is perfectly respectable, an altogether worthy and informative way of spending one's time. ~ Jill Tweedie,
977:Singling out “women’s fiction” for genre derision never fails to piss me off. Somehow worse when women do it. Case in pt: Editor says crowd-sourcing editorial for romance & erotica not bad idea b/c “no great artistry at stake” Yes, genre fiction not high art. But it’s a craft we take seriously, writing for love of storytelling, not writing whatever sells. ~ Kelley Armstrong,
978:Je hais, pour ma part, ces systèmes absolus, qui font dépendre tous les événements de l’histoire de quelques causes premières se liant les unes aux autres par une chaîne fatale, et qui suppriment, pour ainsi dire, les hommes de l’histoire du genre humain. Je les trouve étroits dans leur prétendue grandeur, et faux sous leurs airs de vérités mathématiques. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville,
979:Nous voyons, même de nos jours, que les gouvernements qui se conduisent le mieux sont ceux dont on parle le moins. Nous ne savons donc que le mal ; à peine le bien fait-il époque. Il n'y a que les méchants de célèbres, les bons sont oubliés ou tournés en ridicule : et voilà comment l'histoire, ainsi que la philosophie, calomnie sans cesse le genre humain. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau,
980:I never had a problem with genre because a genre actually is like a uniform - you put yourself into a certain uniform. But if you dress up in a police officer's uniform, it doesn't mean that you are an officer; it can mean something else. But this is the starting point, and the best way is to not to fit into this uniform but to make this uniform a part of yourself. ~ Wong Kar wai,
981:When Job lifted his face to the Storm, when he asked and was answered, he learned that he was very small. He learned that his life was a story. He spoke with the Author, and learned that the genre had not been an accident. God tells stories that make Sunday school teachers sweat and mothers write their children permission slips excusing them from encountering reality. ~ N D Wilson,
982:For generations, field guides to plants and animals have sharpened the pleasure of seeing by opening our minds to understanding. Now John Adam has filled a gap in that venerable genre with his painstaking but simple mathematical descriptions of familiar, mundane physical phenomena. This is nothing less than a mathematical field guide to inanimate nature. ~ Hans Christian von Baeyer,
983:I wrote, I think, half a dozen films that were completely out of genre. Comedies, love stories, even one serious film about Vietnam, and we couldn't get backing for any of it. And we both sort of drifted from making, at that time, serious money on Last House to going through it all in the course of almost three years and only getting offers to do something scary again. ~ Wes Craven,
984:Je hais, pour ma part, ces systèmes absolus, qui font dépendre tous les événements de l’histoire de quelques causes premières se liant les unes aux autres par une chaîne fatale, et qui
suppriment, pour ainsi dire, les hommes de l’histoire du genre humain. Je les trouve étroits dans leur prétendue grandeur, et faux sous leurs airs de vérités mathématiques. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville,
985:Would-be novelists need to bring equal parts arrogance and ignorance to the task before them. The arrogance is almost self-explanatory. Walk into any bookstore or library, calculate how many lifetimes the average person would need to read all the fiction contained therein. To think that one has anything to contribute, to any genre or tradition, takes genuine hubris. ~ Laura Lippman,
986:I listen to all those kinds of music, from classic soul to hip-hop to Brazilian music to, you know, jazz to indie to alternative... And for me, when I'm making music, it's all in my head, and all those influences in my head. So if something comes to me that's a reference from a different genre then people are used to hearing from me, I'm not afraid to go there with it. ~ John Legend,
987:I really feel our job as actors is to find a human experience in the character. So, for me, genre comes second; it's about script and the emotional journey of that character. Genre definitely has an impact, but it has more of an impact on the way the character is expressed. We all have the same core emotions of love, jealousy, rage - it's just how they're expressed. ~ Sophie Cookson,
988:Yes, to me that's one of the most compelling fears in film noir and the psychological thriller genre - that fear of conspiracy. It's definitely something that I have a fear of - not being in control of your own life. I think that's something people can relate to, and those genres are most successful when they derive the material from genuine fears that people have. ~ Christopher Nolan,
989:From his style, you’d think Jason Brannon was the dark double of Ray Bradbury. He cares more about character and realism than most writers I’ve read and his plots flow like well-orchestrated music. Indeed, Brannon’s writing has a classical feel, reminiscent of the best traditional work in the genre, even when he’s going for gut-wrenching terror and torture in-extremis. ~ Michael Arnzen,
990:It does no good to run. And it does no good to hide. But I know what it's like. Your brain shuts down, and you follow your instincts. Or, at least, you think you do. But you know what you're really doing? When you flee through the night, or crawl into your little bolt-hole? You know what's really guiding you? Controlling you? Pushing you on? Genre conventions. ~ Mike Carey,
991:I swear, I have really tried to care about genres or categories, but I find myself sadly unable to do so. I will enjoy anything, anything, as long as it comes written in language that is personal to the point of idiosyncratic, euphonious, revealing and precise. I avoid any kind of writing that doesn’t fill these requirements. I don’t care which genre it belongs to. ~ Juan Gabriel V squez,
992:The Booker thing was a catalyst for me in a bizarre way. It’s perceived as an accolade to be published as a ‘literary’ writer, but, actually, it’s pompous and it’s fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself. I’d always read omnivorously and often thought much literary fiction is read by young men and women in their 20s, as substitutes for experience. ~ Neil Cross,
993:In America, even the critics - which is a pity - tend to genre-ize things. They have a hard time when genres get mixed. They want to categorize things. That's why I love Wes Anderson's films and the Coen Brothers, because you don't know what you're going to get, and very often you get something that you don't expect and that's just what a genre's not supposed to do. ~ Francis Ford Coppola,
994:The only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving toward genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn’t SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my argument by writing well”). ~ Zadie Smith,
995:Women’s fiction is a subset of the larger genres contemporary or literary fiction—it all depends on how you tell your story, and we’ll discuss style more in the following chapter. On the lighthearted side of this genre, you have “chick lit” like Bridget Jones’s Diary, and on the more serious side, you have the works of Nicholas Sparks and—my personal favorite—Liane Moriarty. ~ Emlyn Chand,
996:I don't record (any type of genre of music) that I didn't hear in my family's living room by the time I was 10. It just is my rule that I don't break because ... I can't do it authentically ... I really think that you're just hard-wiring (synapses) in your brain up until the age of maybe 12 or 10, and there are certain things you can't learn in an authentic way after that. ~ Linda Ronstadt,
997:There is a little bit of a head vs. heart kind of battle that happens sometimes with the song. There's the goose bump thing, where the melody or whatever it is just gets you and you don't know why. Sometimes, it's in a genre that you didn't think you liked and, all of a sudden, the song hits you and you just say, wow, I feel the hairs on the back of my neck. I love this song. ~ Josh Groban,
998:How to make a scary movie human, take a movie like Sinister. How can I make that guy so real so that the scary elements of it are more scary and it functions as a genre movie - as the way it's supposed to, you want to hear a ghost story at midnight, that's a good one - but how do you fill it up with humanity inside, in staying true to the genre? You know? Does that make sense? ~ Ethan Hawke,
999:They [academy writing programs] have no concept that the world has changed, that publishing has changed, that filmmaking has changed, and if you're not constantly looking at your education model and adjusting for the change, you'll find yourself teaching antiquity. Like all of these programs that won't accept students who are writing genre fiction - what an institutional ego! ~ Tod Goldberg,
1000:Why should it be any surprise that people find solace in the most intimate literary genre? Poetry slows us down, cherishes small details. A large disaster erases those details. We need poetry for nourishment and for noticing, for the way language and imagery reach comfortably into experience, holding and connecting it more successfully than any news channel we could name. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye,
1001:Quand j'arrive à la gare de l'Est, j'espère toujours secrètement qu'il y aura quelqu'un pour m'attendre. C'est con. J'ai beau savoir que ma mère est encore au boulot à cette heure-là et que Marc est pas du genre à traverser la banlieue pour porter mon sac, j'ai toujours cet espoir débile. [...] Je voudrais que quelqu'un m'attende quelque part... C'est quand même pas compliqué. ~ Anna Gavalda,
1002:When you're have known to do voice-overs for Justice League or Legion of Super Heroes or DC/Marvel, you're kind of on that radar. When you do a ton of Star Treks over your career, then you're kind of on that radar in a way. But that doesn't mean you're going to continue getting that type of work. It just means when you do that type of work, you're more firmly tied to that genre. ~ Phil Morris,
1003:As a horror movie fan, I was very obsessed with horror films. Still am. I love the genre. For me, horror films are opera, and they are... instead of consumption killing off the young lovers, it's Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers. It is when the stakes are at their absolute largest in a story: whether somebody is going to live or die. In a way, it's just holding up a mirror to life. ~ Bryan Fuller,
1004:People who make snide comments to authors like "anyone can write a book" or "well, you did it, so obviously I can/it can't be that hard" or poke at a book because it's "romance" or "genre fiction" and act like that somehow makes it substandard because they don't read it... well, ok, go ahead. Write a bestseller. Don't forget to go through the correct edit process. We'll wait. ~ Michelle M Pillow,
1005:There's a thing I really mind hearing, when someone says: "That's not my kind of film, I don't want to go and see that..." I don't believe that, I don't believe that it's possible to write off a whole genre of filmmaking - "oh I don't like subtitled films", or "I don't like black and white films", or I don't like films made before or after, a certain date" - I don't believe that. ~ Tilda Swinton,
1006:Science fiction invites the writer to grandly explore alternative worlds and pose questions about meaning and destiny. Inventing plausible new realities is what the genre is all about. One starts from a hypothesis and then builds out the logic, adding detail and incident to give substance to imaginary structures. In that respect, science fiction and theology have much in common. ~ Lawrence Wright,
1007:I make some movies for myself. I do that sometimes when the subject matter is very sensitive and very personal and I really can't imagine that I'm an audience member. I would lose myself too much if I thought of myself as the audience. There are other types of genre films that I need to be able to direct from the audience, to be right next to you watching the picture being made. ~ Steven Spielberg,
1008:Pour tout Européen du 19è siècle, (...), l'orientalisme était un système de vérités de ce genre, des vérités au sens donné par Nietzsche à ce mot [cf : "les vérités sont des illusions dont on a oublié qu'elles le sont"]. Il est donc exact que tout Européen, dans ce qu'il pouvait dire sur l'Orient, était, pour cette raison, raciste, impérialiste et presque totalement ethnocentriste. ~ Edward W Said,
1009:I do not know what might be the most fitting description.... I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner. And this is what I said when they asked me if I would accept my election as pontiff: I am a sinner, but I trust in the infinite mercy and patience of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I accept in a spirit of penance. ~ Pope Francis,
1010:The best advice that an accomplished writer could give a beginning writer is probably, "Find your slide and then grease it." Almost every writer that wants a rewarding career, in terms of money and status and number of readers, finally finds a certain genre or certain style that he or she sticks with until reaching a critical mass of readership. And I've violated this from the get-go. ~ Dan Simmons,
1011:The greatest thing about form and convention is that it saves you from having to reinvent the wheel. Now, whether you mount the wheel to a horse carriage or a Formula One racing car, make it plain or give it spinning rims, those are all craft decisions. But the fact of the wheel remains: it will turn if you set it down. That's what I mean about the beauty of the gifts genre can offer. ~ Chris Abani,
1012:...[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my arguments by writing well. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,
1013:It's really, really eclectic. It's not a business book [Girlboss], but it's still a book that should make you want to get up and do things and think about your life. And for a book that looks that beautiful on a coffee table, I think that's a very special thing. So it's hopefully a new genre I guess, of book. It was so fun to put together and fun to write, that was really a pleasure. ~ Sophia Amoruso,
1014:I had a lot of issues with the genre, and I probably even had issues with the whole idea of genre. I was coming into it with a certain degree of outsider attitude, and I didn't have a long-term plan. But I think the way it's worked out, it's sort of warped into what I suppose you could say is my own genre. If people like my books, they have some idea of what the next one will be like. ~ William Gibson,
1015:I love researching, whether it's old Western documentaries or old Western country singers or John Ford Westerns, which are heavily influenced by family values, which so many of these country songs are related to. I'm having a good time doing that, and writing some treatments and hoping to bring a new style of music video to the country genre, that is starting to become very poppy. ~ Clifton Collins Jr,
1016:Science fiction is a literature that belongs to all humankind. It portrays events of interest to all of humanity, and thus science fiction should be the literary genre most accessible to readers of different nations. Science fiction often describes a day when humanity will form a harmonious whole, and I believe the arrival of such a day need not wait for the appearance of extraterrestrials. ~ Liu Cixin,
1017:Dickens is a much misunderstood and mis-approached writer, in that he tends to be read, particularly in the twentieth century, as a social commentator - like the great Victorians, a realist in his way. But he isn't at all like that. His genre is actually more like a fairy tale - weird transformations, long voyages from which people come back altered, parental mysteries, semi-magical twists. ~ Martin Amis,
1018:Especially in entertainment geared toward young people, the women are much stronger than they used to be. There's not really the damsel in distress anymore. I think the stereotype still possibly lives in different genre pictures but, in entertainment for the younger generation, they're used to women being equal and being strong. I think if you don't portray that, it would be kind of weird. ~ Jessica Alba,
1019:I hate to see great works of literature ghettoized, whereas others that conform to the rules, conventions, and procedures of the genre we call literary fiction get accorded greater esteem and privilege. I also have a problem with how books are marketed, with certain cover designs and typefaces. They're often stamped with an identity that has nothing to do with their effect on the reader. ~ Michael Chabon,
1020:I have seen authors saying their agents have told them to change their genre to another. For instances, YA genre is re-classified as historical romance or Contemporary Romance is now Women's Fiction to fit market trends. It's important for authors to be flexible, but they should keep writing what they love to write. Writing is a profession, I understand, but it is also an art. Be true to it. ~ Kailin Gow,
1021:Science fiction is a literature that belongs to all humankind. It portrays events of interest to all of humanity, and thus science fiction should be the literary genre most accessible to readers of different nations. Science fiction often describes a day when humanity will form a harmonious whole, and I believe the arrival of such a day need not wait for the appearance of extraterrestrials. I ~ Liu Cixin,
1022:Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel. If you are writing a plot-driven genre novel make sure all your major themes/plot elements are introduced in the first third, which you can call the introduction. Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development. Resolve your themes, mysteries and so on in the final third, the resolution. ~ Michael Moorcock,
1023:There is a real problem with the lack of diversity, specifically in genre films and the superheroes our kids grow up watching and emulating, they can't really identify with. When you see the same thing, over and over again, and it seems not to speak of you and your heritage and your culture, it leaves you out of this world, a little bit. It gives a certain social distance with your world. ~ Djimon Hounsou,
1024:I personally feel that there's a lot of music journalism that is dominated by genre, because you need a language in which to write, but actually the things that strike people about music, are very hard to write about, and its sonic connections, it's a sense of harmony that I think we all have even if we don't know how to express it - it's something musical, it's synapse connections in our brain. ~ Ben Watt,
1025:I think I have always sort of cultivated a flowery writing style. I've always sort of over - written in every genre that I've attempted. I went to college and took a couple of writing classes and I remember my teachers were always incredibly encouraging. But it was inevitable to get the criticism: "Take it down a notch!" But the nice thing about screenwriting is that you don't really have to. ~ Diablo Cody,
1026:Well, part of it is the general fascination with the Amish. It's an extremely popular genre and Beverly Lewis just happens to have the market cornered. She is the bestselling author in this genre. We had actually optioned another one of her Amish books, The Redemption of Sarah Cain. We retitled it Saving Sarah Cain and it did extremely well for Lifetime so we pursued more of her novels. ~ Michael Landon Jr,
1027:One of the interesting things about the history of poetry in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries is that people who read liked getting their information in rhyme just as much as in prose. The genre that we would think of as nonfiction often was written in verse in forms like the Georgic when people thought that one of the tasks of poetry was conveying arguments and information in a pleasant way. ~ Robert Hass,
1028:But unfortunately, vampires lost some of their cultural panache, partly because the romantic vampire genre has portrayed so many bloodsuckers as merely harmlessly eccentric. This isn't to dis the romantic vampire—it's a trope for a reason—but the trope started to occupy the majority of headspace in fans’ minds. People forgot that vampires, as cool and sexy as they might sometimes be, are monsters. ~ C T Phipps,
1029:There are shows, a lot of small cable shows like Breaking Bad, where in the general population nobody watches them really, but everybody in Los Angeles in the industry watches them, and to get a small role on a show like that actually, in some respects, advances your career more than having a huge hit role on a genre show because they are somehow dismissed as a secondary market in this industry ~ Misha Collins,
1030:There was a time when I first started that there was such a thing called 'a woman's film' and there were certain scripts that women would make. But I think that's changed a lot now. I think that if a woman director walks into a room with a script, it doesn't really matter what the subject matter is, or the genre is, so long as the financers feel that the woman has the skills to make the film. ~ Gurinder Chadha,
1031:This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
1032:I had this whole issue of doing a crime film in the 2010s. The genre's been mined very, very heavily. Post-Scorsese, post-Tarantino, post-Guy Ritchie, what do you do? I wasn't attracted to pulp so much as all of a sudden I had a pulp problem. I had to find a way to make this interesting, because there's a lot of crime films that come out on VOD every week, and a number of these star Nicolas Cage. ~ Paul Schrader,
1033:OTHER BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR SO YOU WANT TO WRITE A BOOK? In this masterpiece of the how-to genre, Bob Odenkirk asks his readers questions such as You want to write a book? Really? Why? Wasn’t this one good enough for you? What about the other twenty billion books you can pick up for free at the library? Oh, I get it, none of them contain your life story. Are you sure? Have you checked? Double-check. ~ Bob Odenkirk,
1034:They used to be particularly hideous if they’d recently won a literary prize. Their dialogue was so powerful and impenetrable it didn’t require punctuation! So naturally they didn’t require permission to slip-slide their hairy hands over the body of a young writer of genre fiction. In their minds, Frances virtually owed them sex in return for her unseemly mass-market sales of “airport trash. ~ Liane Moriarty,
1035:Si je savais quelque chose qui me fût utile, et qui fût préjudiciable à ma famille, je la rejetterais de mon esprit. Si je savais quelque chose utile à ma famille et qui ne le fût pas à ma patrie, je chercherais à l’oublier. Si je savais quelque chose utile à ma patrie et qui fût préjudiciable au genre humain, je la regarderais comme un crime car je suis nécessairement homme et français que par hasard. ~ Montesquieu,
1036:Unfortunately it's hard for me to be a fanboy for anything these days just because I see so much music. And it's not a namedropping thing, but there's just not that many people in this certain small little genre world we live in that I don't know or am not acquainted with. And I like them all; I get along with pretty much everyone. It wouldn't be unusual to see a thousand collaborations at some point. ~ Bradford Cox,
1037:Bien que le rapprochement soit peut être bizarre, je pense ici à un autre fait qui a exactement la même cause : c’est la croyance à l’existence de certains monstres et animaux fantastiques, qui ne sont que d’anciens symboles incompris ; ainsi, je connais ici des gens qui croient fermement aux “hommes à tête de chien” ; l’“Histoire naturelle” de Pline est remplie de confusions du même genre
[Corr. AKC] ~ Ren Gu non,
1038:[Genre is] like working in any form—in poetry, for example. When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always—I think any poet who’s worked in form will agree with me—is that the form leads you to what you want to say. It is wonderful and mysterious. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,
1039:The only good thing in life is mystery. It keeps us pegging at information and makes us inquisitive. Mystery is a genre that appeals to everyone. Mystery is the essence of everything unknown and undefined. The way mystery can surge your adrenalin, not even the cutest face can. Mystery is everything you see, everything you feel. Mystery is the summation of everything.
Oh! What is life without mystery!!! ~ Alcatraz Dey,
1040:Very little in science fiction can transcend the gimmickry of a technical conceit, yet without that conceit at its heart a book is not truly science fiction. Furthermore, so little emerging thought and technology is employed by sf writers today that the genre is lagging far behind reality both in the cosmology area and the technology area: sf is no longer a place to experiment, but is now very derivative. ~ Janet Morris,
1041:I've often been accused of harnessing genre strategies to mainstream ends. I do concede that relationships, characters, and introspection are my primary interest. The fanciful is of a secondary order of importance; I usually use it to approach the large issue of perception, so that my fantastical elements, while intended as real within the stories, occupy some borderland between reality and psychology. ~ Karen Joy Fowler,
1042:As you see, I bear some resentment and some scars from the years of anti-genre bigotry. My own fiction, which moves freely around among realism, magical realism, science fiction, fantasy of various kinds, historical fiction, young adult fiction, parable, and other subgenres, to the point where much of it is ungenrifiable, all got shoved into the Sci Fi wastebasket or labeled as kiddilit - subliterature. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,
1043:Write from the heart, what has meaning to you personally; have the patience and discipline to sit down and do it every day whether you're feeling inspired or not; never be afraid to take chances, in fact, make sure you take chances. As soon as you become complacent, you become boring ... . Read as much as possible, not simply in the genre, or what you think you're interested in, but other things as well. ~ Charles de Lint,
1044:Le livre, comme livre, appartient à l'auteur, mais comme pensée, il appartient -le mot n'est pas trop vaste- au genre humain. Toutes les intelligences y ont droit. Si l'un des deux droits, le droit de l'écrivain et le droit de l'esprit humain, devait être sacrifié, ce serait, certes, le droit de l'écrivain, car l'intérêt public est notre préoccupation unique, et tous, je le déclare, doivent passer avant nous. ~ Victor Hugo,
1045:Well, I think there was a time when I first started that there was such a thing called 'a woman's film' and there were certain scripts that women would make. But I think that's changed a lot now. I think that if a woman director walks into a room with a script, it doesn't really matter what the subject matter is, or the genre is, so long as the financiers feel that the woman has the skills to make the film. ~ Gurinder Chadha,
1046:Die Hard represents the class of modern action pictures and the standard by which they must be judged. Few films falling into the "mindless entertainment" genre have as much going for them as this movie. Not only is it a thrill-a-minute ride, but it has one of the best film villains in recent memory, a hero everyone can relate to, dialogue that crackles with wit, and a lot of very impressive pyrotechnics. ~ James Berardinelli,
1047:I really wanted to do a comedy. I've done a lot of drama, and comedy was the one genre I was not being offered. So I became obsessive about getting one. I tried with two little parts in comedies that were more mainstream, I was kind of fumbling around, and then I read The Brothers Bloom and knew it was the one I wanted to jump into. Did it take adjusting? Actually, it's not really any different from doing drama. ~ Rachel Weisz,
1048:Over the years more than one friend or acquaintance had asked Tricia why she was so enamored of the mystery genre. How could she actually enjoy stories that celebrated violent death? They had it all wrong. The books didn't celebrate death, but triumph for justice. Too often real-life villains got away with murder, but in fiction, justice was usually assured.

Sometimes she wished life better imitated art. ~ Lorna Barrett,
1049:I challenged myself to write/direct a romantic comedy. People trash talk the rom com, but it's one of the oldest cinematic genres, with stellar origins like Twentieth Century and Trouble in Paradise. I think as audiences lost their innocence, the genre lost its suspense. To create suspense, you need obstacles, so I gave my couple an obstacle that very few people ever overcome: their own behavior and their past. ~ Leslye Headland,
1050:It's like with Smallville, I'm sure those creators didn't know I had done a ton of Star Trek work. I was just the right guy for the job. Do I gravitate towards it? You do what you are best suited to do, so in me being a comic book fan and a fan of genre from my father being in Mission: Impossible and the spy genre and all that, when I go to audition, perhaps I have a leg up because I understand the universe better. ~ Phil Morris,
1051:Apotheosis (from Greek ἀποθέωσις from ἀποθεοῦν, apotheoun to deify; in Latin deificatio making divine; also called divinization and deification) is the glorification of a subject to divine level. The term has meanings in theology, where it refers to a belief, and in art, where it refers to a genre. this seems particularily important relative to define, which seems to be attempt at the highest potential of the word.
   ~ Wikipedia,
1052:Take the time you need to learn the craft. Then sit down and write. When you hand over your completed manuscript to a trusted reader, keep an open mind. Edit, edit, and edit again. After you have written a great query letter, go to AgentQuery.com. This site is an invaluable resource that lists agents in your genre. Submit, accept rejection as part of the process, and submit again. And, of course, never give up. ~ Kathleen Grissom,
1053:Arnold Rampersad's stunningly revealing biography has, at long last, unveiled-in magisterial prose-the very complex and vulnerable man behind Ralph Ellison's own masks and myths. One of the nation's most brilliant writers emerges as all the more fascinating precisely because he was so very human. Painstakingly researched and compellingly written, Ralph Ellison is a masterwork of the genre of literary biography. ~ Henry Louis Gates,
1054:That's always been the process of our music, in a sense, keeping it simple, not being so heavy that you are beating people over the head, it's just weighted down and it's like, "oohhh I can't relate." People are able to relate because we talked about things that everyone has experienced, it doesn't matter your race or genre. Music was your mainstay. There was something in our element of music that connected. ~ Ali Shaheed Muhammad,
1055:Dreadful fire at Reiver’s Rest,”’ she intoned with relish. ‘“Poor” – it’s Cara, isn’t it, madam? – “Poor Cara tragically lost. Staying in Gatehouse to comfort poor mother.”’ And so on. It became clear that the telegram was not her natural genre, but I managed in the end to remove most of the adverbs and settle on ‘perished’ as an acceptable midway point between her eulogies and my apparently shocking bluntness. ~ Catriona McPherson,
1056:This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got. ~ Toni Morrison,
1057:I would give them (aspiring writers) the oldest advice in the craft: Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You've heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night. ~ Khaled Hosseini,
1058:I'd met Harrison Ford before, but he was just finishing a meet with Jon Favreau and the other producers on the film, and we said "hello" as he walked out and I walked in and sat down and had this meeting with those guys. They basically described what they were looking for, and they thought that I brought a certain amount of authenticity to the genre, and would I want to take part? And I said, "Absolutely! I'd love to!" ~ Keith Carradine,
1059:Il y a là une différence qui est un peu du même genre que celle que nous avons signalée, pour la Chine, entre la langue écrite et la langue parlée : l’arabe littéral seul peut présenter toute la fixité qui est requise pour remplir le rôle de langue traditionnelle tandis que l’arabe vulgaire, comme toute autre langue servant à l’usage courant, subit naturellement certaines variations suivant les époques et suivant les régions. ~ Ren Gu non,
1060:I'm always loath to make generalizations about what is for children and what isn't. Certainly children's literature as a genre has some restrictions, so certain things will never pop up in a Snicket book. But I didn't know anything about writing for children when I started - this is the theme of naïveté creeping up on us once more - and I sort of still don't, and I'm happy that adults are reading them as well as children. ~ Daniel Handler,
1061:Every once in a while a messy character who manifests a REAL body emerges, for instance, Lisbeth Salander - and certainly commercial genre fiction is full of examples of real bodied sexual encounters or violence encounters - but for the most part, and particularly if you are a woman or minority author, your characters' bodies have to fit a kind of norm inside a narrow set of narrative pre-ordained and sanctioned scripts. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch,
1062:Sunshine takes its intelligent and honourable place in the history of grownup science fiction on the screen and on the page: a genre that seeks to break free of parochialism and think about where and why and what we are without the language of religion... I loved Sunshine for its radical proposal that humans can and will do something about a catastrophe, and that our weapons could be used up in the service of preservation. ~ Peter Bradshaw,
1063:[SF] was a commercial genre born in the old adventure pulp magazines
of the first third of the twentieth century, aimed primarily at
adolescent males, which, over the decades, in fits and starts,
evolved into an intellectually credible, scientifically germane,
transcendental literature without losing its popular base.

Of what other literature in the history of the western world can
this truly be said? ~ Norman Spinrad,
1064:After a spate of parties that led to nothing but being threatened by some drunk white boys, and dozens of classes where not a single girl looked at him, he felt the optimism wane, and before he even realised what had happened he had buried himself in what amounted to the college version of what he'd majored in all throughout high school: getting no ass. His happiest moments were genre moments, like when Akira was released (1988). ~ Junot D az,
1065:I realized that I really, almost by accident, had fallen into a labyrinthine, very powerful paradigm for dealing with these things through genre films. And once I realized that and realized the power of it, and the fact that because horror films aren't, in general, studio products - studios back them sometimes, but they don't try to meddle too much, because they kind of don't want to sully their skirts - you have a lot of freedom. ~ Wes Craven,
1066:It turns out that the commonly used standard we cited above of interpreting the Bible through our plain sense, common sense, ordinary and usual meaning is an act of cultural prejudice. Our Western plain sense literalism is simply not the priority in a very symbolic genre of a different culture with a different plain sense than ours, different colloquialisms and memes than ours, and a different sense of what is ordinary and usual. ~ Brian Godawa,
1067:There’s another quote on the act of writing letters, have a look: Letter writing is a truly anachronistic genre, a sort of tardy inheritance of the eighteenth century; those who lived at that time believed in the pure truth of the written word. And we? Times have changed; words are lost with ever greater ease; you can see them float on the waters of history; sink, come up again, mixed in by the current with the water hyacinths. ~ Ricardo Piglia,
1068:When we come back to fantasy, I think we're actually coming back to the real bedrock of storytelling. Our national or international genre really is fantasy, if you think about the worldwide myths and legends and stories that we all know, whether we're talking about Little Red Riding Hood or the Arabian Nights or Noah's Ark or Hercules. These are stories that cross many cultures in much the same way that dragons cross many cultures. ~ Robin Hobb,
1069:Somehow this literary genre, which most people condemned, acted as a sort of counterbalance to Charles's soul; it was the ballast that prevented him from lurching into the serious or melancholy, unlike Andrew, who had been unable to adopt his cousin's casual attitude to life, and to whom everything seemed so achingly profound, imbed with that absurd solemnity that the transience of of existence conferred upon even the smallest act. ~ F lix J Palma,
1070:Why are murder mysteries so popular? There's a 3-part "formula" (if you want to call it that) for a genre novel: (1) Someone the reader likes and relates to (2) overcomes increasingly difficult obstacles (3) to reach an important goal. The more important the goal, the stronger the novel. And the most important goal that any of us have is survival. That's why murder mysteries are more gripping than a story titled "Who Stole My TV Set. ~ Lois Duncan,
1071:I've published over 100 books - and that is divided about 50/50 adult and young adult. Lately, I have been writing more YA, which is such a great genre to write it. I don't have a favourite (I usually say it's the last book I've written), but certain books do stick in the mind. My very first YA novel, The Children of Lir, will always be special to me, and, of course The Alchemyst because it was a series I'd wanted to write for ages. ~ Michael Scott,
1072:The Girl Who Stayed is also a book of the heart and I couldn’t be more thrilled to see its publication. In my twenty-six years of publishing, it’s my first major hardcover release and brings me full circle to work with Lou Aronica, whom I first had the pleasure of working with while at Avon Books. It’s also my very first non-genre novel, although you will find it a signature Tanya Anne Crosby read, filled with flawed characters, ~ Tanya Anne Crosby,
1073:As for whether genre considerations influence what I write, they don't at all, but I might sell more books if they did. The Night Journal is a hodge-podge of historical fiction, western, mystery, and contemporary domestic drama. It doesn't settle into a specific market, reviewers have a hard time describing it, and sometimes it gets classified weirdly in bookstores. But from a writer's standpoint, I like that it's hard to categorize. ~ Elizabeth Crook,
1074:whom I first had the pleasure of working with while at Avon Books. It’s also my very first non-genre novel, although you will find it a signature Tanya Anne Crosby read, filled with flawed characters, and brimming with emotion. Set in Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, this book takes me home and is both deeply personal and intensely satisfying, in terms of pushing the storytelling envelope. In a sense, I’ve opened a vein with Zoe’s ~ Tanya Anne Crosby,
1075:I like to consider myself a student of hip hop. There's a certain level of certification and wit and craftsmanship that comes with rapping. As rap progresses - it's a young genre - it's becoming way more mainstream, crossing over to different lanes. I feel like it's losing its essence in a way, because it's getting commercialised. I want to keep it fresh and keep it progressive, but I also want to respect the foundation of what rap is about. ~ Cakes da killa,
1076:We know from accounts of Rilke's life that his stay in Rodin's workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. The poet's view of the mutilated body thus has nothing to do with the previous century's Romanticism of fragments and ruins; it is part of the breakthrough in modern art to the concept of the object that states itself with authority and the body that publicizes itself with authorization. ~ Peter Sloterdijk,
1077:When I received the invitation to "check out" Fairport I knew absolutely nothing about them, all I knew was that they were beginning to establish themselves as an underground favorite, by playing regularly at the UFO club in Covent Garden. But the crowd I was running with at the time were listening to a completely different genre of music. So I had nothing to go on, there was nothing on vinyl, Fairport's recording days were still ahead of them. ~ Iain Matthews,
1078:Alyosha-Bob and I have an interesting hobby that we indulge whenever possible. We think of ourselves as The Gentlemen Who Like To Rap. Our oeuvre stretches from the old school jams of Ice Cube, Ice-T, and Public Enemy to the sensuous contemporary rhythyms of ghetto tech, a hybrid of Miami bass, Chicago ghetto tracks, and Detroit electronica. The modern reader may be familiar with 'Ass-N-Titties' by DJ Assault, perhaps the seminal work of the genre ~ Gary Shteyngart,
1079:The story of Jonah reads more like a parable than history, employing fanciful literary conventions and language, so why impose literalism on a text when the genre doesn’t seem to demand it? And yet the epistles of Paul and the accounts of Luke, whether you believe them or not, purport a different purpose and employ a different literary style than Jonah, so it seems just as disingenuous to impose metaphor where those authors likely presumed fact. ~ Rachel Held Evans,
1080:The nice thing about a documentary, I think, is that so much of it is editing, too. You sort of get to keep making decisions. It's not as much like when you do a narrative, fictional piece, and you have a certain number of shooting days, and you're like, "Well, that's what it is." You can continue to seek out more photographs or try to find more footage. The genre gives you the ability to keep working on it, which is great for a first-time director. ~ Gillian Jacobs,
1081:I came to terms with living mostly in a world of horror pictures or genre pictures. I have had a few chances to get outside and do something different, like Paris, Je T'Aime or Music Of The Heart, but mostly it's been my lot. And to have created, with a few shocking films, an awareness or a perception of me as somebody dangerous and scary - that can be sold, but trying to sell me for some other kind of picture, like Music Of The Heart, was very difficult. ~ Wes Craven,
1082:I really wish that peoplewould just say, 'Yes, it's a comic. Yes, this is fantasy. Yes, this is Science Fiction,' and defend the genre instead of saying, 'Horror is a bit passe so this is Dark Fantasy,' and that' s playing someone else's game. So that's why I say I'm a fantasy writer and to hell with 'It doesn't read like what I think of as a fantasy'. In that case what you think of as a fantasy is not a fantasy. Or there is more to it than you think. ~ Terry Pratchett,
1083:Of course, we miss all this when we insist the Bible’s origin stories are simply straightforward recitations of historical fact, one scientific discovery or archaeological dig away from ruin. What both hardened fundamentalists and strident atheists seem to have in common is the conviction that any trace of myth, embellishment, or cultural influence in an origin story renders it untrue. But this represents a massive misunderstanding of the genre itself. ~ Rachel Held Evans,
1084:When you're talking horror or sci-fi, you're working in a genre that has loosely certain thematic elements, or, you could even call them rules. But rules are there to be broken. I think that young filmmakers should go all the way back to the history of horror, from silent films like "Nosferatu", and through to today's horror films, so they understand the history of horror films and what has been done. Understand that, and then add something new or original. ~ Roger Corman,
1085:Comme quoi une idée est toujours une bonne idée, du moment qu'elle fait faire quelque chose,même si tout est entrepris de traves, par exemple avec des chevaux moribonds. Comme quoi une idée de ce genre est toujours une bonne idée, même si tout échoue lamentablement, parce qu'alors il arrive au moins qu'on finisse par devenir impatient, comme on ne le serait jamais devenu si on avait commencé par penser que les idées qu'on avait étaient de mauvaises idées. ~ Marguerite Duras,
1086:I'm seeing more and more interesting horror come my way. More and more interesting thrillers and genre films are coming my way from the studio level, and they're financed and they have movie stars attached and all of that. But a lot of times, the storytelling just doesn't speak to me. It feels like it's still oftentimes coming out of a kind of prescribed notion of normalcy, prescribed notion of gender roles. There's not a lot of "new" seeming to be happening. ~ Karyn Kusama,
1087:I decided to make myself a little less precious with my storytelling. I think you can see from the first three pieces in the book that I have a long term relationship with the short story as a form and I really love an elegantly crafted story that has several elements that come together in a way that is emotionally complex and different from when we started. That kind of crystalline, perfect, idealized thing that the short story as a genre has come to represent. ~ Lucy Corin,
1088:l’éternité est essentiellement la « non-durée » ; cette erreur est du même genre que celle qui consiste à croire que l’espace est infini, et d’ailleurs l’une ne va guère sans l’autre ; la cause en est toujours dans la confusion du concevable et de l’imaginable. En réalité, l’espace est indéfini, mais, comme toute autre possibilité particulière, il est absolument nul par rapport à l’Infini ; de même, la durée, même perpétuelle, n’est rien au regard de l’éternité. ~ Ren Gu non,
1089:There’s a reason that some of our oldest and most important stories start with “Once upon a time . . .” Tucked among the fantastical characters and magical other-worlds are profound truths. Lloyd Alexander, author of the beloved Chronicles of Prydain, said, “Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it.” With that, we present to you this collection of wise and beautiful quotes from some of the greatest authors in the fantasy genre. ~ Anne McCaffrey,
1090:the inerrancy of the Bible relates to the authors’ original intent, not necessarily to our interpretation of a passage. Moreover, the inerrancy of an author’s writing must be understood in accordance with the genre of literature the author was using and the culture the author was writing within. For example, we cannot say that an ancient author was incorrect in what he said just because he did not employ the same standard of precision we employ in our culture. ~ Gregory A Boyd,
1091:Every now and then we find ourselves living through moments that make no sense at all. It’s almost as if some omnipotent film editor has snipped us out of our familiar everyday movie and spliced us into something completely random, from a different time and genre and even from a foreign country and partially animated, because suddenly you look around you and the language is unknown and nothing that happens has any relationship to what you think of as reality. This ~ Jeff Lindsay,
1092:Most often, a haloed moon means nothing more than that reflective volcanic ash has made its way into the stratosphere, and a two-headed goat is only a genetic curiosity. The mommy-porn genre currently sweeping the book industry and the Babylonian excess of most television shows probably fall within the historical norm in our culture’s sleaze index and are not omens of the imminent collapse of civilization, though if I were not so busy, I might start building an ark. ~ Dean Koontz,
1093:Basically, this industry is mostly run by men, and I think women have a harder time...I've had enough of the "Women in Rock" issues of magazines and all of that. There's no reason why we should have our own separate little genre; that's just ridiculous. Besides, what is the genre? I certainly don't fit into the whole "Lilith" thing (thank God), but I am a female musician. And there are enough other great females in music that don't have to fit into it, either. ~ Princess Superstar,
1094:I think the possibilities are endless in terms of what the genre would be like. However, in terms of looking for sources of money, I think we have to be very careful not to fall into Hollywood's commodification of Chicano culture. We could look at the example of Piri Thomas, a successful Puerto Rican writer now living in the Bay Area, who has received repeated offers from Hollywood...and he said he's not going to write about his people doing drugs and going to jail. ~ Ana Castillo,
1095:Good genre movies are a little bit like trying to write a haiku. There are certain things that you have to do to fulfill the audience's expectations, but inside that, you have complete freedom to talk about whatever you want. Who wants to see a movie about gun violence in America and class? But, if you set it in this terrifying, fun, roller coaster ride of a movie, you can talk about whatever you want. That's been the game that genre movies play, when they do it well. ~ Ethan Hawke,
1096:Je soutiens l'idée que le genre social n'est pas produit et propagé en fonction de la façon nous, en tant qu'individuEs, "performons" ou "faisons" nos genres ; il réside dans les perceptions et interprétations des autres. Je peux modifier mon propre genre autant que je veux, mais ça ne changera rien au fait que les autres personnes continueront à m'assigner compulsivement un genre, et à me voir à travers le prisme distordu de l'évidence cissexuelle et hétérosexuelle. ~ Julia Serano,
1097:Toute ma vie, j'ai été habitué à ce que les autres se trompent sur mon compte. C'est le lot de tout homme public. Il lui faut une solide cuirasse; car s'il fallait donner des explications pour se justifier quand on se méprend sur vos intentions, la vie deviendrait insupportable. Je me suis fait une règle de ne jamais intervenir pour rectifier ce genre d'erreur, à moins que ne l'exige la cause que je défends. Ce principe m'a épargné bien du temps et bien des tracas. ~ Mahatma Gandhi,
1098:Isn’t there a black box data reorder in every book?” asked Mrs. Malaprop. “We could analyze the tea lemon tree.” “Usually,” I replied, “but engineering contracts have to be spread around the BookWorld, and the construction of Book Data Recorders was subcontracted to James McGuffin and Co. of the Suspense genre, so they have a tendency to go missing until dramatically being found right at the end of an investigation. It’s undoubtedly suspenseful, but a little useless. ~ Jasper Fforde,
1099:I wrote lots of scripts that never got made and they were terrible. I thought they were good at the time. You can't write two scripts and expect your career to take off. Keep writing. Be you. Be original. A lot of people go for a genre, which is fine if you can do that really well, but we all have such layered histories. We all come from a unique background. Write about your past, write about you. Or make stuff up, but make it about something that really matters. ~ Nicole Holofcener,
1100:Magical, yes, but THE SNOW CHILD is also satisfyingly realistic in its depiction of 1920s homestead-era Alaska and the people who settled there, including an older couple bound together by resilient love. Eowyn Ivey's poignant debut novel grabbed me from the very first pages and made me wish we had more genre-defying Alaska novels like this one. Inspired by a fairy tale, it nonetheless contains more depth and truth than so many books set in this land of extremes. ~ Andromeda Romano Lax,
1101:The book is about zombies, in that it is the over-arching theme, but what's going on is the story of these people and how these survivors deal. I think that's so much more of an interesting story, and that's what really gets and hooks these readers into the book and the show. It's a mix of fans of drama, fans of AMC, fans of horror and fans of Frank [Darabont]. It's a lot of people just coming together and realizing a genre doesn't have to be fixed in one specific detail. ~ Steven Yeun,
1102:You would be surprised how many people that are very passionate about classical music are deeply involved in Hip Hop. You would think Jazz would be the natural associative, but it's extraordinary what kind of crossed-genre associations we are finding in digital media. And even as I'm talking about it, I find myself speaking very much more about how people are accessing that which, what I do, rather than me being preoccupied trying to market something that I do to them. ~ Thomas Hampson,
1103:I don't think I've seen that sort of character in a long time in this genre because again, there was a time when you could have quirky, strange characters that you grew to love, you didn't quite understand, you know, and then all of a sudden they became almost cardboard cutouts for awhile. You kind of know the guy, what his deal is - this guy's hard to figure out. He has some strange habits, but, you learn to love him and you discover more about him, where it comes from. ~ Antoine Fuqua,
1104:I've never recognized 'emo' as a genre of music. I always thought it was the most retarded term ever. I know there is this generic commonplace that every band that gets labeled with that term hates it. They feel scandalized by it. But honestly, I just thought that all the bands I played in were punk rock bands. The reason I think it's so stupid is that - what, like the Bad Brains weren't emotional? What - they were robots or something? It just doesn't make any sense to me. ~ Guy Picciotto,
1105:Je me suis souvent surprise moi-même à faire ce genre d'erreur, dit Elinor, à me méprendre sur quelque aspect d'un caractère; on s'imagine que les gens sont plus gais ou plus graves, plus ingénieux, plus stupides qu'ils ne le sont en réalité, et il est difficile de dire comment et en quoi l'erreur a pris naissance. Parfois, on se fonde sur ce qu'ils disent eux-même et, plus fréquemment, sur ce qu'en disent les autres, sans se donner à soi-même le loisir de réfléchir et de juger. ~ Jane Austen,
1106:In general, however, grand opera, by more and more deadening our musical receptivity through its three-hours duration and at the same time putting our patience to the test through the snail's pace of what is usually a very trite action, is in itself intrinsically and essentially boring; which failing can be overcome only by the excessive excellence of an individual achievement: that is why in this genre only the masterpieces are enjoyable and everything mediocre is unendurable. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer,
1107:Nashville has always felt perfect. I don't think Third Man Records could exist in any other town that I know of in America. Anything smaller or larger than the size of Nashville, and also the music - the attention that's paid to music in that town is sort of the right kind. It's not too hipster and it's not too fake; it's something in the middle, which is really good ground for a place like Third Man Records, that aims to be genre-less. It's great to be able to have that kind of access. ~ Jack White,
1108:Humor, drama, romance, whatever genre of entertainment you create or consume is only effective if it is challenging to your sensibilities. When the sexuality of seeing a woman’s ankles became trumped by her calf, society changed. When the calf was later trumped by a woman offering shots of alcohol from her vagina on Rock of Love, society changed again. My hope for this world is that we can soon run out of shocking body parts and can finally see the humor in our ætheric bodies. ~ Christy Leigh Stewart,
1109:the open-world or sandbox or free-roaming game. This genre is superintended by a few general conventions, which include the sensation of being inside a large and disinterestedly functioning world, a main story line that can be abandoned for subordinate story lines (or for no purpose at all), large numbers of supporting characters with whom meaningful interaction is possible, and the ability to customize (or pimp, in the parlance of our time) the game's player-controlled central character. ~ Anonymous,
1110:It's one of the reasons why Spider-Man: Homecoming is so exciting. Because it's a new genre for us, a new character, the first time that Spider-Man is in our cinematic universe and you can see what he was meant to be in the comics. He's such a young teenager in comparison to these other heroes. But I think, because we're film fans who go and see everything, it's much more natural that you're inspired by other work. And then of course that influences your work, and the way you make films. ~ Kevin Feige,
1111:(Kate) had found multiple titles by individual authors scattered willy-nilly through the collection. It made her want to pull her hair out. Obviously!- an individual author's body of work all belonged on one shelf, the works arranged, in turn, by whatever system was most suitable: by volume number, alphabetically by title, or by the year of publication, or, in case of playwrights, works grouped by genre- tragedies with tragedies, comedies with comedies, histories with histories, and so on. ~ Gaelen Foley,
1112:Whatever they are, can Comics be "Art"? Of course they can. The "Art" in a piece is something independent of genre, form, or material. My feeling is that most paintings, most films, most music, most literature and, indeed, most comics fail as "Art." A masterpiece in any genre, form or material is equally "good." It's ridiculous to impose a hierarchy of value on art. The division between high and low art is one that cannot be defended because it has no correlation to aesthetic response. ~ Phoebe Gloeckner,
1113:When you mix Science Fiction with Fantasy you don't have a pure genre, the two are, to a professional separate genres. I noticed today there is a tendency to mingle them, and then excuse the result by calling it imaginative fiction. Actually they don't mix well. Science Fiction, to be credible, has to be based on some degree of plausibility, Fantasy gives you no limits at all. Writing Science Fiction demands care on the part of the author, writing Fantasy is as easy as strolling in the park. ~ L Ron Hubbard,
1114:I'm now much more excited about genre distinctions. What I still see breaking down are more the hierarchical arrangements of genres. That is, "There is literary fiction, and then there are lesser genres." I'm much more clear on the idea that literary fiction is itself a genre. It is not above other genres. It is down there in the muck with all the other genres, and it's doing the wonderful things that it does, but to give it a Y-axis, to make it high and low, just seems absurd. I stand by that. ~ Lev Grossman,
1115:Arthuriana has become a genre in itself, more like TV soap opera where people think they know the characters. All that's fair enough, but it does remove the mythic power of the feminine and masculine principles. So I prefer it in its original form, even if you have to wade through Mallory's 'Le Morte d'Arthur' - people smashing people for pages and pages! It still has the resonances of myth about it, which makes it work for me. I don't want to know if Mordred led an unhappy childhood or not. ~ Michael Moorcock,
1116:Arthuriana has become a genre in itself, more like TV soap opera where people think they know the characters. All that's fair enough, but it does remove the mythic power of the feminine and masculine principles. So I prefer it in its original form, even if you have to wade through Mallory's 'Le Morte d'Arthur' -- people smashing people for pages and pages! It still has the resonances of myth about it, which makes it work for me. I don't want to know if Mordred led an unhappy childhood or not. ~ Michael Moorcock,
1117:I don't know where genre really comes from. I grew up with parents who were artists, and I was always interested in what music they were listening to and open to all kinds of genres. So it's nice to see that whole families come to my concerts. I like having an element in my music that is inclusive rather than exclusive, without being pop for the sake of it. It's not important to me how many people listen to it - it's more wonderful that it brings people who wouldn't usually meet into the same room. ~ Nils Frahm,
1118:I also remember when I watched Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer [1990] at, like, age 15. That scared the crap out of me. Because it didn't operate inside the usual conventions of the horror genre in the way that I could accept. I can accept horny teenager counselors being murdered at camp. But I couldn't accept the derangement of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which was that anyone could be murdered at any moment - whole families, with no build-up music and no meaning. It terrified me. ~ Christopher Bollen,
1119:Many compositions cannot be comprehended without special training or many hours of repeated listening. Even highly educated consumers who enjoy modern art and read James Joyce often find Elliott Carter and Pierre Boulez to be puzzling or perhaps even painful to listen to. Composers of contemporary "classical" music have not made the headway that their peers in literature or painting have enjoyed. Contemporary music, depending on genre, is either the most or the least popular of the these three arts. ~ Tyler Cowen,
1120:There are many other writers whose work I admire tremendously, but none whose work struck me at just the right young age. Jack Vance taught me that speculative fiction, science fiction, could be wonderfully and liberatingly stylistic. It didn't have to be pulp stuff. He really changed my writing and my view of science fiction, so if nothing else, my little homage to him in the novelette I wrote for that anthology is my thank-you to him. He helped me see that any genre can have excellent writing in it. ~ Dan Simmons,
1121:The genre of '80s action movies, I think, changed really when The Matrix came out and Keanu Reeves was able to perform kung fu. Then you had Matt Damon in the Bourne films, doing a great job. So it's different now, they can train actors to do their own fights convincingly on screen, so those guys aren't needed anymore. But I think everything goes around in circles; people still do want to see the guys that can do stuff for real, that's why The Expendables is so popular. I think it will come back again. ~ Scott Adkins,
1122:Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, tortured and hypnotized me, and I wanted to capture it on paper. So I immediately appropriated this genre of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents. This is how I hear and see the world—as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realized to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher. ~ Svetlana Alexievich,
1123:In the field of speculative fiction, helping out the tyros is a dues-paying activity held in only slightly less esteem than that of making money. I know of no other genre in which the established names—from the Asimovian/Bradburyian/Clarkesque upper echelons all the way down to last year’s newcomers—break their asses with such regularity and effusiveness, to assist the fledglings. Show me, if you can, another field of free-lance endeavor in which the fastest guns teach the plowboys how to outdraw them. ~ Harlan Ellison,
1124:Dear Mia, What can I say? I don't know all that much about romance novels, but I think you must be the Stephen King of the genre. Your book is hot. Thanks for letting me read it. Anyone who doesn't want to publish it is a fool. Anyway, since I know it's your birthday, and I also know you never remember to back anything up, here's a little something I made for you. It would be a shame if Ransom My Heart got lost before it ever saw the light of day because your hard drive crashed. See you tonight. Love, Michael ~ Meg Cabot,
1125:I do experiment with lots of different genres. In making music, I don't think of genre like, "I want to do this, because I'm going use that country music sound; I'm going use that hip-hop sound; I'm going use that acoustic [sound]." It's just making music. So now that I've traveled a lot more since I did Acoustic Soul, I'm sure that different sounds will come into place, because I have been exposed to it and I like it. But it's not so much of a conscience effort. It's mind and spirited. You know, we're humans. ~ India Arie,
1126:My agent called and said, 'How do you feel about a pirate movie? I mean, how often are you going to get that call? It's sort of the singularly most failed genre of our time, but I thought it had to be attempted one more time. I think there's something rebellious about pirates, something revolutionary about them. They came out of a time when things were oppressive; you could get hung for stealing a loaf of bread. For me, the Pirates films are about when it's right to break the rules to achieve what you want. ~ Gore Verbinski,
1127:... Andres Segovia literally created the genre of classical guitar, which hadn't existed before around 1910. There was flamenco, which he borrowed from, but he actually arranged the works of Mozart and other classical composers for guitar, something that had never been done before ... Segovias' style is not slick or contrived, but it's still very clean and his timing is impeccable ... it's got a feeling of casual elegance, as if he's sitting around the house in Spain with a jug of wine, just playing from the heart. ~ Roger McGuinn,
1128:I come from a nation where fantastic fiction has a very low status, unless it fits into some very specific categories or is written by already established authors. I don't by any means try to hide what I write, but the way people think in categories here is pretty extreme: it blots out discussing the actual work on its own terms. That's made me loath to talk about my own work in terms of genre, because once you get a label, it sticks and poof go a slew of potential readers and reviewers because eww, fantasy cooties. ~ Karin Tidbeck,
1129:Usually it's just material that resonates with me and I never know exactly what that's gonna be. And there's obviously a certain persuasion, if you will. It's dependent upon the fact that I'm known for certain genres. So, that influences my decision making as well. I mean I'd love to, for example, do an action thriller but there are a lot of very talented people doing that and so it would be very difficult for me to switch over to that genre. So, I do look for things that I know (will resonate with) my audience. ~ Michael Landon Jr,
1130:Dear Mia,
What can I say? I don't know all that much about romance novels, but I think you must be the Stephen King of the genre. Your book is hot. Thanks for letting me read it. Anyone who doesn't want to publish it is a fool.
Anyway, since I know it's your birthday, and I also know you never remember to back anything up, here's a little something I made for you. It would be a shame if Ransom My Heart got lost before it ever saw the light of day because your hard drive crashed. See you tonight.
Love,
Michael ~ Meg Cabot,
1131:efore the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation series of books began to appear in 1979, the scientific autobiography was a largely unfamiliar genre. One recalls Cajal's extraordinary Recollections of My Life, translated into English in 1937, and the little gem of autobiography written by Charles Darwin for his grandchildren in 1876. One supposes that this form of scientific writing is scarce because busy scientists would rather continue to work on scientific problems than to indulge in a retrospective exercise using a writing style ~ Anonymous,
1132:[Michael] Chabon, who is himself a brash and playful and ebullient genre-bender, writes about how our idea of what constitutes literary fiction is a very narrow idea that, world-historically, evolved over the last sixty or seventy years or so - that until the rise of that kind of third-person-limited, middle-aged-white-guy-experiencing-enlightenment story as in some way the epitome of literary fiction - before that all kinds of crazy things that we would now define as belonging to genre were part of the literary canon. ~ Emily Barton,
1133:When I was thinking about How Poetry Saved My Life entering the “big literary world” I more so viewed it as sub genre or an underdog book because there are still comparatively so few books about sex work, especially from authors who once worked street, like I have. Disclosing to working street-level sex work still feels risky to me. Apart from Runaway by Evelyn Lau (published in 1989) I have yet to read a first person memoir about street work. More of these stories must be out there—perhaps I just haven’t found them yet. ~ Amber Dawn,
1134:I believe that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested laypeople. The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people. I hope that this book can be read with profit both in seminars for graduate students and if the movie stinks and you forgot your sleeping pills on the businessman's special to Tokyo. ~ Stephen Jay Gould,
1135:To me, making a horror movie is about how you can present similar genre familiarities, but present them a little bit differently. Part of what interests me is the nonchalant realism of it, because you don't get that in the big studio horror movies. I like seeing someone walk around a house and sift through the drawers, and things like that, because that reminds me of what I would do, and of weird personal choices that people would make. That, in contrast to seeing someone get chased with a knife, makes it all the more interesting. ~ Ti West,
1136:Better to be a cliché than to be a failure. Incidentally, I’ve played this scenario out a dozen times with clients. They want something simple, suggestive, symbolic. I tell them to choose something obvious. A powerful, beautiful picture that hits all the right genre buttons. They insist, we finish the cover, six months later they decide they are frustrated with their low sales and they give me permission to redo the cover and make the design that will sell the best. Are my book covers clichés? Probably. They also sell a lot of copies. ~ Derek Murphy,
1137:If the plot is a machine that allows you to get from set piece to set piece, and the set pieces are things without which the reader or the viewer would feel cheated, then, whatever it is, it’s genre. If the plot exists to get you from the lone cowboy riding into town to the first gunfight to the cattle rustling to the showdown, then it’s a Western. If those are simply things that happen on the way, and the plot encompasses them, can do without them, doesn’t actually care if they are in there or not, then it’s a novel set in the old West. ~ Neil Gaiman,
1138:Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre. ~ Andy Behrman,
1139:Poetry restores language by breaking it, and I think that much contemporary writing restores fantasy, as a genre of writing in contrast to a genre of commodity or a section in a bookstore, by breaking it. Michael Moorcock revived fantasy by prying it loose from morality; writers like Jeff VanderMeer, Stepan Chapman, Lucius Shepard, Jeffrey Ford, Nathan Ballingrud are doing the same by prying fantasy away from pedestrian writing, with more vibrant and daring styles, more reflective thinking, and a more widely broadcast spectrum of themes. ~ Michael Cisco,
1140:Some of the things I love the most are when a writer or a visionary takes on sort of an iconic character and then spins it. Like with Frank Miller, Batman was this one thing for basically forty years, and then Frank Miller came along and said he can also be this other thing. And Christopher Nolan came along and said he can also be this other thing. The idea of taking iconic comic book characters or superhero characters or mythic characters and subverting the genre or coming up with a new idea is something that's really interesting to me. ~ Damon Lindelof,
1141:the problem is that over time we’ve been conditioned to deny our instincts about what kinds of stories we’re reading when those stories are found in the Bible. We’ve been instructed to reject any trace of poetry, myth, hyperbole, or symbolism even when those literary forms are virtually shouting at us from the page via talking snakes and enchanted trees. That’s because there’s a curious but popular notion circulating around the church these days that says God would never stoop to using ancient genre categories to communicate. Speaking ~ Rachel Held Evans,
1142:When I write a book I write the best that I can and so much of that for me is following the book's demands, the subject's requirements - I love books, I always have. They have always been one of the places where I have felt very happy in the world. When I was younger, I loved to read genre fiction - I loved the magic-carpet ride of story! Now I need other things - I need the beautiful particular and strange language and form which brings a writer's book to life in me and speaks to my intellect, and, dare I say it, to my soul. ~ Micheline Aharonian Marcom,
1143:I've always thought that "punk" wasn't really a genre. My band started in Olympia where K Records was and K Records put out music that didn't sound super loud and aggressive. And yet they were punk because they were creating culture in their own community instead of taking their cue from MTV about what was real music and what was cool. It wasn't about a certain fashion. It was about your ideology, it was about creating a community and doing it on your own and not having to rely on, kinda, "The Man" to brand you and say that you were okay. ~ Kathleen Hanna,
1144:People are often wary of reading or watching anything in the horror genre because in their minds, it's just senseless gore, death and violence. Well, I can tell you from avid experience, that's not what horror is about. The horror genre teaches us that sometimes really bad things happen to really good people, but that hope always prevails in even the darkest of situations. That's a very important lesson, no matter how frightening you think the teacher is, and to be in the top of her class, all you need to do is to go in with an open mind. ~ Rebecca McNutt,
1145:C'est drôle, la vie, il y a parfois de toutes petites décisions qui ont des conséquences incroyables sur le cours de votre existence. Et, des années plus tard, on se demande comment elle se serait déroulée si l'on n'avait pas pris, à l'époque, cette toute petite décision mais une autre ... Combien d'occasions de ce genre avais-je ainsi laissé passer sans même le savoir ? Combien de fois, dans les milliers de petits croisements de ma vie, avais-je opté malencontreusement pour le chemin banal, alors que l'autre se serait avéré merveilleux ? ~ Laurent Gounelle,
1146:...one of the main questions for me is in the genre of dealing with real life: how to deal with it formally. There is a standard set of formal expressions that are used in traditional journalism. And some of them are really necessary, like fact-checking. But my conviction is that, now more than ever, real life is much stranger than any fiction one could imagine. So somehow the forms of reporting have to become crazier and stranger, too. Otherwise they are not going to be “documentary” enough, they are not going to live up to what’s happening. ~ Hito Steyerl,
1147:What I try to do is reinvigorate strategies and clichés I find in Hollywood movies. At a certain point I had these huge folders, each one classified according to subject matter or genre: people with guns, people kissing, Indians and cowboys falling off horses, getting shot, getting shot with arrows - almost every plot device. Then I cropped the cheap, recycled imagery to give exhausted images new meaning, or at least something other than their original meaning. I'm basically reassembling atoms to give them a meaning that's more au courant. ~ John Baldessari,
1148:In a less race-conscious world, black fiddlers and white blues singers might have been regarded as forming a single southern continuum, and such collaborations might have been the norm rather than being hailed as genre-crossing anomalies. Indeed, it is arguably due to the legacy of segregation that blues has presented the most common interracial meeting ground, since, given a level playing field, many of the African American southerners we think of as blues artists might have made their mark performing hillbilly or country and western material. ~ Elijah Wald,
1149:Who Stayed is also a book of the heart and I couldn’t be more thrilled to see its publication. In my twenty-six years of publishing, it’s my first major hardcover release and brings me full circle to work with Lou Aronica, whom I first had the pleasure of working with while at Avon Books. It’s also my very first non-genre novel, although you will find it a signature Tanya Anne Crosby read, filled with flawed characters, and brimming with emotion. Set in Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, this book takes me home and is both deeply personal ~ Tanya Anne Crosby,
1150:She understood the genre constraints, the decencies were supposed to be observing. The morally cosy vision allows the embrace of monstrosity only as a reaction to suffering or as an act of rage against the Almighty. Vampire interviewee Louis is in despair at his brother’s death when he accepts Lestat’s offer. Frankenstein’s creature is driven to violence by the violence done to him. Even Lucifer’s rebellion emerges from the agony of injured price. The message is clear: By all means become an abomination—but only while unhinged by grief or wrath. ~ Glen Duncan,
1151:I've been on my share of network dramas and comedies, and the problem sometimes in a network is they have a single-minded focus on making the show true to whatever genre it is. If you're on a drama, it better be procedural, it better fulfill all the demands of a procedural show, and you better keep those episodes independent, so if I'm watching the show in seven years as its syndicated on some other cable network, I don't have to know what happened before or after the episode. If you're on a comedy, everything has to be funny and wacky and zany. ~ Mark Feuerstein,
1152:Write what you want to read. So many people think they need to write a particular kind of book, or imitate a successful style, in order to be published. I've known people who felt they had to model their book on existing blockbusters, or write in a genre that's supposed to be "hot right now" in order to get agents and publishers interested. But if you're writing in a genre you don't like, or modeling yourself on a book you don't respect, it'll show through. You're your first, most important reader, so write the book that reader really wants to read. ~ Cassandra Clare,
1153:Vishnu Purana is one of the eighteen traditional puranas, which were an important genre of smriti text, and the repository of much of traditional Indian mythology... Most of the puranas are highly sectarian as is the Vishnu Purana which is focused on the worship of Vishnu. It gives an exhaustive account of Vishnu’s mystic deeds – many of which have become the common mythic currency for many traditional Hindus – as well as instructions for how, where, and when Vishnu is to be worshipped. ~ James G. Lochtefeld, in Illustrated Encyclopedia of Hinduism: N-Z (2002), p. 760,
1154:because she is white, her non-branded-ness reads as uncool rather than as pathology: she doesn’t fail to meet the imperative to be cool, she transcends it. Swift shakes off both gendered and genre stereotypes, and the external judgment of others: she doesn’t need to concern herself with the market value others place on her, with her reputation. She’s free to be boring and vanilla (because that’s what she is). This freedom–the ability to succeed while being resolutely average (think George W Bush)–that’s the whiteness Swift’s hedged bet returns in abundance. ~ Anonymous,
1155:I think the cornerstone for my impetus for doing arrangements for people is because I want to be an enabler. That is to say, I don't approach arrangements with the idea that I want to progressive the genre of arranging. I want to be more of an enabler, and if a person is making a record and they have the option of layering some real instruments down on a track and I can be of assistance whether it is brass or winds or stings or percussion then I do so. Sometimes I do take on projects because it is a pretty sweet deal to work with Pet Shop boys, you know? ~ Owen Pallett,
1156:I like a lot of hardcore, but it's just a genre about which I don't have much to say. It's kind of a thing where, unless you're active in the hardcore community, what could you have to say of value about it? It resists criticism because it's not just a style but an entrance into several different worlds of ideas- political, philosophical, societal. The music is really only part of the whole scene. In that sense, the music doesn't change much because it shouldn't: It needs to be there as a signal that you're entering into a certain discursive mode, maybe. ~ John Darnielle,
1157:We all have a tendency to over generalize our individual experiences. After I've published something, I'll meet someone who says, "I'm Haitian, and I don't know this, so it must not be true." Even if we're talking about a work of fiction. I've gotten very angry myself reading many things about Haiti. We're not a monolithic group; no group is. Also, it's important to keep in mind the genre in which we are writing. Fiction is full of invented stories about exceptional people in exceptional situations. Those situations are not always cheery or celebratory. ~ Edwidge Danticat,
1158:Augustine’s particular contribution to the Adversus Judaeos genre of sermons, which permeates all of the patristic writings, was his admonition that Jews should be harassed, dispersed throughout the world at the pleasure of Christian rulers, treated as constant targets for conversion, but not, in the end, exterminated. To Augustine, the physical survival of some Jews—even though they were so wrongheaded and oblivious to God’s grace as to reject Jesus as the Messiah—was necessary to attest to the truth of Christianity and its fulfillment of Hebrew prophecy. He ~ Susan Jacoby,
1159:Part of why I think I have so much fun working in the mockumentary genre is that you can cut to pretty much anything at any time. People are now so conditioned to watch documentaries - they know how they operate, and that you can introduce a new character by cutting to them, and now they're in it. Similarly, being able to treat a sidebar idea that has nothing to do with your main story really seriously, the way the rest of it is being treated - all the pomp and circumstances lend themselves, I feel, to making comedy feel really earned and funnier and weirder. ~ Andy Samberg,
1160:The biggest thing about me, as an actor, is I'm never a finished product, you know? I always want to try something or be in a new genre because, one, it's much more fun to do that because you're not doing the same thing over and over. One of the greatest reasons is that it keeps stretching you as an actor. So, hopefully, my method is that it makes me a better actor, and a more believable actor, so then, the more experience I have in any way possible, in a drama or a musical genre, different formats of working, the better I can be on all different platforms. ~ Aneurin Barnard,
1161:Une population parfaitement déterminée est en mesure non seulement de contraindre un dirigeant à fuir son pays, mais également de faire reculer un candidat à l'occupation de son territoire par la mise en œuvre d'un formidable ensemble de stratégies disponible : boycotts et manifestations, occupations de locaux et sit-in, arrêts de travail et grèves générales, obstructions et sabotages, grève des loyers et des impôts, refus de coopérer, refus de respecter les couvre-feux ou la censure, refus de payer les amendes, insoumission et désobéissance civile en tout genre. ~ Howard Zinn,
1162:When I have a writing workshop, I like to have people that are anthropologists and people who are poking around in other fields, I like to have them all in the same workshop, and not worry about genre. I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet. Or the comments you'll get from a filmmaker about your performance are going to be very different. My writing workshop is about mixing it up, cross-pollinating, not only in genres but in occupations. ~ Sandra Cisneros,
1163:At the age of 17, Mozart was hired as a court musician to the current ruler of Salzburg, Prince-Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo. During his time touring as a young man, Mozart had gained quite a following among the court in his home province of Salzburg, and his appointment found him surrounded by admirers, as well as friends among the other court musicians. During his four years of employment with the court in Salzburg, Mozart had the opportunity to explore new genres of music and wrote several violin concertos (a genre he would never touch again after this period). ~ Hourly History,
1164:The zombie threat is made worse by the fact that their victims then turn into the creature that attacked them. This too is similar to other monsters (werewolves and vampires) and also similar to the sub-genre of infection/plague films. In the case of zombies, however, this may carry a greater sense of dread and revulsion: vampires and werewolves can be seen as desirable, potent, intelligent, virile creatures whom one might like -- in some way at least -- to become; a mindless ghoul condemned to wander aimlessly across an empty, ruined earth seems much less attractive. ~ Kim Paffenroth,
1165:Ed began explaining this Yo La Tengo thing, how he was listening to a record of theirs, on vinyl he emphasized, and he'd been thinking about a genre of music called shoegaze something about the body language of the shoegazer, the perpetual crumpling or downward slope of the gazer's neck, and then he changed the subject, abruptly, to nettle root—had I ever taken nettle root? I was in a subdued, semi-meditative state, but he repeated himself, louder—Mary, have you ever taken nettle root?—and I said, Um, no, to which he immediately began chanting. ~ Catherine Lacey,
1166:I had an idea for a medical conspiracy thriller. Since it was non-horror, I didn't want the publishers and editors bringing a lot of baggage - my history as a genre writer in the SF and horror fields, for instance - to the novel when they read it. I wanted them to consider the book solely on its own merits. So I called myself Colin Andrews. I was tired of seeing my books at floor level. Not that Herman Wouk and Phyllis Whitney and William Wharton are bad company, but I wanted to be up at eye level for a change, where people with bad backs could get a chance to see my books. ~ F Paul Wilson,
1167:The art film’s focus on inner conflict draws the interest of those with advanced degrees, because the inner world is where the highly educated spend a large amount of time. Minimalists, however, often overestimate the appetite of even the most self-absorbed minds for a diet of nothing but inner conflict. Worse, they also overestimate their talent to express the unseeable on screen. By the same token, Hollywood’s action filmmakers underestimate the interest of their audience in character, thought, and feeling, and, worse, overestimate their ability to avoid Action genre clichés. ~ Robert McKee,
1168:Un éclat de rire grossier, un haussement d'épaules, accompagné de quelque maxime triviale sur la folie des femmes, avaient constamment accueilli les confidences de ce genre de chagrins, que le besoin d'épanchement l'avait portée à faire, à son mari, dans les premières années de leur mariage. Ces sortes de plaisanteries, quand surtout elles portaient sur les maladies de ses enfants, retournait le poignard dans le coeur de Madame de Rénal. Voilà ce qu'elle trouva au lieu des flatteries empressées et mielleuses du couvent jésuitique où elle avait passé sa jeunesse
(partie I, ch. VII) ~ Stendhal,
1169:Daniel Defoe was an English writer, journalist and spy, who gained enduring fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest practitioners of the novel and helped popularize the genre in Britain. In some texts he is even referred to as one of the founders, if not the founder, of the English novel. A prolific and versatile writer, he wrote over five hundred books, pamphlets, and journals on various topics (including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology and the supernatural). He was also a pioneer of economic journalism. Source: Wikipedia ~ Daniel Defoe,
1170:29 On the Karl May-Hitler link, see the controversial article of K. Mann, 'Cowboy Mentor of the Fuehrer', Living Age, 359 (1940), 217-22. For an effort to rescue May from Hitler, B. Linkemeyer, Was hat Hitler mit Karl May zu tun? (Abstadt, 1987). On May in the context of German literary imaginings of America, see J. L. Sammons, Ideology, Mimesis, Fantasy (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998), 229-45. For May's popularity and the genre of adventure fiction, see R. Frigge, Das erwartbare Abenteuer: Massenrezeption und literarisches Interesse am Beispiel der Reiserzaehlungen von Karl May (Bonn, 1984), ~ Anonymous,
1171:Sometimes I'm trying to communicate a feeling. Sometimes I can't piece it together into any kind of coherant thesis. I'm just trying to evoke some kind of mood, and put some kind of idea in somebody's head. If Marshall McLuhan or Harold Innis were looking at it, they would tell you that the genre of rock music isn't the best way to deliver a political message because it distorts it, it makes it into entertainment. Perhaps the best political message is just to speak it to somebody. I think that's something I'm always writing about in songs, just how to mediate, how to present something. ~ A C Newman,
1172:There's a long-standing (50 year old) flame war within the field over whether it's "sci-fi" or "SF".SF has traditionally been looked down on by the literary establishment because, to be honest, much early SF was execrably badly written - but these days the significance of the pigeon hole is fading; we have serious mainstream authors writing stuff that is I-can't-believe-it's-not-SF, and SF authors breaking into the mainstream. If you view them as tags that point to shelves in bricks-and-mortar bookshops, how long are these genre categories going to survive in the age of the internet? ~ Charles Stross,
1173:When I get about five readers I can rub together in one genre, I leave that genre and go somewhere else. And this is due to a vow that I made myself when I started writing - that if I had any success at all, I would not be bound to one form of writing. That I would write what moves me. The only way I can see me surviving and doing more than one book is to present the readers with a Dan Simmons novel, with whatever tropes and protocols from whatever genre I want to borrow them. If that builds a Dan Simmons readership, well then, okay. Otherwise, forget about it. I'd rather drive a truck. ~ Dan Simmons,
1174:Horror itself is a bit of a bullied genre, the antagonist being literary snobbery and public misconception. And I think good horror tackles our darkest fears, whatever they may be. It takes us into the minds of the victims, explores the threats, disseminates fear, studies how it changes us. It pulls back the curtain on the ugly underbelly of society, tears away the masks the monsters wear out in the world, shows us the potential truth of the human condition. Horror is truth, unflinching and honest. Not everybody wants to see that, but good horror ensures that it's there to be seen. ~ Kealan Patrick Burke,
1175:The best advice I have that is worth anything, is to do your research. Research everything—your book, marketing, promo, your genre—and think about the long-term goals, not just instant career gratification. That’s what separates career authors from hobbyists. Writing as a hobby is fine, if that’s what you want to do. If you want to be a professional, you just have to spend the time and study up. There is no magic formula or secret handshake. I so wish there was. (Well, there is coffee. That’s kind of magical.) You just have to put in the hours and do the work. Knowledge really is power. ~ Michelle M Pillow,
1176:I love the word 'fantasy'... but I love it for the almost infinite room it gives an author to play: an infinite playroom, of a sort, in which the only boundaries are those of the imagination. I do not love it for the idea of commercial fantasy. Commercial fantasy, for good or for ill, tends to drag itself through already existing furrows, furrows dug by J. R. R. Tolkien or Robert E. Howard, leaving a world of stories behind it, excluding so much. There was so much fine fiction, fiction allowing free reign to the imagination of the author, beyond the shelves of genre. That was what we wanted to read. ~ Neil Gaiman,
1177:You know, I think some people fear that if they like the wrong kind of book, it will reflect poorly on them. It can go with genre, too. Somebody will say, “I won’t read science fiction, or I won’t read young adult novels”—all of those genres can become prisons. I always find it funny when the serious literary world will make a little crack in its wall and allow in one pet genre writer and crown them and say, “Well Elmore Leonard is actually a real writer.” Or “Stephen King is actually a really good writer.” Generally speaking, you know you’re being patronized when somebody uses the word “actually ~ Elizabeth Gilbert,
1178:If there's another writer, like Ross McDonald or Raymond Chandler, and all they're writing are mysteries, they won't be accepted," he said. "And that's problematic. A lot of so-called literary novels are just not very good. They're not well-written, they're not well-thought-out. They have pyrotechnics of intelligence.

"On the other hand, some of the best writers and speculative ideas are in science-fiction. The science-fiction genre is completely, completely segregated. And these people are writing good stuff. They're writing about where you're going, which means they're talking about where you are. ~ Walter Mosley,
1179:more thrilled to see its publication. In my twenty-six years of publishing, it’s my first major hardcover release and brings me full circle to work with Lou Aronica, whom I first had the pleasure of working with while at Avon Books. It’s also my very first non-genre novel, although you will find it a signature Tanya Anne Crosby read, filled with flawed characters, and brimming with emotion. Set in Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, this book takes me home and is both deeply personal and intensely satisfying, in terms of pushing the storytelling envelope. In a sense, I’ve opened a vein with Zoe’s story. ~ Tanya Anne Crosby,
1180:Le genre d’image poignante qui me rappelait combien, pendant longtemps, j’avais détesté les appareils photo, ces machines cruelles à créer de la nostalgie. Leurs milliers de déclics trompeurs figeaient dans l’instant une spontanéité déjà évaporée. Pis, tels des fusils à double détente, ils n’atteignaient souvent leur cible que des années plus tard, mais touchaient toujours le cœur. Car, dans nombre d’existences, rien n’est plus fort que le passé, l’innocence perdue et les amours enfouies. Rien ne nous remue plus les tripes que le souvenir des occasions manquées et le parfum du bonheur qu’on a laissé filer ~ Guillaume Musso,
1181:I have noticed a curious bifurcation in outcome in the way romances are written by women et written by men - Love Story, The Bridges of Madison County, every James Bond tale ever penned, even the film named above - end with the woman either lost or dead. And the man free to love, or at least to have sex, again. Romances (in the modern genre sense) written by women end with the couple alive, together, and in a committed and at least potentially fertile relationship, ready to turn to the work of their world. In other words, men's romances are about love and death; women's romances are about love and life. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold,
1182:I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was R. L. Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy. It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. ~ Neil Gaiman,
1183:Another growing genre of film, science fiction, also tried to play on anti-Communist emotions during and after the war. Following such films as When Worlds Collide (1951) and War of the Worlds (1953), "sci-fi flicks" became increasingly popular in the 1950s. Many of these movies need no deep analysis. Others, such as Them (1953) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), were truly scary, arousing fears of monsters—perhaps mutations from atomic testing. Common themes in the sci-fi movies featured "good" scientists and public officials contending with dangerous conspirators, aliens, or monsters from the "other. ~ James T Patterson,
1184:Claiming to be a unique divinely guided state, destined by the Almighty to bring Christian civilization to the entire globe, lost most of its force after two-thirds of the empire had been conquered by the standard-bearers of a different religion. Fortunately, Judaeo-Christian texts offered another, now more apposite model. From divinely ordained world conquerors, emperors were able to use the Old Testament to morph themselves into the leaders of a Chosen People, riding the Constantinopolitan Ark of salvation through besetting tempests towards final Salvation and Triumph, with apocalypse a recurrently popular genre. ~ Peter Heather,
1185:Question No. 6 Briefly outline the historical development of castles in western Europe. What, if anything, do they have to do with cannoli? By the way, is “cannoli” singular or plural? Are the vanilla kind better than the chocolate? Question No. 7 Tell why you like reading stories about dragons and castles and fairies and that sort of thing. Have you ever read, say, A la recherché du temps perdu by Marcel Proust? Compare and contrast this book with any genre fantasy novel and explain why a writer would spend 30 pages describing how he rolls over in bed (no kidding). Why do the French think so highly of Jerry Lewis? ~ John DeChancie,
1186:En réalité, je n'avais jamais pensé qu'il pût lire mon livre. L'art incomparable de Johnny. Que pouvais je dire de plus ? Mais c'est peut-être justement à ce tournant qu'il m'attend, à l'affût comme toujours ramassé sur lui-même, prêt à faire un de ces bonds qui risquent toujours de blesser l'un de nous. Honnêtement, que m'importe sa vie ? La seule chose qui m'inquiète c'est qu'en se laissant mener par ce genre d'existence que je ne peux pas suivre, disons que je ne veux pas suivre, il ne finisse par contredire les conclusions de mon livre, par laisser entendre une ou deux fois que sa musique n'est pas ce que je dis. ~ Julio Cort zar,
1187:If readers don’t care about your protagonist, they won’t care about your story. Your protagonist might be sarcastic, but she must not be smarmy. She might be unhappy, but she cannot be whiny. She might do undesirable things, but she cannot be unlikable. If your protagonist appears childish, easily intimidated, or cowardly, readers will naturally look for someone else to cheer for. If the hero cowers in the face of evil, readers may end up liking the villain more. You’ll need to fix this to keep readers on your protagonist’s side. Readers want to either empathize with or admire your protagonist. It all depends on the genre. ~ Steven James,
1188:Weird fiction is a strange beast, an eclectic genre (or subgenre). It originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through the works of authors including Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, and M. R. James, and has since developed over the course of the last hundred years to encompass new writers such as China Miéville, M. John Harrison and others. Weird fiction is notable for its generic uncertainty; it exists at the boundary between science fiction and horror—perhaps—or between literary fiction and horror—perhaps—or between Lovecraft and whatever happens to be floating close to hand at any given moment—perhaps! ~ Helen Marshall,
1189:I get most of my inspiration from two places: my own life, and reading. I read widely—in my genre (romance), and in all sorts of different genres, from urban fantasy to literature. Then there’s your own life. Romance is a fantasy genre, but if the rock core of your characters doesn’t come from your own life, from emotions you know intimately, the book won’t fly. I don’t mean you have to be married to Casanova—I mean that a heroine will feel genuine to readers if she shares some of your fears or triumphs. Craft the emotional part of the plot from truths you learned from your own life, from watching your friends’ lives, or from reading books. ~ Eloisa James,
1190:Ce ne sont pas les humains qui choisissent leur destin mais le destin qui choisit les humains. Voilà la vision du monde essentielle de la tragédie grecque. Et la tragédie – d’après Aristote – prend sa source, ironiquement, non pas dans les défauts mais dans les vertus des personnages. Tu comprends ce que je veux dire ? Ce ne sont pas leurs défauts, mais leurs vertus qui entraînent les humains vers les plus grandes tragédies. Œdipe roi de Sophocle, en est un remarquable exemple. Ce ne sont pas sa paresse ou sa stupidité qui le mènent à la catastrophe mais son courage et son honnêteté. Il naît de ce genre de situation une ironie inévitable. ~ Haruki Murakami,
1191:attributes—will tug the reader’s emotions. Unlike character development, don’t be afraid to start writing your story with minimal details on your world. For any contemporary genre, you can work out many of the details once you start writing. First, setting is crucial to all genres. When and where does your story take place? Does it take place today in London or two hundred years from now on Mars? Depending on the location you select, you may have a specific landmark, holiday, or natural disaster that you can incorporate into your story. Once you know the location and time period, what is the emotion or mood you want to convey through the setting? ~ Rachel Aukes,
1192:I don't pay much attention to the distinction between fantasy and science fiction–or between “genre” and “mainstream” for that matter. For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors-which is the logic of narratives in general–over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.

We spend our entire lives trying to tell stories about ourselves–they’re the essence of memory. It is how we make living in this unfeeling accidental universe tolerable. That we call such a tendency “the narrative fallacy” doesn’t mean it doesn’t also touch upon some aspect of the truth.

Some stories simply literalize their metaphors a bit more explicitly. ~ Ken Liu,
1193:[T]he incomparable Diana Wynne Jones, one of the finest mythic fiction writers of our age, who left us too early (due to cancer) two days ago. I'm so grateful to her for the extraordinary books she has left behind, which have inspired a whole generation of younger writers. She was writing brilliant YA fantasy before the genre (as we know it now) even existed; she was writing enchanting "wizard school" books long before Harry Potter was a gleam in Rowling's eye; and her knowledge of how to weave mythic/folkloric themes into contemporary fiction was second to no one's. Diana will be terribly missed, but through her magical stories, her light will stay on. ~ Terri Windling,
1194:Les cissexuelLEs voient leur légitimité de genre comme un droit de naissance. Il s'agit souvent d'un acte malhonnête quand dans notre société beaucoup de cissexuelLEs (si ce n'est la majorité) ont tendance à considérer avec dénigrement les sociétés et cultures qui reposent sur des systèmes de classes et de castes - alors que leur métier, statut social, situation économique, pouvoir politique, etc., est prédétermié en fonction d'un accident de naissance. Donc si la plupart des cissexuelLEs occidentauxLES critiquent le provilège de naissance comme moyen de déterminer d'autres formes de classes sociales, illes l'adoptent hypocritement quand il s'agit du genre. ~ Julia Serano,
1195:as if it were the equal of Western classical or art music. The recordings were given respect, thoughtful presentation, and technical attention that was all too rare for non-Western music. I had grown up on Folkways’s Nonesuch field recordings and the stuff Lomax had done for the Library of Congress, but the production values on the Ocora releases were on a whole other level. Eno and I realized that music from elsewhere didn’t need to sound distant, scratchy, or “primitive.” These recordings were as well produced as any contemporary recording in any genre. You were made to feel, for example, that this music wasn’t a ghostly remnant from some lost culture, soon ~ David Byrne,
1196:If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be. ~ Patrick Rothfuss,
1197:Par une conséquence nécessaire, il y a trois genres distincts pour les discours qu'étudie la rhétorique : le délibératif, le judiciaire et le démonstratif. Quand on délibère, il s'agit d'engager à faire quelque chose que l'on
conseille, ou de détourner de quelque chose que l'on dissuade. Soit, en effet, qu'on ait à délibérer sur un intérêt particulier, soit que le peuple réuni discute un intérêt public, on n'a jamais que l'une ou l'autre de ces alternatives.
Pour le genre judiciaire, il n'y a que l'accusation et la défense ; car il faut bien, en réalité, que les plaideurs fassent nécessairement l'un ou l'autre. Pour le démonstratif, c'est la louange ou le blâme. ~ Aristotle,
1198:Reacher looked at the books on the tables. He read when he could, mostly through the vast national library of lost and forgotten volumes. Battered paperbacks mostly, all curled and furry, found in waiting rooms or on buses, or on the porches of out-of-the-way motels, read and enjoyed and left somewhere else for the next guy. He liked fiction better than fact, because fact often wasn’t. Like most people he knew a couple of things for sure, up close and eyeballed, and when he saw them in books they were wrong. So he liked made-up stories better, because everyone knew where they were from the get-go. He wasn’t strict about genre. Either shit happened, or it didn’t. Chang ~ Lee Child,
1199:The Girl Who Stayed is also a book of the heart and I couldn’t be more thrilled to see its publication. In my twenty-six years of publishing, it’s my first major hardcover release and brings me full circle to work with Lou Aronica, whom I first had the pleasure of working with while at Avon Books. It’s also my very first non-genre novel, although you will find it a signature Tanya Anne Crosby read, filled with flawed characters, and brimming with emotion. Set in Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, this book takes me home and is both deeply personal and intensely satisfying, in terms of pushing the storytelling envelope. In a sense, I’ve opened a vein with Zoe’s ~ Tanya Anne Crosby,
1200:[…] beaucoup d’Orientaux, prenant par ignorance les Textes sacrés à la lettre, tout en maintenant arbitrairement le sens purement symbolique de certains passages, croient à la réincarnation au sens vulgaire de ce mot ; ils ne se rendent manifestement pas compte que, si l’on voulait prendre au pied de la lettre tous les Textes brahmaniques, à commencer par le Vêda, on arriverait à une monstrueuse divinisation de phénomènes physiques et par conséquent à un culte grossier de la nature, et l’on devrait admettre, en comprenant par exemple le Rig Vêda littéralement, que les âmes des défunts montent à la lune et redescendent dans la pluie, et d’autres choses de ce genre. ~ Frithjof Schuon,
1201:for me, although with the same voice my readers have come to anticipate. I believe that people are pretty much the same, regardless of era, physical space, or culture, and this is the essence of my storytelling. I strive for characters you will relate to, no matter where or when they may have lived. The Girl Who Stayed is also a book of the heart and I couldn’t be more thrilled to see its publication. In my twenty-six years of publishing, it’s my first major hardcover release and brings me full circle to work with Lou Aronica, whom I first had the pleasure of working with while at Avon Books. It’s also my very first non-genre novel, although you will find it a signature ~ Tanya Anne Crosby,
1202:Le cri : Audace ! est un Fiat lux. Il faut, pour la marche en avant du genre humain, qu’il y ait sur les sommets, en permanence, de fières leçons de courage. Les témérités éblouissent l’histoire et sont une des grandes clartés de l’homme. L’aurore ose quand elle se lève. Tenter, braver, persister, persévérer, s’être fidèle à soi-même, prendre corps à corps le destin, étonner la catastrophe par le peu de peur qu’elle nous fait, tantôt affronter la puissance injuste, tantôt insulter la victoire ivre, tenir bon, tenir tête ; voilà l’exemple dont les peuples ont besoin, et la lumière qui les électrise. Le même éclair formidable va de la torche de Prométhée au brûle-gueule de Cambronne. ~ Victor Hugo,
1203:To eat nothing at all is more human than to take a little of what cries out for the appetite of a giant. One servingspoonful of spaetzle is like the opening measures of Vivaldi's Four Seasons: Any man who walks out on either proves he doesn't understand the genre-and he misses the repose of the end. To eat without eating greatly is only to eat by halves. While God gives me meat in due season and the sensibilities with which to relish the gift, I refuse to sit down to eat and rise up only to have picked and fussed my way through the goodness of the earth. My vow, therefore, was beautifully simple: If I ate, I would eat without stint; and of I stinted, I would not eat at all. ~ Robert Farrar Capon,
1204:Another of Mozart’s achievements was the technical advancement of established musical forms. He composed a prolific number of piano concertos and single-handedly managed to bring them back into mass popularity, largely due to his ability to infuse what was considered an old-fashioned form with new life and increased emotional reach. He dabbled in nearly every major genre, including the aforementioned popular operas he composed, as well as symphonies and even liturgical music. These genres were among the more serious and sophisticated genres with which he tinkered—Mozart also composed many forms of what would be considered light entertainment: serenades and court dances among them. ~ Hourly History,
1205:Lady Maccon se leva pour l’aider à passer sa cape, mais se rassit avant de pouvoir le faire. Elle ne tenait toujours pas bien sur ses jambes.
Lord Maccon cessa aussitôt de secouer le vêtement pour le déplier et s’agenouilla, nu, devant elle.
« Qu’est-ce qui ne va pas ? cria-t-il presque.
— Quoi ? » Ivy se retourna pour voir ce qui se passait, aperçut le derrière nu du comte, poussa un cri aigu et se détourna en s’éventant avec une main gantée.
« Ne t’inquiète pas, Conall. Tu troubles Ivy, grommela lady Maccon.
— Il y a toujours quelque chose pour troubler Mlle Hisselpenny. Toi, c’est différent. Tu ne fais pas ce genre de choses, femme. Tu n’es pas féminine à ce point. ~ Gail Carriger,
1206:He’s writing his name in water,” I said. “What’s that?” It was the half-regretful term—borrowed from the headstone of John Keats—that Crabtree used to describe his own and others’ failure to express a literary gift through any actual writing on paper. Some of them, he said, just told lies; others wove plots out of the gnarls and elf knots of their lives and then followed them through to resolution. That had always been Crabtree’s chosen genre—thinking his way into an attractive disaster and then attempting to talk his way out, leaving no record and nothing to show for his efforts but a reckless reputation and a small dossier in the files of the Berkeley and New York City police departments. ~ Michael Chabon,
1207:Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuristic but not enlightening. Instead, I ask, After evolution was discovered, how did religion and society respond? After cities were electrified, how did daily life change? After the airplane could fly from one country to another, how did commerce or warfare change? After we walked on the Moon, how differently did we view Earth? My larger understanding of people, places and things derives primarily from stories surrounding questions such as those. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,
1208:Edgar Allan Poe was an American poet, short story writer, playwright, editor, critic, essayist and one of the leaders of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of the macabre and mystery, Poe was one of the early American practitioners of the short story and a progenitor of detective fiction and crime fiction. He is also credited with contributing to the emergent science fiction genre.Poe died at the age of 40. The cause of his death is undetermined and has been attributed to alcohol, drugs, cholera, rabies, suicide (although likely to be mistaken with his suicide attempt in the previous year), tuberculosis, heart disease, brain congestion and other agents. Source: Wikipedia ~ Edgar Allan Poe,
1209:I have been, I think, altogether disparaging about the ‘escapist’ elements of the genre, emphasizing its powers to address social, moral and even philosophical issues at the expense of celebrating its dreamier virtues. I took this position out of a genuine desire to defend a fictional form I love from accusations of triviality and triteness, but my zeal led me astray. Yes, fantastic fiction can be intricately woven into the texture of our daily lives, addressing important issues in fabulist form. But it also serves to release us for a time from the definitions that confine our daily selves; to unplug us from a world that wounds and disappoints us, allowing us to venture into places of magic and transformation. ~ Clive Barker,
1210:All of the real original stories, all of the best stories, were first told by the animals. The bears were superb story-tellers; so were the deep-space geese (they took nine generations to make a migration, laying eggs on the space journey and hatching out of them on the space journey, for the summer-land of their migrations was not on Earth). The brindled cave-cats were very good story-tellers. Among the stories were well-established genre stories. The seals told under-water stories that they learned from river-and-ocean creatures; and the golden weasels, who really came from the moon, told all sorts of space stories. So the Neanderthals, who learned the stories from the animals, had a very good stock of tales. ~ R A Lafferty,
1211:Voilà bientôt deux siècles que nous vivons avec la conception de l'artiste - qu'il soit sculpteur, poète, écrivain, peintre, compositeur (ou interprète) - en tant que héros romantique et isolé, marginal et souvent paria, un chaman sans portefeuille, un individu doté d'un souffle impressionnant, réel ou truqué, qui lui permet de gonfler son ego jusqu'aux dimensions d'un dirigeable afin de se prémunir contre les coups, réels ou imaginaires, que lui assènent ses concitoyens. Ce n'est pas le genre de personne prompte à reconnaître que nous sommes tous "comme des moutons sortis du droit chemin". Souvent doté d'un aplomb évident, il se croit unique, mais c'est en définitive le cas de tout le monde, à des degrés divers. ~ Jim Harrison,
1212:Je crois absolument - et j'ai essayé de le montrer dans mes autres ouvrages - qu'assez de choses se font aujourd'hui dans les sciences humaines pour proposer aux savants des intuitions, des méthodes et des idées leur permettant de se passer des stéréotypes raciaux, idéologiques et impérialistes du genre de ceux que l'orientalisme a fournis pendant sa phase historique ascendante. Je considère que l'échec de l'orientalisme a été un échec humain tout autant qu'un échec intellectuel ; en effet, en ayant à s'opposer irréductiblement à une région du monde qu'il considérait comme "autre" que la sienne, l'orientalisme n'a pas été capable de s'identifier à l'expérience humaine, ni même de la considérer comme une expérience. ~ Edward W Said,
1213:In another genre the consequences of that identification may also be innocent, but in horror the guilt spreads, because if you identify with monsters doesn’t that mean that part of you understands them? Even if you don’t know they’re a monster—especially if you don’t know. If the identification is innocent then there’s no bias; the recognition is untainted. And if you recognise a monster by your identification with it, by its reflection in yourself, doesn’t that make part of you a monster too? An innocent monster, perhaps. One not awake to the potential of your own nature… but the potential remains regardless. And when the monster acts as monsters do, then don’t your sympathetic responses share the responsibility for it? ~ Octavia Cade,
1214:Most world-historic events - great military battles, political revolutions-are self-consciously historic to the participants living through them. They act knowing that their decisions will be chronicled and dissected for decades or centuries to come. But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for prosperity. And of course, if they do recognize that they are living through a historical crisis, it's often too late- because, like it or not, the primary way that ordinary people create this distinct genre of history is by dying. ~ Steven Johnson,
1215:This is perhaps the biggest departure from the science fiction norm. We do not have ‘the cocky guy,’ ‘the fast-talker,’ ‘the brain,’ ‘the wacky alien sidekick’ or any of the other usual characters who populate a space series. Our characters are living, breathing people with all the emotional complexity and contradictions present in quality dramas like The West Wing or The Sopranos. In this way, we hope to challenge our audience in ways that other genre pieces do not. We want the audience to connect with the characters of Galactica as people. Our characters are not super-heroes. They are not an elite. They are everyday people caught up in an enormous cataclysm and trying to survive it as best they can. “They are you and me. ~ Alan Sepinwall,
1216:The trouble is, we have up-close access to women who excel in each individual sphere. With social media and its carefully selected messaging, we see career women killing it, craft moms slaying it, chef moms nailing it, Christian leaders working it. We register their beautiful yards, homemade green chile enchiladas, themed birthday parties, eight-week Bible study series, chore charts, ab routines, “10 Tips for a Happy Marriage,” career best practices, volunteer work, and Family Fun Night ideas. We make note of their achievements, cataloging their successes and observing their talents. Then we combine the best of everything we see, every woman we admire in every genre, and conclude: I should be all of that. It is certifiably insane. ~ Jen Hatmaker,
1217:conventions hosted by the Miami Morrison. The question was, what convention was Laker Girl attending? Walt had arrived at the hotel earlier in the day to find massive banners and the entire second floor of the conference hall filling up with pictures of half-naked men and women embracing. At first, he thought the competing conference had something to do with adult film. When he asked, he was told a writers convention was dominating the hotel for the weekend. By comparison, the number of people at the conference he was attending was a drop of water in the ocean. Soon the hotel would be filled with writers, readers, publishers, and agents. The genre of choice . . . romance. Books written with nothing but happily-ever-after in mind. ~ Catherine Bybee,
1218:I welcome the liberation of music from the prison of melody, rigid structure, and harmony. Why not? But I also listen to music that does adhere to those guidelines. Listening to the Music of the Spheres might be glorious, but I crave a concise song now and then, a narrative or a snapshot more than a whole universe. I can enjoy a movie or read a book in which nothing much happens, but I'm deeply conservative as well—if a song establishes itself within a pop genre, then I listen with certain expectations. I can become bored more easily by a pop song that doesn't play by its own rules than by a contemporary composition that is repetitive and static. I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea—do I have to choose between the two? ~ David Byrne,
1219:Comment en est-on arrivé là? Comment le mouvement de libération gay, que Huey P. Newton, président des Black Panthers, avait cru “peut-être le plus révolutionnaire”....un mouvement dont les slogans étaient “Démolissons la famille, démolissons l’état” et “une armée d’amants ne peut pas perdre”...une collectivité qui envisageait une révolution totale des rôles de genre et de sexe, une nouvelle responsabilité sociale et communautaire….une communauté qui faisait face à la crise du SIDA avec une unité et une imagination sans limites...comment cette force radicale, vivante et créatrice a-t-elle (...) pu dégénérer en un groupe de couples racistes, refoulés, aisés, privatisés, prêts à sacrifier tout leur héritage juste pour se marier? Et échouer ? ~ Sarah Schulman,
1220:I think romance is maligned in large part because at first glance, love seems so pedestrian. It’s all around us. It’s in books and songs and movies and on billboards, so how could it really hold literary value? But what people tend to forget is that the search for love—for the simple idea that there is someone out there who will see us for who we are and accept us isn’t trite. It’s a huge part of our lives. And it’s an enormous part of our dreams.
There are so many fabulous romances out there—there’s something for everyone. I really believe that. And I believe that most of the people who look down their noses at the genre haven’t ever read a romance novel. I think that if they did, they’d be really surprised by how good great romance can be. ~ Sarah MacLean,
1221:Camus recours donc à la raison allégorique. Un pari risqué avec les lecteurs sans imagination ontologique - du genre Barthes ou Sartre. De la même façon que La Fontaine utilise cette même raison allégorique (ou bien encore Orwell dans la Ferme des animaux un livre qui parait dans sa traduction française la même année que le roman de Camus), et le philosophe déconstruit le fascisme sans souci de savoir s'il est brun ou rouge, s'il sévit au nom de la Race ou du Prolétariat, s'il sert Dieu ou le Diable. Au contraire des partisans ayant renoncé à leur intelligence et à leur esprit critique, Camus n'a pas l'indignation sélective. La radicalité de sa dénonciation est simple, elle s'enracine dans la parole d'un père absent, mais présent par ses leçons. ~ Michel Onfray,
1222:No one shines more luridly on this faux-real stage than a woman. Whether it’s a modeling competition, a chance to compete for love, a weight-loss challenge, or a look into the lives of an aging magazine publisher’s harem, women are often the brightly polished trophies in the display case of reality television. The genre has developed a very successful formula for reducing women to an awkward series of stereotypes about low self-esteem, marital desperation, the inability to develop meaningful relationships with other women, and an obsession with an almost pornographic standard of beauty. When it comes to reality television, women, more often than not, work very hard at performing the part of woman, though their scripts are shamefully, shamefully warped. ~ Roxane Gay,
1223:For my money, noir boils down to bleak humanism – or, to put it more plainly: shit options, bad decisions, and dire
consequences. The difference between Greek tragedy and noir ain't the height of the fall, but the reason: those who fall in Greek tragedy do so because they're destined to; those who fall in noir choose to their damn selves.

In short, free will's a bitch.
But regardless of whose definition you go with, you'll notice something's lacking: namely, any mention of genre. That's because for as much as noir's assumed to be a subset of crime fiction, it's more vibe than subgenre. And, as many an enterprising modern writer seems intent on proving, that vibe is one that plays just as well with fantasy and science fiction as it does with crime. ~ Chris Holm,
1224:À ce propos, nous ajouterons encore une remarque concernant certaines descriptions d’êtres étranges qui se rencontrent dans ces récits : comme ces descriptions datent naturellement tout au plus de l’antiquité « classique », dans laquelle il s’était déjà produit une incontestable dégénérescence au point de vue traditionnel, il est fort possible qu’il s’y soit introduit des confusions de plus d’une sorte ; ainsi, une partie de ces descriptions peut en réalité provenir des « survivances » d’un symbolisme qui n’était plus compris [L’Histoire Naturelle de Pline, notamment, semble être une « source » presque inépuisable d’exemples se rapportant à des cas de ce genre, et c’est d’ailleurs une source à laquelle tous ceux qui sont venus après lui ont puisé fort abondamment.] ~ Ren Gu non,
1225:Researchers have confirmed what porn producers already know: men tend to get turned on by images depicting an environment in which sperm competition is clearly at play (though few, we imagine, think of it in quite these terms). Images and videos showing one woman with multiple males are far more popular on the Internet and in commercial pornography than those depicting one male with multiple females.14 A quick peek at the online offerings at Adult Video Universe lists over nine hundred titles in the Gangbang genre, but only twenty-seven listed under Reverse Gangbang. You do the math. Why would the males in a species that’s been wearing the shackles of monogamy for 1.9 million years be sexually excited by scenes of groups of men ejaculating with one or two women? ~ Christopher Ryan,
1226:One more nice thing about short stories is that you can create a story out of the smallest details -an idea that springs up in your mind, a word, an image, whatever. In most cases it's like jazz improvisation, with the story taking me where it wants to. And another good point is that with short stories you don't have to worry about failing. If the idea doesn't work out the way you hoped it would, you just shrug your shoulders and tell yourself that they can't all be winners. Even with masters of the genre like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Carver -even Anton Chekhov- not every short story is a masterpiece. I find this a great comfort. You can learn from your mistakes (in other words, those you can't call complete success) and use that in the next story you write. ~ Haruki Murakami,
1227:Supposons dix hommes, dont chacun a dix sortes de besoins. Il faut que chacun, pour son nécessaire, s'applique à dix sortes de travaux ; mais, vu la différence de génie et de talent, l'un réussira moins à quelqu'un de ces travaux, l'autre à un autre. Tous, propres à diverses choses, feront les mêmes, et seront mal servis. Formons une société de ces dix hommes, et que chacun s'applique, pour lui seul et pour les neuf autres, au genre d'occupation qui lui convient le mieux ; chacun profitera des talents des autres comme si lui seul les avait tous ; chacun perfectionnera le sien par un continuel exercice ; et il arrivera que tous les dix, parfaitement bien pourvus, auront encore du surabondant pour d'autres. Voilà le principe apparent de toutes nos institutions. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau,
1228:The bar was busy for a Wednesday due to the conventions hosted by the Miami Morrison. The question was, what convention was Laker Girl attending? Walt had arrived at the hotel earlier in the day to find massive banners and the entire second floor of the conference hall filling up with pictures of half-naked men and women embracing. At first, he thought the competing conference had something to do with adult film. When he asked, he was told a writers convention was dominating the hotel for the weekend. By comparison, the number of people at the conference he was attending was a drop of water in the ocean. Soon the hotel would be filled with writers, readers, publishers, and agents. The genre of choice . . . romance. Books written with nothing but happily-ever-after in mind. ~ Catherine Bybee,
1229:But if it so happens ... a work ... under pain of otherwise becoming shameful or false, requires fantasy ... [and that] certain limbs or elements of a figure are altered by borrowing from other species, for example transforming into a dolphin the hinder end of a griffon or a stag ... these alterations will be excellent and the substitution, however unreal it may seem, deserves to be declared a fine invention in the genre of the monstrous.

When a painter introduces into this kind of work of art chimerae and other imaginary beings in order to divert and entertain the senses and also to captivate the eyes of mortals who long to see unclassified and impossible things, he shows himself more respectful of reason than if he produced the usual figures of men or of animals. ~ Michelangelo Buonarroti,
1230:Romance is fiction.” He punctuated this statement by taking a bite of steak, and then chewing. “But it’s—it’s—” Interesting? Well researched? Engaging? Well written? All of the above. “Not what you expected?” he supplied, smirking around his bite. “What did you expect?” Shrugging, I lifted a small rectangle of lasagna on my fork and blew at the steam. “I guess something brainless.” I didn’t add that I followed The New York Times Book Review and they’d had more than their fair share of articles calling the romance genre “fluffy.” If you couldn’t trust The New York Times Book Review, who could you trust? “Why? Because it’s about love and has a happy ending? And only stories of unhappiness with tragic endings are important? Because a struggle that leads to something good isn’t worthwhile? ~ Penny Reid,
1231:Furthermore, the world is so complex, and fate so uncertain, that you can never really control other people or the environment effectively enough to be master of your own destiny. Reason is not powerful enough to build intellectual systems or models to allow you to accurately understand the world around you or anticipate what is to come. Your willpower is not strong enough to successfully police your desires. If you really did have that kind of power, then New Year’s resolutions would work. Diets would work. The bookstores wouldn’t be full of self-help books. You’d need just one and that would do the trick. You’d follow its advice, solve the problems of living, and the rest of the genre would become obsolete. The existence of more and more self-help books is proof that they rarely work. ~ David Brooks,
1232:I think US/UK genre has become more open to “diverse” writers and writing; there’s a genuine interest in reading work from countries outside the US/UK and hearing voices that have been historically shut out, but at the same time, people are quite lazy. That sounds harsh, but I include myself in it — your tastes are shaped by what you’ve read and watched before, and it takes a little effort to understand stories that use a different voice, that follow different storytelling conventions, that are trying to subvert the dominant paradigm. There’s a quite large group of people who are “yay diversity” in theory, but I think the number of people who have then said to themselves, “OK, if I’m committed to this, I need to start reading outside my comfort zone and making an effort” is maybe a little smaller. ~ Zen Cho,
1233:One of the things that Tolkien did was to open up a new continent of imaginative space for many millions of readers, and hundreds of writers – though he himself would have said (see above) that it was an old continent which he was merely rediscovering. An acceptably philological way of putting it might be to say that Tolkien was the Chretien de Troyes of the twentieth century. Chretien, in the twelfth century, did not invent the Arthurian romance, which must have existed in some form before his time, but he showed what could be done with it; it is a genre whose potential has never been exhausted in the eight centuries since. In the same way, Tolkien did not invent heroic fantasy, but he showed what could be done with it; he established a genre whose durability we cannot estimate. ~ Tom Shippey,
1234:Enfin, en continuant à suivre du dedans au−dehors les états simultanément juxtaposés dans ma
conscience, et avant d'arriver jusqu'à l'horizon réel qui les enveloppait, je trouve des plaisirs d'un autre genre,
celui d'être bien assis, de sentir la bonne odeur de l'air, de ne pas être dérangé par une visite et, quand une
heure sonnait au clocher de Saint−hilaire, de voir tomber morceau par morceau ce qui de l'après−midi était
déjà consommé, jusqu'à ce que j'entendisse le dernier coup qui me permettait de faire le total et après lequel
le long silence qui le suivait semblait faire commencer, dans le ciel bleu, toute la partie qui m'était encore
concédée pour lire jusqu'au bon dîner qu'apprêtait Françoise et qui me réconforterait des fatigues prises,
pendant la lecture du livre, à la suite de son héros. ~ Marcel Proust,
1235:No. Every time I’ve seen you reach out and love someone, take your hand and put it on a broken person’s arm and encourage them with your words, kiss me on the cheek and make me feel like the most important person in the universe, play a game with your little brother while you could be doing something else – that’s holy. Those moments when we’re together and we sink into that weird little world where it’s just the two of us and we almost feel like we’re glowing with love and then some vibrating entity that feels older than the sea filters in and hums between us – that’s religion. That’s us rising above our humanity – transcending the genre – and reaching a higher level, a galactic level. That’s love. That’s God. That’s grace. That’s majesty. And you love, Summer, so you’re God.” He laughed again, quieter this time. “To me, at least. ~ Seth King,
1236:According to the conventions of the genre, Augustus Waters kept his sense of humor till the end, did not for a moment waiver in his courage, and his spirit soared like an indomitable eagle until the world itself could not contain his joyous soul.

But this is the truth, a pitiful boy who desperately wanted not to be pitiful, screaming and crying, poisoned by an infected G-tube that kept him alive, but not alive enough.

I wiped his chin and grabbed his face in my hands and knelt down close to him so that I could see his eyes, which still lived. 'I'm sorry. I wish it was like that movie, with the Persians and the Spartans.'

'Me too,' he said.

'But it isn't,' I said.

'I know,' he said.

'There are no bad guys.'

'Yeah.'

'Even cancer isn't a bad guy really: Cancer just wants to be alive. ~ John Green,
1237:Degas, more than any other Realist, looked upon the photograph not merely as a means of documentation, but rather as an inspiration: it evoked the spirit of his own imagery of the spontaneous, the fragmentary and the immediate. Thus, in a certain sense, critics of Realism were quite correct to equate the objective, detached, scientific mode of photography, and its emphasis on the descriptive rather than the imaginative or evaluative, with the basic qualities of Realism itself. As Paul Valéry pointed out in an important though little known article: ‘the moment that photography appeared, the descriptive genre began to invade Letters. In verse as in prose, the décor and the exterior aspects of life took an almost excessive place.… With photography… realism pronounces itself in our Literature’ and, he might have said, in our art as well. ~ Linda Nochlin,
1238:On cite souvent les cas de Henri III et de Henri IV de France, qui auraient été pris d’une passion subite et irrésistible pour des femmes dont üs avaient senti les vêtements intimes ; dans le cas de Henri III, on dit que sa passion, née ainsi, pour Marie de Qèves, à survécu à la mort tragique de celle-d. Cf. R. von Krafft-Ebing, PsychopaOtia Sexualis, Stuttgart '®, p. 25. Lorsque cet auteur doute (p. 18) que des effets de ce genre liés aux centres olfactifs puissent se vérifier « chez des individus normaux », il identifie évidemment les individus normaux à ceux qui ont une sensibilité « subtile » assez réduite. Ploss-Baitels (Op. cil., vol. I, p. 467 sq) font allusion à des croyances populaires selon lesquelles l’odeur du corps (nous dirions : de l’être) d’une personne peut avoir un effet intoxicant sur une autre personne, si celle-ci est de sexe opposé. ~ Julius Evola,
1239:To understand a book, one needs to know to which genre it belongs: Is it history or legend, chronicle or myth? To what question is it an answer? A history book answers the question: what happened?; a book of cosmology – be it science or myth – answers the question: how did it happen?

[...]if we seek to understand the Torah, we must read it as Torah – as law, instruction, teaching, guidance. Torah is an answer to the question: how shall we live?

[...]Torah is not a book of history, even though it includes history. It is not a book of science, even though the first chapter of Genesis – as the nineteenth-century sociologist Max Weber points out – is the necessary prelude to science: it represents the first time people saw the universe as the product of a single creative will, and therefore as intelligible rather than capricious and mysterious. ~ Jonathan Sacks,
1240:Embrassons donc de plus en plus cette obéissance salutaire; livrons-nous tout entiers au Seigneur; attachons-nous fortement aux cordages du vaisseau de la foi, et soyons bien persuadés que les vertus qu'elle nous ordonne de suivre sont l'égal apanage de l'homme et de la femme. S'ils ont, en effet, un seul et même Dieu, ils ont aussi un seul et même Pédagogue, une seule et même Église. La modération, la tempérance, la pudeur sont des vertus communes aux deux sexes. Ils se nourrissent des mêmes aliments, ils s'unissent par le mariage ; la respiration, la vue, l'ouïe, l'intelligence, l'espérance, la disposition à écouter les commandements de Dieu, la charité, tout leur est commun.

Si l'homme et la femme ont le même genre de vie, ils ont également part aux mêmes grâces et au même salut. Ils sont aimés de Dieu avec le même amour, instruits avec les même soins ~ Clement of Alexandria,
1241:Realism is for lazy-minded, semi-educated people whose atrophied imagination allows them to appreciate only the most limited and convention subject matter. Re-Fi is a repetitive genre written by unimaginative hacks who rely on mere mimesis. If they had any self-respect they'd be writing memoir, but they're too lazy to fact-check. Of course I never read Re-Fi. But the kids keep bringing home these garish realistic novels and talking about them, so I know that it's an incredibly narrow genre, completely centered on one species, full of worn-out cliches and predictable situations--the quest for the father, mother-bashing, obsessive male lust, dysfunctional suburban families, etc., etc. All it's good for is being made into mass-market movies. Given its old-fashioned means and limited subject matter, realism is quite incapable of describing the complexity of contemporary experience. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,
1242:The techno-political thriller and the romance novel serve as antidotes to the imagination rather than stimulants to it. For this reason they make for ideal reading in airports and airplanes. They effectively shut down the imagination by doing all its work for it. They leave the spirit or the soul—and ambiguity, for that matter—out of the equation. By shutting down the imagination, genre novels perform a useful service to the anxious air traveler by reducing his or her ability to speculate. For the most part, people on airplanes, and here I include myself, would rather not use their speculative imaginations at all; one consequence of this situation is that great poetry is virtually unreadable during turbulence, when the snack cart has been put away and the seat belts fastened. Enough anxiety is associated with air travel without Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus making it worse. ~ Charles Baxter,
1243:What's coming out of the stereo is like a genre unto itself, a charming, fucked-up fairy tale that immediately breaks my heart in all the best ways.
I stretch out on the floor with my ear parked next to the speaker, in a trance. I place the album cover over my face to block out any interruption as "I'll Be Your Mirror" seduces me. I immediately add the song to my mental list of top ten songs ever.
And as I'm bobbing my head with dreamy abandon, I hear a voice. "Nice choice, DJ," it says.
I slowly slide the album cover down past my eyes and look up. My eyes spy his shoes first--paint-splattered brogues. My heart stops when I look at his face. Pale skin, messy black hair, emerald eyes...Senor Smolder! He's eighteen, maybe nineteen. And no, my imagination didn't lie, he is just as devastating now as he was the first time I saw him. Only even more, because he just complimented my taste in music. ~ Shauna Cross,
1244:Houellebecq has created a new genre—the dystopian conversion tale. Submission is not the story some expected of an armed coup d’état, and no one in it expresses hatred or even contempt of Muslims. At one level it is simply about a man who through suffering and indifference finds himself slouching toward Mecca. At another level, though, it is about a civilization that after centuries of a steady, almost imperceptible sapping of inner conviction finds itself doing the same thing. The literature of civilizational decline, to which Zemmour’s Le Suicide français is a minor contribution, is typically brash and breathless. Not so Submission. There is not even drama here—no clash of spiritual armies, no martyrdom, no final conflagration. Stuff just happens, as in all Houellebecq’s fiction. All one hears at the end is a bone-chilling sigh of collective relief. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. Whatever. ~ Mark Lilla,
1245:Few men ever stop and actually think critically about why they like certain things, why certain forms of pop culture are popular and others are not. Few have the curiosity to look into new art forms or hobbies and figure out how they feel about them.
Here are some concepts to keep in mind as you go through your life experiencing art and media:
1. Assume everything has a form of value; it's your job to find it. Nothing is stupider than to be prejudiced against a genre of music or type of movie for no other reason than because of some stereotype or preconceived notion about it.
Drop all of this prejudice and adopt this mentality immediately: "there has to be something to this form of art, otherwise it wouldn't have a following, so I should find out what that something is." Once you find it, then decide if you like it or not. Whether you like something or not, you should always be able to appreciate it. ~ Mark Manson,
1246:Horror is a woman’s genre, and it has been all the way back to the oldest horror novel still widely read today: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, daughter of pioneering feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft. Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novels (The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian) made her the highest-paid writer of the late eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Charlotte Riddell were book-writing machines, turning out sensation novels and ghost stories by the pound. Edith Wharton wrote ghost stories before becoming a novelist of manners, and Vernon Lee (real name Violet Paget) wrote elegant tales of the uncanny that rival anything by Henry James. Three of Daphne du Maurier’s stories became Hitchcock films (Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, The Birds), and Shirley Jackson’s singular horror novel The Haunting of Hill House made her one of the highest-regarded American writers of the twentieth century. ~ Grady Hendrix,
1247:Je me doute que quand paraîtra ce livre on me demandera : "Mais alors, finalement, vous êtes chrétien ou non ?" Comme, il y a bientôt trente ans : "Mais alors, finalement, la moustache, il l'avait ou non ?" Je pourrais finasser, dire que si je me suis échiné à écrire ce livre c'est pour ne pas répondre à cette question. Pour la laisser ouverte, y renvoyer chacun. Ce serait bien mon genre. Mais je préfère répondre.
Non.
Non, je ne crois pas que Jésus soit ressuscité. Je ne crois pas qu'un homme soit revenu d'entre les morts. Seulement, qu'on puisse le croie, et de l'avoir cru moi-même, cela m'intrigue, cela me fascine, cela me trouble, cela me bouleverse - je ne sais pas quel verbe convient le mieux. J'écris ce livre pour ne pas me figurer que j'en sais plus long, ne le croyant plus, que ceux qui le croient et que moi-même quand je le croyais. J'écris ce livre pour ne pas abonder dans mon sens. (p. 341-342) ~ Emmanuel Carr re,
1248:Right from the start she realised the potential of the idea that she would always use to such effect: that of fastening suspicion so firmly to one person that the reader eliminates him or her, only to find that here, indeed, is the culprit. She deployed this device as no other writer has since, with the utmost logic and liberality: the murderer is absent from the scene of the crime (as in Styles), or appears to be the intended victim, or is the narrator of the story, or a person incapacitated by a gunshot wound, or is a child, or a policeman; the key, with Agatha, being that blessed element of the ordinary which gives the device an illusion of reality. That she had a gift for plotting coups was undeniable. The genre had a magical effect upon her ability to structure; although this was not achieved without a great deal of work, which interested her in the manner of wrestling with an intricate mathematical equation, as she had ~ Laura Thompson,
1249:La différence, évidemment, était qu'ils avaient appris plusieurs siècles auparavant quelque chose que moi, descendant d'un peuple incomparablement plus favorisé, je n'avais jamais été obligé d'acquérir. Ils avaient appris à survivre. La survie était pour moi un fait qui m'était accordé d'avance, et il était donc plus que vraisemblable que dans des circonstances analogues je serais incapable de survivre. Je deviendrais le vieux bougon, l'homme amer qui marche les yeux rivés au sol, le pessimiste qui prophétise partout le désastre et l'échec qu'il appelle de ses voeux ; je serais le suicidaire qui veut entraîner les autres dans sa chute. Il n'y avait pas de place, dans ma culture, pour le genre d'optimisme qui les protégeait dans leur monde, et il ne semblait pas y avoir de place, dans leur culture, pour le genre de rigueur, de complétude et de recherche de symétrie dont je pensais qu'elles me préservaient au sein du mien. (p.223) ~ Russell Banks,
1250:La dernière fois qu'on s'est vus, on a parlé de la statue, là-bas, reprit-elle. Il se demandait pourquoi elle me fascinait tant. Je lui ai expliqué que je ne l'avais jamais considérée comme la représentation d'un acte héroïque, mais comme celle d'une terrible agression infligée au dragon. Holger a compris. Et il m'a interrogée sur le feu. Qu'a-t-il de si particulier, ce feu que crache le dragon ? C'est le feu, lui ai-je répondu, qui brûle dans les veines de tous les opprimés. Ce même feu qui peut nous réduire en cendres peut aussi parfois... si un doux dingue du genre de Holger vous regarde, joue aux échecs avec vous, vous parle, bref, s'intéresse à vous tout simplement, le même feu, donc, qui peut aussi se transformer en une force. Une force qui vous permet de rendre coup pour coup. Holger savait qu'on peut toujours se relever, même quand une lance vous transêrce le corps. C'est pour ça qu'il était si pénible, si fatigant, conclut-elle. ~ David Lagercrantz,
1251:Essentially, in the model of strange fiction based in shifts in narrative modality, we are reversing the polarity, treating those ‘contents’ (errata, nova and chimera) as the end results of a literary technique of estrangement, the effects of strangeness rather than the cause. These quirks – dragons, spaceships, magic, FTL – are not things which, in and of themselves, make fiction strange. Rather they are the epiphenomena of an underlying process of semiosis, figurae generated and combined to create meaning, gaining their symbolic power by their application. Genre is not a question of which trove of tropes one uses, of a characteristic set of quirks; rather it is a quality emergent from the underlying dynamics of modalities, the nature of the impossibilities and our affective responses to them – the uncertainties and ethical imperatives too, if we include epistemic and deontic quirks in our scope along with the alethic and boilomaic. ~ Hal Duncan,
1252:One day I found him amid large packages from which spilled attractive, glossy paperbacks with mythical covers. He had tried to use, as a "generator of ideas" — for we were running out of them — those works of fantastic literature, that popular genre (especially in the States), called, by a persistent misconception, "science fiction." He had not read such books before; he was annoyed — indignant, even — expecting variety, finding monotony. "They have everything except fantasy," he said. Indeed, a mistake. The authors of these pseudo-scientific fairy tales supply the public with what it wants: truisms, clichés, stereotypes, all sufficiently costumed and made "wonderful" so that the reader may sink into a safe state of surprise and at the same time not be jostled out of his philosophy of life. If there is progress in a culture, the progress is above all conceptual, but literature, the science-fiction variety in particular, has nothing to do with that. ~ Stanis aw Lem,
1253:Right from the start she realised the potential of the idea that she would always use to such effect: that of fastening suspicion so firmly to one person that the reader eliminates him or her, only to find that here, indeed, is the culprit. She deployed this device as no other writer has since, with the utmost logic and liberality: the murderer is absent from the scene of the crime (as in Styles), or appears to be the intended victim, or is the narrator of the story, or a person incapacitated by a gunshot wound, or is a child, or a policeman; the key, with Agatha, being that blessed element of the ordinary which gives the device an illusion of reality. That she had a gift for plotting coups was undeniable. The genre had a magical effect upon her ability to structure; although this was not achieved without a great deal of work, which interested her in the manner of wrestling with an intricate mathematical equation, as she had done as a child with her father. ~ Laura Thompson,
1254:When I was a kid, I just read and read. We were lucky enough to have gone to England and had a whole bunch of Penguin Puffins books, like The Land of Green Ginger by Noel Langley, which is hilarious. I would love to be able to write a book like that, but I don't know that I have a humorous bone in my body when it comes to writing. Once on a Time by A.A. Milne. I read a lot of old, old fantasy stuff. The Carbonelbooks by Barbara Sleigh. Then when I got a little older I loved Zilpha Keatley Snyder. I was a big fan of romance and when I got a little bit older I would read a Harlequin romance or a Georgette Heyer novel and then David Copperfield, and then another genre book and then Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy. I was that kind of reader. One book that I loved was I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. I loved voice and that book had it in spades. And then of course I grew into loving Jane Eyre. ~ Franny Billingsley,
1255:For some young artists, it can take a bit of time to discover which tools (which medium, or genre, or career pathway) will truly suit them best. For me, although many different art forms attract me, the tools that I find most natural and comfortable are language and oil paint; I've also learned that as someone with a limited number of spoons it's best to keep my toolbox clean and simple. My husband, by contrast, thrives with a toolbox absolutely crowded to bursting, working with language, voice, musical instruments, puppets, masks animated on a theater stage, computer and video imagery, and half a dozen other things besides, no one of these tools more important than the others, and all somehow working together. For other artists, the tools at hand might be needles and thread; or a jeweller's torch; or a rack of cooking spices; or the time to shape a young child's day....

To me, it's all art, inside the studio and out. At least it is if we approach our lives that way. ~ Terri Windling,
1256:As-tu déjà été amoureux? C'est horrible non? Ca rend si vulnérable. Ca t'ouvre la poitrine et le coeur en grand et du coup, n'importe qui peut venir te bousiller de l'intérieur. On se forge des défenses, on se fabrique une belle armure pour que rien ne puisse jamais nous atteindre, et voilà qu'un imbécile, pas bien différent des autres s'immisce dans notre imbécile de vie... On lui offre un morceau de soi alors que l'autre n'a rien demandé. Il a juste fait un truc débile un jour, genre t'embrasser ou te sourire, mais, depuis, ta vie ne t'appartient plus. L'amour te prend en otage. Il s'insinue en toi. Il te dévore de l'intérieur et te laisse tout seul à chialer dans le noir, au point qu'un simple phrase comme "je crois qu'on devrait rester amis" te fait l'effet d'un éclat de verre qu'on t'aurait planté dans le coeur. Ca fait mal. Pas juste dans ton imagination. Pas juste dans ta tête. C'est une douleur à fendre l'âme, qui s'incruste en toi et te déchire du dedans. Je hais l'amour. ~ Neil Gaiman,
1257:Meanwhile, the net celebrates kids whose antics are the most sensationalist and, as a result, often reckless and self-destructive. An entire genre of YouTube video known as Epic Fail features amateur footage of wipeouts and other, well, epic failures. "FAIL Blog," part of The Daily What media empire, solicits fail videos from users and features both extreme sports stunts gone awry along with more random humiliations—like the guy who tried to shoplift an electric guitar by shoving it down his pants. Extreme sports clips are competing on the same sensationalist scale and result in popular classics such as "tire off the roof nut shot" and "insane bike crash into sign." Daring quickly overtakes what used to be skill. In "planking" photos and videos, participants seek to stay frozen in a horizontal plank position as they balance on a flagpole, over a cliff, or on top of a sleeping tiger. For "choking" videos, young people strangle one another to the point of collapse and, sometimes, death. ~ Douglas Rushkoff,
1258:I had grown up on Folkway's Nonesuch field recordings and the stuff Lomax had done for the Library of Congress, but the production values on the Ocora releases were on a whole other level. Eno and I realized that music from elsewhere didn't need to sound distant, scratchy, or 'primitive.' These recordings were as well produced as any contemporary recordings in any genre. You were made to feel, for example, that this music wasn't a ghostly remnant form some lost culture, soon to be relegated to the almost forgotten past. It was vital, and it was happening right now. To us there was strange beauty there, deep passion, and the compositions often operated by rules and structures that were radically different from what we were used to. As a result, our limited ideas of what constituted music were exploded forever. These recordings opened up myriad ways that music could be made and organized. There were many musical universes out there, and we had been blinkered by confining ourselves to only one. ~ David Byrne,
1259:Dans une existence inauthentique, la recherche systématique de diversions, de succédanés et de tranquillisants, qui caractérise tant de "distractions" et de "divertissements" d'aujourd'hui, ne laisse pas encore pressentir à la femme la crise qui l'attend lorsqu'elle s'apercevra combien les occupations masculines, pour lesquelles elle a tant lutté, sont dépourvues de sens, lorsque s’évanouiront les illusions et l'euphorie que lui donne la satisfaction de ses revendications, lorsqu'elle constatera, d'autre part, qu'en raison du climat de dissolution, famille et enfants ne peuvent plus donner un sens satisfaisant à sa vie, ni homme ni sexe ne pourront signifier grand chose non plus, ne pourront plus constituer, comme ils le firent pour la femme absolue et traditionnelle, le centre naturel de son existence, et ne représentera plus pour elle qu'un des éléments d'une existence dispersée et extériorisée, allant de concert avec la vanité, le sport, le culte narcissique du corps, les intérêts pratiques et autres chose du même genre ~ Julius Evola,
1260:He remained seated on his revolving stool, turned toward us, hands between his knees, in a position the same as ours, and with a few words concluded his lecture on the question of why Beethoven had not written a third movement to Opus 111. We had needed only to hear the piece, he said, to be able to answer the question ourselves. A third movement? A new beginning, after that farewell? A return — after that parting? Impossible! What had happened was that the sonata had found its ending in its second, enormous movement, had ended never to return. And when he said, “the sonata,” he did not mean just this one, in C minor, but he meant the sonata per se, as a genre, as a traditional artform — it had been brought to an end, to its end, had fulfilled its destiny, reached a goal beyond which it could not go; canceling and resolving itself, it had taken its farewell - the wave of goodbye from the D-G-G motif, consoled melodically by the C-sharp, was a farewell in that sense, too, a farewell as grand as the work, a farewell from the sonata. ~ Thomas Mann,
1261:To admirers and students of Anthony Trollope, the interest of this play, now printed for the first time and from the original manuscript, is out of all proportion to its artistic qualities. So far as is known, Trollope wrote only two plays during the prolific five and thirty years of his life of authorship. The genre was uncomfortable to him. It limited his elbow-room and forbade him the subtle accumulation of detail that was his genius. He liked a large canvas and a crowded one. Unrivalled as a manipulator of interdependent groups and individuals, he loved to sustain the interest and vitality of half a dozen societies, weaving them into one absorbing narrative. The more one reads his novels, the more one marvels at the skill with which he takes the reader from one set of characters to another; at the knowledge of human nature that enabled him to present so many personalities from so many walks of life; at the technique that could keep each individual distinct, and at the same time each group of individuals generically alike. ~ Anthony Trollope,
1262:Your scorn for mediocrity blinds you to its vast primitive power. You stand in the glare of your own brilliance, unable to see into the dim corners of the room, to dilate your eyes and see the potential dangers of the mass, the wad of humanity. Even as I tell you this, dear student, you cannot quite believe that lesser men, in whatever numbers, can really defeat you. But we are in the age of the mediocre man. He is dull, colorless, boring — but inevitably victorious. The amoeba outlives the tiger because it divides and continues in its immortal monotony. The masses are the final tyrants. See how, in the arts, Kabuki wanes and withers while popular novels of violence and mindless action swamp the mind of the mass reader. And even in that timid genre, no author dares to produce a genuinely superior man as his hero, for in his rage of shame the mass man will send his yojimbo, the critic, to defend him. The roar of the plodders is inarticulate, but deafening. They have no brain, but they have a thousand arms to grasp and clutch at you, drag you down. ~ Trevanian,
1263:I’ve read science fiction and fantasy all my life – though when you’re a child, they just call that “books.” The first book I ever read on my own was The Neverending Story. I studied classics at university, and in ancient literature, monsters, witches, magic, curses, and impossible machines aren’t genre, they’re just Tuesday afternoon. I had no idea that I was writing fantasy at first, because I was so saturated in Greek literature that it never occurred to me that my talking animals and sentient mazes were anything but realism. Our instinct toward folklore and magical stories, parables and imagining the future, are as much a part of the human experiences as divorce, grief, falling in love, politics, or raising children. I’ve always read fantastic literature, because it’s always seemed truest to me. It makes the metaphorical literal and is all the more powerful for that immediacy and directness. I love genre fiction for the infinite expanse of stories it can tell – and it’s been my constant companion since I was a very small child. ~ Catherynne M Valente,
1264:Ce qu'il dit, c'est que c'est une chose étrange, quand on y pense, que des gens normaux, intelligents, puissent croire à un truc aussi insensé que la religion chrétienne, un truc exactement du même genre que la mythologie grecque ou les contes de fées. Dans les temps anciens, admettons : les gens étaient crédules, la science n'existait pas. Mais aujourd'hui ! Un type qui aujourd'hui croirait à des histoires de dieux qui se transforment en cygnes pour séduire des mortelles, ou à des princesses qui embrassent des crapauds et quand elles les embrassent ils deviennent des princes charmants, tout le monde dirait : il est fou. Or, un tas de gens croient une histoire tout aussi délirante et ces gens ne passent pas pour des fous. Même sans partager leur croyance, on les prend au sérieux. Ils ont un rôle social, moins important que par le passé, mais respecté et dans l'ensemble plutôt positif. Leur lubie cohabite avec des activités tout à fait sensées. Les présidents de la République rendent visite à leur chef avec déférence. C'est quand même bizarre, non ? (p. 15) ~ Emmanuel Carr re,
1265:[...] Les natures du genre de la tienne, les hommes doués de sens délicats, ceux qui ont de l'âme, les poètes, ceux pour qui toute la vie est amour nous sont presque toujours supérieurs, à nous, chez qui domine l'intellect. Vous êtes, par votre origine, du côté de la mère. Vous vivez dans la plénitude de l'être. La force de l'amour, la capacité de vivre intensément les choses est votre lot. Nous autres, hommes d'intellect, bien que nous ayons l'air souvent de vous diriger et de vous gouverner, nous ne vivons pas dans l'intégrité de l'être, nous vivons dans les abstractions. A vous la plénitude de la vie, le suc des fruits, à vous le jardin de l'amour, le beau pays de l'art. Vous êtes chez vous sur terre, nous dans le monde des idées. Vous courez le risque de sombrer dans la sensualité, nous d'étouffer dans le vide. Tu es artiste, je suis penseur. Tu dors sur le cœur d'une mère, je veille dans le désert. Moi, c'est le soleil qui m'éclaire, pour toi brillent la lune et les étoiles. Ce sont des jeunes filles qui hantent tes rêves; moi, ce sont mes écoliers... (p. 54-55) ~ Hermann Hesse,
1266:I stood by and spoke out for Amazon when Amazon was attacked by Hatchett and other traditional publishers in the early days. I also represented Amazon as an author spokesperson to the media during the Press Conference launch in Santa Monica for Kindle Family as well as at Book Expo America. Today, authors don't have that kind of loyalty to a distributor of their books. They don't have that kind of loyalty to the publishers of their books and jump around to find the best deal for each book and going back and forth between publishing with a big publisher and self-publishing. Publishing like any industry is built on relationships. When an author is published by multiple publishers and jumps around, it signals to her publishers her lack of commitment to them. It is only human to see this lack of trust. So, my advice to authors who jump around...find a good publisher to land with if you decide to go with a traditional publisher. Be committed to them or it will seem like a betrayal when you are published with another publisher in the same genre. - Advice to Authors by Kailin Gow ~ Kailin Gow,
1267:Le Boucher, the early Claude Chabrol that Hitch, according to lore, wished he’d directed. Dark Passage, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall—a San Francisco valentine, all velveteen with fog, and antecedent to any movie in which a character goes under the knife to disguise himself. Niagara, starring Marilyn Monroe; Charade, starring Audrey Hepburn; Sudden Fear!, starring Joan Crawford’s eyebrows. Wait Until Dark: Hepburn again, a blind woman stranded in her basement apartment. I’d go berserk in a basement apartment. Now, movies that postdate Hitch: The Vanishing, with its sucker-punch finale. Frantic, Polanski’s ode to the master. Side Effects, which begins as a Big Pharma screed before slithering like an eel into another genre altogether. Okay. Popular film misquotes. “Play it again, Sam”: Casablanca, allegedly, except neither Bogie nor Bergman ever said it. “He’s alive”: Frankenstein doesn’t gender his monster; cruelly, it’s just “It’s alive.” “Elementary, my dear Watson” does crop up in the first Holmes film of the talkie era, but appears nowhere in the Conan Doyle canon. ~ A J Finn,
1268:The notion of finding “a body in the library” of a country house was another trope of the genre. Christie had fun with it in The Body in the Library, where the corpse is found in Gossington Hall, owned by Miss Marple’s cronies, Colonel Arthur Bantry and his wife Dolly. But profound changes were taking place in British society as war was followed by peace-time austerity, and high taxes made it impossible for many families to cling on to old houses that were cripplingly expensive to run. Country house parties fell out of fashion, and although traditional whodunits continued to be written and enjoyed, detective novelists could not altogether ignore the reality. The scale of upheaval is apparent in another Marple story, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, published twenty years after The Body in the Library. Gossington Hall has been sold off, and been run as a guest house, divided into flats, bought by a government body, and finally snapped up for use as a rich woman’s playground by a much-married film star. Her entourage provides a “closed circle” of suspects suited to the Sixties. ~ Martin Edwards,
1269:Fishermen lean on the railing. There are kiosks at regular intervals that grill meats for truck drivers and others who want a quick lunch. Bags of charcoal piled by the sides of the kiosks will supply the heat to grill blood sausages, steaks, hamburgers, and various other cuts of the legendary Argentine flesh that sizzles during the early part of the day in anticipation of the lunch crowd. Many of the kiosks advertise choripan, a conjunction of chorizo (sausage) and pan (bread). There’s another offering called vaciopan, which literally means empty sandwich, but it also is a cut off the cow. This is not a place for vegetarians. The slang here, called lunfardo, is many-layered and inventive. There’s even a genre of slang called vesre when you reverse the syllables—vesre is reves (reverse) with the syllables reversed. Tango becomes gotán and café con leche becomes feca con chele. Sometimes this is compounded and complicated even further when a euphemism for something—a word for marijuana or one’s wife—is pronounced backward, adding yet another layer of obscurity to a slang that already approaches a separate language. ~ David Byrne,
1270:I conclude this section with a possibly puzzling postscript on the meaning of the word “literal.” What is the literal meaning of a parable? Its literal meaning is its parabolic meaning. What is the literal meaning of a poem? Its literal meaning is its poetic meaning. What is the literal meaning of a symbolic or metaphorical narrative? Its literal meaning is its symbolic or metaphorical meaning. But in modern Western culture over the last few centuries, “literal” has most often been confused with “factual,” and factuality has been elevated over the metaphorical. Hence when people say they take stories in the Bible and the gospels “literally,” they most often mean “factually.” Thus the difference is not ultimately a literal versus a metaphorical reading, but a factual versus a metaphorical reading. And to read a story factually rather than metaphorically often involves a misjudgment about the literary genre of a story. When the metaphorical is understood factually, the result is a story hard to believe. But when a metaphorical narrative is understood metaphorically, it may indeed be powerfully and challengingly true. ~ Marcus J Borg,
1271:Q: Do you have any advice for upcoming writers who want to pen weird stories?

A: READ, damn it. Fill your brain to the bursting point with the good stuff, starting with writers that you truly enjoy, and then work your way backward and outward, reading those writers who inspired the writers you love best. That was my path as far as Weird/Horror Fiction, starting with Lovecraft, and then working my way backward/outward on the Weird Fiction spiderweb. And don’t limit your reading. Read it all, especially non-fiction and various news outlets. You’d be surprised by how many of my story ideas were born while listening to NPR, perusing a blog, or paging through Vanity Fair.

Once you have your fuel squared away, just write what you love, in whatever style and genre. You’ll never have fun being someone you’re not, so be yourself. When a singer opens their mouth, what comes out is what comes out.

Also, don’t be afraid to fail, and don’t be afraid to walk away. Writing isn’t for everyone, and that’s totally fine. One doesn’t need to be a writer to enjoy being a reader and overall fan of genre or wider fiction. ~ T E Grau,
1272:Border crossing' is a recurrent theme in all aspects of my work -- editing, writing, and painting. I'm interested in the various ways artists not only cross borders but also subvert them. In mythology, the old Trickster figure Coyote is a champion border crosser, mischievously dashing from the land of the living to the land of the dead, from the wilderness world of magic to the human world. He tears things down so they can be made anew. He's a rascal, but also a culture hero, dancing on borders, ignoring the rules, as many of our most innovative artists do. I'm particularly drawn to art that crosses the borders critics have erected between 'high art' and 'popular culture,' between 'mainstream' and 'genre,' or between one genre and another -- I love that moment of passage between the two; that place on the border where two worlds meet and energize each other, where Coyote enters and shakes things up. But I still have a great love for traditional fantasy, for Imaginary World, center-of-the-genre stories. I'm still excited by series books and trilogies if they're well written and use mythic tropes in interesting ways. ~ Terri Windling,
1273:We have so long been subject to external criticism that we don’t know how to react to internal criticism, because whereas the most enduring, positive and sensible response to the former is a united front – you shall not divide us, here we stand – responding to the latter is an entirely different ballgame.

This is my fear: that as a community, we don’t know how to critique ourselves, and that this is dong us damage. Criticism, and specifically the criticism of both literary publications and the mainstream press, has so long been the weapon of the enemy that our first response on seeing it wielded internally is to call it the work of traitors. We have found strength in the creation of our own conventions and the hallowing of our own legends, flourishing to such an extent that, even if we are not yet accepted into the mainstream literary establishment, we are nonetheless part of the cultural mainstream. We are written about inaccurately, yet we are written about; and if there ever was a time when the whole genre seemed a precarious, faddish endeavour, then that time is surely past.

Blog post: Criticism in SFF and YA ~ Foz Meadows,
1274:YA stories feature a young adult protagonist or protagonists and usually focus on that character’s journey toward maturity (the tradition of the Bildungsroman.). Learning about love / relationships is an important part of that stage in our lives, so it’s not surprising so many writers are building strong romantic elements into their YA stories. I don’t remember quite such an emphasis on romance in the books my children read as young adults, so I do think the approach has changed. Within my genre of fantasy, there’s been an upsurge of paranormal romance, partly generated by the Twilight books, but also reflecting the popularity of this sub-genre with adult readers. There are far more female fantasy writers (and female fantasy readers) than there were, say, twenty years ago, and perhaps female writers are more confident about including a good love story in a fantasy novel.

(2012 Interview by Helen Lowe: The Supernatural Underground: An Interview with Juliet Marillier Discussing "Shadowfell".) ~ Juliet Marillier,
1275:In the past few years, more and more passionate debates about the nature of SFF and YA have bubbled to the surface. Conversations about race, imperialism, gender, sexuality, romance, bias, originality, feminism and cultural appropriation are getting louder and louder and, consequently, harder to ignore. Similarly, this current tension about negative reviews is just another fissure in the same bedrock: the consequence of built-up pressure beneath. Literary authors feud with each other, and famously; yet genre authors do not, because we fear being cast as turncoats. For decades, literary writers have also worked publicly as literary reviewers; yet SFF and YA authors fear to do the same, lest it be seen as backstabbing when they dislike a book. (Small wonder, then, that so few SFF and YA titles are reviewed by mainstream journals.) Just as a culture of sexual repression leads to feelings of guilt and outbursts of sexual moralising by those most afflicted, so have we, by denying and decrying all criticism that doesn’t suit our purposes, turned those selfsame critical impulses towards censorship.

Blog post: Criticism in SFF and YA ~ Foz Meadows,
1276:Il avait lu des masses de livres là-dessus, tout récement celui d'Hannah Arendt sur le procès d'Eichmann à Jérusalem, il savait que le jour où il écrirait sérieusement, ce serait à ce sujet. Le nazisme, tous les habitants de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle doivent se débrouiller avec, vivre avec l'idée que c'est arrivé, comme lui devait vivre avec la mort de sa soeur Jane. On peut ne pas y penser, n'empêche que c'est là, et il faudrait que ce soit aussi dans son livre.

Rien de plus éloigné du tao que le nazisme. Les Japonais, pourtant, qui vénèrent le tao, avaient été alliés aux nazis. S'ils l'avaient emporté... Un moment, il laissa miroiter cette idée. On avait déjà fait des livres de ce genre, il en avait lu un d'après lequel le Sud avait gagné la guerre de Sécession. Il se demanda ce que serait un monde issu de la victoire de l'Axe, quinze ans plus tòt. Qui dirigerait le Reich ? Hitler toujours l'un de ses lieutenants ? Est-ce que cela changerait quelque chose que ce soit Bormann, Himmler, Goering ou Baldur von Schirach? Est-ce que cela changerait quelque chose pour lui, habitant de Point Reyes, Marin County ? Et quoi? ~ Emmanuel Carr re,
1277:Literature is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.
The value judgement concealed in distinguishing one novel as literature and another as genre vanishes with the distinction.
Every readable novel can give true pleasure. Every novel read by choice is read because it gives true pleasure.
Literature consists of many genres, including mystery, science fiction, fantasy, naturalism, realism, magical realism, graphic, erotic, experimental, psychological, social, political, historical, bildungsroman, romance, western, army life, young adult, thriller, etc., etc…. and the proliferating cross-species and subgenres such as erotic Regency, noir police procedural, or historical thriller with zombies.
Some of these categories are descriptive, some are maintained largely as marketing devices. Some are old, some new, some ephemeral.
Genres exist, forms and types and kinds of fiction exist and need to be understood: but no genre is inherently, categorically superior or inferior.

(Hypothesis on Literature vs. Genre) ~ Ursula K Le Guin,
1278:And once upon a time I wondered: Is writing epic fantasy not somehow a betrayal? Did I not somehow do a disservice to my own reality by paying so much attention to the power fantasies of disenchanted white men?

But. Epic fantasy is not merely what Tolkien made it.

This genre is rooted in the epic — and the truth is that there are plenty of epics out there which feature people like me. Sundiata’s badass mother. Dihya, warrior queen of the Amazighs. The Rain Queens. The Mino Warriors. Hatshepsut’s reign. Everything Harriet Tubman ever did. And more, so much more, just within the African components of my heritage. I haven’t even begun to explore the non-African stuff. So given all these myths, all these examinations of the possible… how can I not imagine more? How can I not envision an epic set somewhere other than medieval England, about someone other than an awkward white boy? How can I not use every building-block of my history and heritage and imagination when I make shit up?

And how dare I disrespect that history, profane all my ancestors’ suffering and struggles, by giving up the freedom to imagine that they’ve won for me. ~ N K Jemisin,
1279:L’« objectivisme » anti-émotionnel et facticement impassible trahit sa fausseté par la contradiction suivante : ceux qui se font les porte-parole d'une rationalité imperturbable et impertinente sont en même temps ceux qui préconisent l'amour libre — ils n’ont aucun goût à l'ascétisme — ou qui s’enflamment dès qu'on parle de politique, et autres inconséquences de ce genre ; ce qui prouve que leur « objectivité » n'est qu'erreur et ostentation, qu'elle est apparentée à l'orgueil et à l'amertume ; d'où la propension à blanchir les hommes vils — sauf quand par hasard ce sont des adversaires politiques — et à noircir les hommes de bien, calmement et sans passion, du moins sans passion visible ; c'est là un exemple de cette morale à sens unique, si caractéristique pour tous les genres d’hypocrisie. Quoi qu'il en soit, il faut réagir contre l'opinion psychanalytique — très répandue — que l’indignation aussi bien que l’enthousiasme révèlent toujours un préjugé ou un parti pris ; opinion simpliste qui est voisine d’une autre erreur non moins sotte, à savoir que dans une discorde nul n’a jamais tout à fait raison, et que celui qui s’emporte à toujours tort. ~ Frithjof Schuon,
1280:La Religion est utile et même nécessaire aux Peuples. Cela n’est-il pas dit, soutenu, prouvé dans ce même Ecrit? Loin d’attaquer les vrais principes de la Religion, l’Auteur les pose, les affermit de tout son pouvoir; ce qu’il attaque, ce qu’il combat, ce qu’il doit combattre, c’est le fanatisme aveugle, la superstition cruelle, le stupide préjugé. Mais il faut, disent-ils, respecter tout cela. Mais pourquoi? Parce que c’est ainsi qu’on mene les Peuples. Oui, c’est ainsi qu’on les mene à leur perte. La superstition est le plus terrible fléau du genre humain; elle abbrutit les simples, elle persécute les sages, elle enchaîne les Nations, elle fait par tout cent maux effroyables: quel bien fait-elle? Aucun; si elle en fait, c’est aux Tyrans; elle est leur arme la plus terrible, et cela même est le plus grand mal qu’elle ait jamais fait.” “il importe que l’Etat ne soit pas sans Religion, et cela importe par des raisons graves, sur lesquelles j’ai par tout fortement insisté: mais il vaudroit mieux encore n’en point avoir, que d’en avoir une barbare et persécutante qui, tyrannisant les Loix mêmes, contrarieroit les devoirs du Citoyen ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau,
1281:We have arrived at an interesting moment in the evolution of our species when a smart person in a first-world culture is pestered by two contradictory feelings: first that he is as special a creature as nature has yet produced
and second that he's not very special at all, just excited matter here for a while and off again into universal dark matter. This first feeling inflates him and makes him want to puff out his chest and preen a bit. This second feeling makes him want to crawl in a hole, act carelessly, or sit inert on the sofa. How unfortunate for a creature to be buffeted in such contradictory ways! These twin feelings lead a person to the following pair of conclusions: that while he is perhaps quite smart, he is nevertheless rather like a cockroach, trapped with a brain that really isn't big enough for his purposes, perhaps trapped in a corner of an academic discipline, a research
field, a literary genre, or in some other small place, trapped by his creatureliness, and trapped by life's very smallness. I would like to dub this the god-bug syndrome: the prevalent and perhaps epidemic feeling of greatness walking hand-in-hand with smallness that plagues so many people today. ~ Eric Maisel,
1282:Je découvris qu'en bluffant les psychiatres on pouvait tirer des trésors inépuisables de divertissement gratifiants: vous les menez habilement en bateau, leur cachez soigneusement que vous connaissez toutes les ficelles du métier; vous inventez à leur intention des rêves élaborés, de purs classiques du genre qui provoquent chez eux, ces extorqueurs de rêves, de tels cauchemars qu'ils se réveillent en hurlant; vous les affriolez avec des "scènes primitives" apocryphes; le tout sans jamais leur permettre d'entrevoir si peu que ce soit le véritable état de votre sexualité. En soudoyant une infirmière, j'eus accès à quelques dossiers et découvris, avec jubilation, des fiches me qualifiant d' "homosexuel en puissance" et d' "impuissant invétéré". Ce sport était si merveilleux, et ses résultats - dans mon cas - si mirifiques, que je restai un bon mois supplémentaire après ma guérison complète (dormant admirablement et mangeant comme une écolière). Puis j'ajoutai encore une semaine rien que pour le plaisir de me mesurer à un nouveau venu redoutable, une célébrité déplacée (et manifestement égarée) comme pour son habileté à persuader ses patients qu'ils avaient été témoins de leur propre conception. ~ Vladimir Nabokov,
1283:Du reste, la majorité des orientalistes ne sont et ne veulent être que des érudits ; tant qu’ils se bornent à des travaux historiques ou philologiques, cela n’a pas grande importance ; il est évident que des ouvrages de ce genre ne peuvent servir de rien pour atteindre le but que nous envisageons ici, mais leur seul danger, en somme, est celui qui est commun à tous les abus de l’érudition, nous voulons dire la propagation de cette « myopie intellectuelle » qui borne tout savoir à des recherches de détail, et le gaspillage d’efforts qui pourraient être mieux employés dans bien des cas. Mais ce qui est beaucoup plus grave à nos yeux, c’est l’action exercée par ceux des orientalistes qui ont la prétention de comprendre et d’interpréter les doctrines, et qui les travestissent de la façon la plus incroyable, tout en assurant parfois qu’ils les comprennent mieux que les Orientaux eux-mêmes (comme Leibnitz s’imaginait avoir retrouvé le vrai sens des caractères de Fo-hi), et sans jamais songer à prendre l’avis des représentants autorisés des civilisations qu’ils veulent étudier, ce qui serait pourtant la première chose à faire, au lieu de se comporter comme s’il s’agirait de reconstituer des civilisations disparues. ~ Ren Gu non,
1284:La science moderne se présente dans le monde comme le principal ou le seul facteur de vérité ; selon ce style de certitude, connaître Charlemagne, c’est savoir combien a pesé son crâne et quelle a été sa taille. Au point de vue de la vérité totale — redisons-le une fois de plus — il vaut mille fois mieux croire que Dieu a créé le monde en six jours et que l’au-delà se situe sous le disque terrestre ou dans le ciel tournant, que de connaître la distance d’une nébuleuse à une autre tout en ignorant que les phénomènes ne font que manifester une Réalité transcendante qui nous détermine de toutes parts et qui donne à notre condition humaine tout son sens et tout son contenu ; aussi les grandes traditions, conscientes de ce qu’un savoir prométhéen mènerait à la perte de la vérité essentielle et salvatrice, n’ont-elles jamais prescrit ni encouragé cette accumulation de connaissances tout extérieures et, en fait, mortelles pour l’homme. On affirme couramment que telle ou telle prouesse scientifique « fait honneur au genre humain », et autres niaiseries de ce genre, comme si l’homme faisait honneur à sa nature autrement qu’en se dépassant, et comme s’il se dépassait ailleurs que dans la conscience d’absolu et dans la sainteté. ~ Frithjof Schuon,
1285:Mais rien ne servirait de s’être mis à l’abri de tous les motifs personnels de tristesse, si parfois la misanthropie s’emparait de votre âme, en voyant le crime partout heureux, la candeur si rare, l’innocence si peu connue, la bonne foi si négligée quand elle est sans profit, les gains et les prodigalités de la débauche également odieux ; enfin, l’ambition si effrénée que, se méconnaissant elle-même, elle cherche son éclat dans la bassesse. Alors une sombre nuit environne notre âme, et dans cet anéantissement des vertus impossibles à trouver chez les autres, et nuisibles à celui qui les a, elle se remplit de doute et d’obscurité.
Pour nous détourner de ces idées, faisons en sorte que les vices des hommes ne nous paraissent pas odieux, mais ridicules ; et sachons imiter Démocrite plutôt qu’Héraclite. Le premier ne se montrait jamais en public sans pleurer ; le second, sans rire. L’un, dans tout ce que font les hommes, ne voyait que misère ; le second, qu’ineptie. Il faut donc attacher peu d’importance à toutes choses, et ne nous passionner pour aucune.
Il est plus conforme à l’humanité de se moquer des choses de la vie que d’en gémir. Ajoutez que mieux vaut pour le genre humain s’en moquer, que se lamenter à son sujet. ~ Seneca,
1286:Cat Rambo: Where do you think the perennial debate between what is literary fiction and what is genre is sited?

Norman Spinrad: I think it’s a load of crap. See my latest column in Asimov’s, particularly re The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I detest the whole concept of genre. A piece of fiction is either a good story well told or it isn’t. The supposed dichotomy between “literary fiction” and “popular fiction” is ridiculous. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mailer, did not have serious literary intent? As writers of serious literary intent, they didn’t want to be “popular,” meaning sell a lot of books? They wanted to be unpopular and have terrible sales figures to prove they were “serious”?

I say this is bullshit and I say the hell with it. “Genre,” if it means anything at all, is a restrictive commercial requirement. “Westerns” must be set in the Old West. “Mysteries” must have a detective solving a crime, usually murder. “Nurse Novels” must have a nurse. And so forth.

In the strictly literary sense, neither science fiction nor fantasy are “genres.” They are anti-genres. They can be set anywhere and anywhen except in the mimetic here and now or a real historical period. They are the liberation of fiction from the constraints of “genre” in an absolute literary sense. ~ Norman Spinrad,
1287:About the only law that I think relates to the genre is that you should not try to explain, to find neat explanations for what happens, and that the object of the thing is to produce a sense of the uncanny. Freud in his essay on the uncanny wrote that the sense of the uncanny is the only emotion which is more powerfully expressed in art than in life, which I found very illuminating; it didn’t help writing the screen-play, but I think it’s an interesting insight into the genre. And I read an essay by the great master H.P. Lovecraft where he said that you should never attempt to explain what happens, as long as what happens stimulates people’s imagination, their sense of the uncanny, their sense of anxiety and fear. And as long as it doesn’t, within itself, have any obvious inner contradictions, it is just a matter of, as it were, building on the imagination (imaginary ideas, surprises, etc.), working in this area of feeling. I think also that the ingeniousness of a story like this is something which the audience ultimately enjoys; they obviously wonder as the story goes on what’s going to happen, and there’s a great satisfaction when it’s all over not having been able to have anticipated the major development of the story, and yet at the end not to feel that you have been fooled or swindled. ~ Stanley Kubrick,
1288:About the only law that I think relates to the genre is that you should not try to explain, to find neat explanations for what happens, and that the object of the thing is to produce a sense of the uncanny. Freud in his essay on the uncanny wrote that the sense of the uncanny is the only emotion which is more powerfully expressed in art than in life, which I found very illuminating; it didn't help writing the screen-play, but I think it's an interesting insight into the genre. And I read an essay by the great master H.P. Lovecraft where he said that you should never attempt to explain what happens, as long as what happens stimulates people's imagination, their sense of the uncanny, their sense of anxiety and fear. And as long as it doesn't, within itself, have any obvious inner contradictions, it is just a matter of, as it were, building on the imagination (imaginary ideas, surprises, etc.), working in this area of feeling. I think also that the ingeniousness of a story like this is something which the audience ultimately enjoys; they obviously wonder as the story goes on what's going to happen, and there's a great satisfaction when it's all over not having been able to have anticipated the major development of the story, and yet at the end not to feel that you have been fooled or swindled. ~ Stanley Kubrick,
1289:How can so many (white, male) writers narratively justify restricting the agency of their female characters on the grounds of sexism = authenticity while simultaneously writing male characters with conveniently modern values?

The habit of authors writing Sexism Without Sexists in genre novels is seemingly pathological. Women are stuffed in the fridge under cover of "authenticity" by secondary characters and villains because too many authors flinch from the "authenticity" of sexist male protagonists. Which means the yardstick for "authenticity" in such novels almost always ends up being "how much do the women suffer", instead of - as might also be the case - "how sexist are the heroes".

And this bugs me; because if authors can stretch their imaginations far enough to envisage the presence of modern-minded men in the fake Middle Ages, then why can't they stretch them that little bit further to put in modern-minded women, or modern-minded social values? It strikes me as being extremely convenient that the one universally permitted exception to this species of "authenticity" is one that makes the male heroes look noble while still mandating that the women be downtrodden and in need of rescuing.

-Comment at Staffer's Book Review 4/18/2012 to "Michael J. Sullivan on Character Agency ~ Foz Meadows,
1290:Tagore claims that the first time he experienced the thrill of poetry was when he encountered the children’s rhyme ‘Jal pare/pata nare’ (‘Rain falls / The leaf trembles) n Iswrchandra Vidyasagar’s Bengali primer Barna Parichay (Introducing the Alphabet). There are at least two revealing things about this citation. The first is that, as Bengali scholars have remarked, Tagore’s memory, and predilection, lead him to misquote and rewrite the lines. The actual rhyme is in sadhu bhasha, or ‘high’ Bengali: ‘Jal paritechhe / pata naritechhe’ (‘Rain falleth / the leaf trembleth’). This is precisely the sort of diction that Tagore chose for the English Gitanjali, which, with its these and thous, has so tried our patience. Yet, as a Bengali poet, Tagore’s instinct was to simplify, and to draw language closer to speech. The other reason the lines of the rhyme are noteworthy, especially with regard to Tagore, is – despite their deceptively logical progression – their non-consecutive character. ‘Rain falls’ and ‘the leaf trembles’ are two independent, stand-alone observations: they don’t necessarily have to follow each other. It’s a feature of poetry commented upon by William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral: that it’s a genre that can get away with seamlessly joining two lines which are linked, otherwise, tenuously. ~ Amit Chaudhuri,
1291:It has generally been assumed that fairy tales were first created for children and are largely the domain of children. But nothing could be further from the truth.

From the very beginning, thousands of years ago, when tales were told to create communal bonds in face of the inexplicable forces of nature, to the present, when fairy tales are written and told to provide hope in a world seemingly on the brink of catastrophe, mature men and women have been the creators and cultivators of the fairy tale tradition. When introduced to fairy tales, children welcome them mainly because they nurture their great desire for change and independence. On the whole, the literary fairy tale has become an established genre within a process of Western civilization that cuts across all ages. Even though numerous critics and shamans have mystified and misinterpreted the fairy tale because of their spiritual quest for universal archetypes or their need to save the world through therapy, both the oral and the literary forms of the fairy tale are grounded in history: they emanate from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphors. ~ Jack D Zipes,
1292:A l'inhibition sexuelle résultant directement de la fixation aux parents, viennent s'ajouter les sentiments de culpabilité qui dérivent de l'énormité de la haine accumulée au cours d'années de vie familiale.
Si cette haine reste consciente elle peut devenir un puissant facteur révolutionnaire individuel : elle poussera le sujet à rompre les attaches familiales et pourra servir à promouvoir une action dirigée contre les conditions productrices de cette haine.
Si au contraire cette haine est refoulée, elle donne naissance aux attitudes inverses de fidélité aveugle et d'obéissance infantile. Ces attitudes constituent bien entendu un lourd handicap pour celui qui veut militer dans un mouvement libéral ; un individu de ce genre pourra fort bien être partisan d'une liberté complète, et en même temps envoyer ses enfants à l'école du dimanche, ou continuer à fréquenter l'église "pour ne pas faire de peine à ses vieux parents" ; il présentera des symptômes d'indécision et de dépendance, séquelles de la fixation à la famille ; il ne pourra vraiment combattre pour la liberté.
Mais la même situation familiale peut aussi produire l'individu "névrotiquement révolutionnaire", spécimen fréquent chez les intellectuels bourgeois. Les sentiments de culpabilité, liés aux sentiments révolutionnaires, en font un militant peu sûr dans un mouvement révolutionnaire. (p. 140) ~ Wilhelm Reich,
1293:Sure, zombies can “be a metaphor.” They can represent the oppressed, as in Land of the Dead, or humanity’s feral nature, as in 28 Days. Or racial politics or fear of contagion or even the consumer unconscious (Night of the Living Dead, Resident Evil, Dawn of the Dead). We could play this game all night.

But really, zombies are not “supposed to be metaphors.” They’re supposed to be friggin’ zombies. They follow the Zombie Rules: they rise from death to eat the flesh of the living, they shuffle in slow pursuit (or should, anyway), and most important, they multiply exponentially. They bring civilization down, taking all but the most resourceful, lucky and well-armed among us, whom they save for last. They make us the hunted; all of us.

That’s the stuff zombies are supposed to do. Yes, they make excellent symbols, and metaphors, and have kick-ass mythopoeic resonance to boot. But their main job is to follow genre conventions, to play with and expand the Zombie Rules, to make us begin to see the world as a place colored by our own zombie contingency plans. […]

Stories are the original virtual reality device; their internal rules spread out into reality around us like a bite-transmitted virus, slowly but inexorably consuming its flesh. They don’t just stand around “being metaphors” whose sole purpose is to represent things in the real world; they eat the real world. ~ Scott Westerfeld,
1294:The story is told in fragmentary narratives written by a Doctor and a Lawyer, culminating in Jekyll’s own full statement of the case. As well as creating a sense of mystery as each narrator witnesses a series of inexplicable events that is only finally explained by Jekyll’s own posthumous statement of his experiments, this structure is also symbolic of the fragmentary personality that Hyde’s existence reveals. For Jekyll is careful to note that Hyde is not simply his own ‘evil’ alter ego – rather he is just one facet of Jekyll’s personality, increased to the maximum. If Hyde is completely evil, it does not necessarily follow that Jekyll is entirely good – he always had the capacity for evil within him, but has repressed it in order to live a socially respectable life. It is this capacity for evil, lying beneath the socially acceptable face of society, that Hyde represents. This has made the novel open to all kinds of intriguing readings that suggest that the Jekyll/Hyde split is symbolic of the divergent experiences of ‘respectable’ Victorian society and their less respectable ‘others’ – a commentary on the hypocrisy of a society that condones certain kinds of behaviour so long as the mask of respectability is maintained. This subtext means that the novel fits easily into the Gothic genre, which is typically concerned with the chaotic forces lying beneath the pretence of civilisation. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson,
1295:It was Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the television series, 1997-2003, not the lackluster movie that preceded it) that blazed the trail for Twilight and the slew of other paranormal romance novels that followed, while also shaping the broader urban fantasy field from the late 1990s onward.

Many of you reading this book will be too young to remember when Buffy debuted, so you'll have to trust us when we say that nothing quite like it had existed before. It was thrillingly new to see a young, gutsy, kick-ass female hero, for starters, and one who was no Amazonian Wonder Woman but recognizably ordinary, fussing about her nails, her shoes, and whether she'd make it to her high school prom. Buffy's story contained a heady mix of many genres (fantasy, horror, science-fiction, romance, detective fiction, high school drama), all of it leavened with tongue-in-cheek humor yet underpinned by the serious care with which the Buffy universe had been crafted. Back then, Whedon's dizzying genre hopping was a radical departure from the norm-whereas today, post-Buffy, no one blinks an eye as writers of urban fantasy leap across genre boundaries with abandon, penning tender romances featuring werewolves and demons, hard-boiled detective novels with fairies, and vampires-in-modern-life sagas that can crop up darn near anywhere: on the horror shelves, the SF shelves, the mystery shelves, the romance shelves. ~ Ellen Datlow,
1296:Que la langue du génocide ne doive, à aucun prix, se galvauder ; que veiller sur la probité des mots en général et de celui-ci en particulier soit une tâche intellectuelle et politique prioritaire ; qu'il se soit produit à Auschwitz, un événement sans précédent, incomparable à tout autre et que la lutte contre la banalisation, et de la chose, et du mot qui la désigne, soit un impératif, non seulement pour les Juifs, mais pour tous ceux que lèse ce crime (autrement dit, l'humain comme tel ; l'humain en chaque homme, chaque femme, d'aujourd'hui) ; que la Shoah soit le génocide absolu, l'étalon du genre, la mesure même du non-humain ; que cette singularité tienne tant à l'effroyable rationalité des méthodes (bureaucratie, industrie du cadavre, chambre à gaz) qu'à sa non moins terrible part d'irrationalité (l'histoire folle, souvent notée, des trains de déportés qui avaient, jusqu'au dernier jour, priorité sur les convois d'armes et de troupes), à sa systématicité (des armées de tueurs lâchés, dans toute l'Europe, à la poursuite de Juifs qui devaient être traqués, exterminés sans reste, jusqu'au dernier) ou à sa dimension, son intention métaphysique (par-delà les corps les âmes et, par-delà les âmes, la mémoire même des textes juifs et de la loi) - tout cela est évident ; c'est et ce sera de plus en plus difficile à faire entendre, mais c'est établi et évident...
(ch. 57
La Shoah au coeur et dans la tête) ~ Bernard Henri L vy,
1297:Tel fut aussi le cas d'un Nietzsche, génie volcanique s'il en est ; ici encore - mais d'une façon à la fois déviée et démentielle - il y a extériorisation passionnée d'un feu intérieur ; nous pensons ici non à la philosophie nietzschéenne, qui dans sa littéralité est sans intérêt (17), mais à l'oeuvre poétique dont l'expression la plus intense est en partie le "Zarathoustra". Ce que ce livre, d'ailleurs fort inégal, manifeste avant tout, c'est la réaction violente d'une âme a priori profonde contre une ambiance culturelle médiocre et paralysante ; le défaut de Nietzsche, ce fut de n'avoir que le sens de la grandeur en l'absence de tout discernement intellectuel. Le "Zarathoustra" est au fond le cri d'une grandeur piétinée, d'où l'authenticité poignante - la grandeur précisément - de certains passages ; certes non de tous et surtout pas de ceux qui expriment une philosophie mi-machiavélique mi-darwiniste, ou de la petite habileté littéraire.Quoi qu'il en soit, le malheur de Nietzsche - ou celui d'autres hommes géniaux, comme Napoléon - fut d'être né après la Renaissance et non avant ; ce qui marque évidemment un aspect de leur nature, car il n'y a pas de hasard.


(17) Cette philosophie aurait pu être un cri d'alarme contre le péril d'un humanitarisme aplatissant et abâtardissant, donc mortel pour le genre humain ; en fait, elle fut un combat contre des moulins à vent en même temps qu'une séduction plus périlleuse ~ Frithjof Schuon,
1298:[...] Nous ne reprochons pas à la science moderne d'être une science fragmentaire, analytique, privée d’éléments spéculatifs, métaphysiques et cosmologiques, ou de provenir des résidus ou des déchets des sciences anciennes ; nous lui reprochons d'être subjectivement et objectivement une transgression et de mener subjectivement et objectivement au déséquilibre et partant au désastre"
[...] Nous sommes fort loin de contester que la médecine traditionnelle avait, et a, l'immense avantage d'une perspective qui englobe l'homme total ; qu'elle était, et est, efficace dans des cas ou la médecine moderne est impuissante ; que la médecine moderne contribue à la dégénérescence du genre humain et à la surpopulation; qu'une médecine absolue n'est ni possible ni souhaitable, et cela pour d'évidentes raisons.
Mais qu'on ne vienne pas nous dire que la médecine traditionnelle est supérieure du seul fait de ses spéculations cosmologique et en l'absence de tels remèdes efficaces, et que la médecine moderne, qui possède ces remèdes, n'est qu'un pitoyable résidu parce qu'elle ignore les dites spéculations ; ou que les médecins de la Renaissance, tel Paracelse, avaient tort de découvrir les erreurs anatomiques et autres de la médecine gréco-arabe; ou d'une manière toute générale, que les sciences traditionnelles sont merveilleuses à tous les égards et que les sciences modernes, la chimie par exemple, ne sont que des fragments et des déchets. ~ Frithjof Schuon,
1299:He is a middle-class man trying to get by in an oligarchic world. Thirty years ago, Mantel’s Cromwell would have been of limited interest. His virtues—hard work, self-discipline, domestic respectability, a talent for office politics, the steady accumulation of money, a valuing of stability above all else—would have been dismissed as mere bourgeois orthodoxies. If they were not so boring they would have been contemptible. They were, in a damning word, safe. But they’re not safe anymore. They don’t assure security. As the world becomes more oligarchic, middle-class virtues become more precarious. This is the drama of Mantel’s Cromwell—he is the perfect bourgeois in a world where being perfectly bourgeois doesn’t buy you freedom from the knowledge that everything you have can be whipped away from you at any moment. The terror that grips us is rooted not in Cromwell’s weakness but in his extraordinary strength. He is a perfect paragon of meritocracy for our age. He is a survivor of an abusive childhood, a teenage tearaway made good, a self-made man solely reliant on his own talents and entrepreneurial energies. He could be the hero of a sentimental American story of the follow-your-dreams genre. Except for the twist—meritocracy goes only so far. Even Cromwell cannot control his own destiny, cannot escape the power of entrenched privilege. And if he, with his almost superhuman abilities, can’t do so, what chance do the rest of us have? This terror ~ Anonymous,
1300:Love hurts.

Think back over romance novels you’ve loved or the genre-defining books that drive our industry. The most unforgettable stories and characters spring from crushing opposition. What we remember about romance novels is the darkness that drives them. Three hundred pages of folks being happy together makes for a hefty sleeping pill, but three hundred pages of a couple finding a way to be happy in the face of impossible odds makes our hearts soar. In darkness, we are all alone.

So don’t just make love, make anguish for your characters. As you structure a story, don’t satisfy your hero’s desires, thwart them. Make sure your solutions create new problems. Nurture your characters doubts and despair. Make them earn the happy ending they want, even better…make them deserve it. Delay and disappointment charge situations and validate character growth. Misery accompanies love. It’s no accident that many of the stories we think of as timeless romances in Western Literature are fiercely tragic: Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Cupid and Psyche… the pain in them drags us back again and again, hoping that this time we’ll find a way out of the dark.

Only if you let your characters get lost will we get lost in them. And that, more than anything else, is what romance can and should do for its protagonists and its readers: lead us through the labyrinth, skirt the monstrous despair roaming its halls, and find our way into daylight. ~ Damon Suede,
1301:The problem with a lot of people who read only literary fiction is that they assume fantasy is just books about orcs and goblins and dragons and wizards and bullshit. And to be fair, a lot of fantasy is about that stuff.

The problem with people in fantasy is they believe that literary fiction is just stories about a guy drinking tea and staring out the window at the rain while he thinks about his mother. And the truth is a lot of literary fiction is just that. Like, kind of pointless, angsty, emo, masturbatory bullshit.

However, we should not be judged by our lowest common denominators. And also you should not fall prey to the fallacious thinking that literary fiction is literary and all other genres are genre. Literary fiction is a genre, and I will fight to the death anyone who denies this very self-evident truth.

So, is there a lot of fantasy that is raw shit out there? Absolutely, absolutely, it’s popcorn reading at best. But you can’t deny that a lot of lit fic is also shit. 85% of everything in the world is shit. We judge by the best. And there is some truly excellent fantasy out there. For example, Midsummer Night’s Dream; Hamlet with the ghost; Macbeth, ghosts and witches; I’m also fond of the Odyessey; Most of the Pentateuch in the Old Testament, Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Honestly, fantasy existed before lit fic, and if you deny those roots you’re pruning yourself so closely that you can’t help but wither and die. ~ Patrick Rothfuss,
1302:Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world. The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away. The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity. The biographer is portrayed almost as a kind of benefactor. He is seen as sacrificing years of his life to his task, tirelessly sitting in archives and libraries and patiently conducting interviews with witnesses. There is no length he will not go to, and the more his book reflects his industry the more the reader believes that he is having an elevating literary experience, rather than simply listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people’s mail. The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre. The reader’s amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole. ~ Janet Malcolm,
1303:Even if we admit that running-survey and compass techniques were somehow being used on ships to produce sea-charts as early as the thirteenth century (which most historians of science would rule out) we still come against the unexplained enigma of the miraculous and fully formed de novo appearance of the Carta Pisane. As we've seen, not a single chart pre-dates it that demonstrates in any way the gradual build-up of coastal profiles across the whole extent of the Mediterranean that must have occurred before a likeness as perfect as this could have been resolved.
It is possible, of course, through the vicissitudes of history, that all the evidence for the prior evolution of portolans before the Carta Pisane has simply been lost. If that were the case, however -- in other words if the Carta Pisane is a snapshot of a certain moment in the development of an evolving genre of maps, and if we accept that all earlier 'snap-shots' have been lost, wouldn't we nevertheless expect that such an 'evolving genre' would have continued to evolve after the date of the earliest surviving example?
Whether we set the date of the Pisane between 1270 and 1290 [...] or a little later -- between 1295 and 1300 -- as other scholars have argued, we've seen that there was no significant evolution afterwards.
Now kept in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the enigmatic Pisane is an unsigned chart and scholars have no idea who the cartographer might have been. ~ Graham Hancock,
1304:Des erreurs plus subtiles, et par suite plus redoutables, se produisent parfois lorsqu’on parle, à propos de l’initiation, d’une « communication » avec des états supérieurs ou des « mondes spirituels » ; et, avant tout, il y a là trop souvent l’illusion qui consiste à prendre pour « supérieur » ce qui ne l’est pas véritablement, simplement parce qu’il apparaît comme plus ou moins extraordinaire ou « anormal ». Il nous faudrait en somme répéter ici tout ce que nous avons déjà dit ailleurs de la confusion du psychique et du spirituel (1), car c’est celle-là qui est le plus fréquemment commise à cet égard ; les états psychiques n’ont, en fait, rien de « supérieur » ni de « transcendant », puisqu’ils font uniquement partie de l’état individuel humain (2) ; et, quand nous parlons d’états supérieurs de l’être, sans aucun abus de langage, nous entendons par là exclusivement les états supra-individuels. Certains vont même encore plus loin dans la confusion et font « spirituel » à peu près synonyme d’« invisible », c’est-à-dire qu’ils prennent pour tel, indistinctement, tout ce qui ne tombe pas sous les sens ordinaires et « normaux » ; nous avons vu qualifier ainsi jusqu’au monde « éthérique », c’est-à-dire, tout simplement, la partie la moins grossière du monde corporel ! Dans ces conditions, il est fort à craindre que la « communication » dont il s’agit ne se réduise en définitive à la « clairvoyance », à la « clairaudience », ou à l’exercice de quelque autre faculté psychique du même genre et non moins insignifiante, même quand elle est réelle. ~ Ren Gu non,
1305:Fiction is a set of observable manifestations, as represented and frozen in language, that triggers a profoundly subjective and individual experience.

Ultimately, this is the kind of productive dilemma that can allow fiction to get to places that other media does not. Fiction is exceptionally good at providing models for consciousness, and at putting readers in a position to take upon themselves the structure of another consciousness for a short while. It is better at this than any other genre or media, and can do it in any number of modes (realistic or metafictional, reliably or unreliably, representationally or metafictionally, etc.). But for it to be able to do this as well as it possibly can, it must clear a space. This is where, for me, doing without becomes most crucial.

The subtractions that we find in innovative fictions (even when those subtractions, as in Joyce's work, are followed by further ornamentations and encrustations) are there to facilitate the simulation of consciousness. What is subtracted is the significance and meaning designed to let us classify an experience without entering into it. Doing without such things opens the door wider for experience, putting the reader in a position where they are experiencing fiction in lieu of understanding it.

By paying more attention to what we leave out than to how readers are going to interpret or work after the fact, we refuse to let fiction be assimilable, digestible, and safe. We keep it from being mere fodder for criticism and instead accept it as valid, vital experience. ~ Brian Evenson,
1306:We’ve been instructed to reject any trace of poetry, myth, hyperbole, or symbolism even when those literary forms are virtually shouting at us from the page via talking snakes and enchanted trees. That’s because there’s a curious but popular notion circulating around the church these days that says God would never stoop to using ancient genre categories to communicate. Speaking to ancient people using their own language, literary structures, and cosmological assumptions would be beneath God, it is said, for only our modern categories of science and history can convey the truth in any meaningful way. In addition to once again prioritizing modern, Western (and often uniquely American) concerns, this notion overlooks one of the most central themes of Scripture itself: God stoops. From walking with Adam and Eve through the garden of Eden, to traveling with the liberated Hebrew slaves in a pillar of cloud and fire, to slipping into flesh and eating, laughing, suffering, healing, weeping, and dying among us as part of humanity, the God of Scripture stoops and stoops and stoops and stoops. At the heart of the gospel message is the story of a God who stoops to the point of death on a cross. Dignified or not, believable or not, ours is a God perpetually on bended knee, doing everything it takes to convince stubborn and petulant children that they are seen and loved. It is no more beneath God to speak to us using poetry, proverb, letters, and legend than it is for a mother to read storybooks to her daughter at bedtime. This is who God is. This is what God does. ~ Rachel Held Evans,
1307:People often seem surprised that I choose to write science fiction and fantasy—I think they expect a history professor to write historical fiction, or literary fiction, associating academia with the kinds of novels that academic lit critics prefer. But I feel that speculative fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy, is a lot more like the pre-modern literature I spend most of my time studying than most modern literature is. Ursula Le Guin has described speculative fiction authors as “realists of a larger reality” because we imagine other ways of being, alternatives to how people live now, different worlds, and raise questions about hope and change and possibilities that different worlds contain.

....

Writing for a more distant audience, authors tended to be speculative, using exotic perspectives, fantastic creatures, imaginary lands, allegories, prophecies, stories within stories, techniques which, like science fiction and fantasy, use alternatives rather than one reality in order to ask questions, not about the way things are, but about plural ways things have been and could be. Such works have an empathy across time, expecting and welcoming an audience as alien as the other worlds that they describe. When I read Voltaire responding to Francis Bacon, responding to Petrarch, responding to Boethius, responding to Seneca, responding to Plutarch, I want to respond to them too, to pass it on. So it makes sense to me to answer in the genre people have been using for this conversation since antiquity: speculation. It’s the genre of many worlds, the many worlds that Earth has been, and will be. ~ Ada Palmer,
1308:La conséquence immédiate de ceci, c’est que connaître et être ne sont au fond qu’une seule et même chose ; ce sont, si l’on veut, deux aspects inséparables d’une réalité unique, aspects qui ne sauraient même plus être distingués vraiment là où tout est « sans dualité ». Cela suffit à rendre complètement vaines toutes les « théories de la connaissance » à prétentions pseudo-métaphysiques qui tiennent une si grande place dans la philosophie occidentale moderne, et qui tendent même parfois, comme chez Kant par exemple, à absorber tout le reste, ou tout au moins à se le subordonner ; la seule raison d’être de ce genre de théories est dans une attitude commune à presque tous les philosophes modernes, et d’ailleurs issue du dualisme cartésien, attitude qui consiste à opposer artificiellement le connaître à l’être, ce qui est la négation de toute métaphysique vraie. Cette philosophie en arrive ainsi à vouloir substituer la « théorie de la connaissance » à la connaissance elle-même, et c’est là, de sa part, un véritable aveu d’impuissance ; rien n’est plus caractéristique à cet égard que cette déclaration de Kant : « La plus grande et peut-être la seule utilité de toute philosophie de la raison pure est, après tout, exclusivement négative, puisqu’elle est, non un instrument pour étendre la connaissance, mais une discipline pour la limiter »1. De telles paroles ne reviennent-elles pas tout simplement à dire que l’unique prétention des philosophes doit être d’imposer à tous les bornes étroites de leur propre entendement ? C’est là, du reste, l’inévitable résultat de l’esprit de système, qui est, nous le répétons, antimétaphysique au plus haut point. ~ Ren Gu non,
1309:[...] contrairement à l’opinion courante, d’après laquelle l’analyse serait en quelque sorte préparatoire à la synthèse et conduirait à celle-ci, si bien qu’il faudrait toujours commencer par l’analyse, même quand on n’entend pas s’en tenir là, la vérité est qu’on ne peut jamais parvenir effectivement à la synthèse en partant de l’analyse ; toute synthèse, au vrai sens de ce mot, est pour ainsi dire quelque chose d’immédiat, qui n’est précédé d’aucune analyse et en est entièrement indépendant, comme l’intégration est une opération qui s’effectue d’un seul coup et qui ne présuppose nullement la considération d’éléments comparables à ceux d’une somme arithmétique ; et, comme cette somme arithmétique ne peut donner le moyen d’atteindre et d’épuiser l’indéfini, il est, dans tous les domaines, des choses qui résistent par leur nature même à toute analyse et dont la connaissance n’est possible que par la seule synthèse [1].

[1] Ici et dans ce qui va suivre, il doit être bien entendu que nous prenons les termes « analyse » et « synthèse » dans leur acception véritable et originelle, qu’il faut avoir bien soin de distinguer de celle, toute différente et assez impropre, dans laquelle on parle couramment de l’« analyse mathématique », et suivant laquelle l’intégration elle-même, en dépit de son caractère essentiellement synthétique, est regardée comme faisant partie de ce qu’on appelle l’ « analyse infinitésimale » ; c’est d’ailleurs pour cette raison que nous préférons éviter l’emploi de cette dernière expression, et nous servir seulement de celles de « calcul infinitésimal » et de « méthode infinitésimale », qui du moins ne sauraient prêter à aucune équivoque de ce genre. ~ Ren Gu non,
1310:Logiquement, la démocratie s'oppose à la tyrannie, mais en fait, elle y mène ; c'est-à-dire : comme sa réaction est sentimentale — sans quoi elle serait centripète et tendrait vers la théocratie, seule garantie d'une liberté réaliste — elle n'est qu'un extrême qui, par sa négation irréaliste de l'autorité et de la compétence, appelle fatalement un autre extrême et une nouvelle réaction autoritaire, autoritaire celle-ci et tyrannique par son principe même. L'illusion démocratique apparaît surtout dans les traits suivants : en démocratie, est vrai ce que croit la majorité ; c'est elle qui « crée » pratiquement la vérité ; la démocratie elle-même n'est vraie que dans la mesure où — et aussi longtemps que — la majorité y croit, elle porte donc en son sein les germes de son suicide. L'autorité, qu'on est bien obligé de tolérer sous peine d'anarchie, vit à la merci des électeurs, d'où l'impossibilité de gouverner réellement ; l'idéal de « liberté » fait du gouvernement un prisonnier qui doit suivre constamment les pressions des divers groupes d'intérêt ; les campagnes électorales elles-mêmes prouvent que les aspirants à l'autorité doivent duper les électeurs, et les moyens de cette duperie sont si grossiers et stupides, et constituent un tel avilissement du peuple, que cela devrait suffire pour réduire à néant le mythe de la démocratie moderne. Ce n'est pas à dire qu'aucun genre de démocratie ne soit possible : mais alors il s'agit d'abord de collectivités restreintes — nomades surtout — et ensuite d'une démocratie intérieurement aristocratique et théocratique, non d'un égalitarisme laïc imposé à de grands peuples sédentaires.

"La Transfiguration de l'homme" (1995) ~ Frithjof Schuon,
1311:True to its name (gelato spelled backwards), Oletag is swimming against the tide of cost-cutting convenience that dominates Italy's ice cream industry. Sixty flavors at a given time, rotating daily- most rigorously tied to the season, many inspired by a pantry of savory ingredients: mustard, Gorgonzola with white chocolate and hazelnuts, pecorino with bitter orange. He seeks out local flavors, but never at the expense of a better product: pistachios from Turkey, hazelnuts from Piedmont, and (gasp!) French-born Valrhona chocolate. Extractions, infusions, experiments- whatever it takes to get more out of the handful of ingredients he puts into each creation. In the end, what matters is what ends up in the scoop, and the stuff at Oletag will make your toes curl- creams and chocolates so pure and intense they must be genetically manipulated, fruit-based creations so expressive of the season that they actually taste different from one day to the next. And a licorice gelato that will change you- if not for life, at least for a few weeks.
Radicioni and Torcè are far from alone in their quest to lift the gelato genre. Fior di Luna has been doing it right- serious ingredients ethically sourced and minimally processed- since 1993. At Gelateria dei Gracchi, just across the Regina Margherita bridge, Alberto Monassei obsesses over every last detail, from the size of the whole hazelnuts in his decadent gianduia to the provenance of the pears that he combines with ribbons of caramel. And Maria Agnese Spagnuolo, one of Torcè's many disciples, continues to push the limits of gelato at her ever-expanding Fatamorgana empire, where a lineup of more than fifty choices- from basil-honey-walnut to dark chocolate-wasabi- attracts a steady crush of locals and savvy tourists. ~ Matt Goulding,
1312:Sam Anderson. “The Greatest Novel.” New York Magazine (outline). Jan. 9, 2011. New York is, famously, the everything bagel of megalopolises—one of the world’s most diverse cities, defined by its churning mix of religions, ethnicities, social classes, attitudes, lifestyles, etc., ad infinitum. This makes it a perfect match for the novel, a genre that tends to share the same insatiable urge. In choosing the best New York novel, then, my first instinct was to pick something from the city’s proud tradition of megabooks—one of those encyclopedic ambition bombs that attempt to capture, New Yorkily, the full New Yorkiness of New York. Something like, to name just a quick armful or two, Manhattan Transfer, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Underworld, Invisible Man, Winter’s Tale, or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay—or possibly even one of the tradition’s more modest recent offspring, like Lush Life and Let the Great World Spin. In the end, however, I decided that the single greatest New York novel is the exact opposite of all of those: a relatively small book containing absolutely zero diversity. There are no black or Hispanic or Asian characters, no poor people, no rabble-rousers, no noodle throwers or lapsed Baha’i priests or transgender dominatrixes walking hobos on leashes through flocks of unfazed schoolchildren. Instead there are proper ladies behaving properly at the opera, and more proper ladies behaving properly at private balls, and a phlegmatic old Dutch patriarch dismayed by the decline of capital-S Society. The book’s plot hinges on a subtly tragic love triangle among effortlessly affluent lovers. It is 100 percent devoted to the narrow world of white upper-class Protestant heterosexuals. So how can Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence possibly be the greatest New York novel of all time? ~ Anonymous,
1313:Having to amuse myself during those earlier years, I read voraciously and widely. Mythic matter and folklore made up much of that reading—retellings of the old stories (Mallory, White, Briggs), anecdotal collections and historical investigations of the stories' backgrounds—and then I stumbled upon the Tolkien books which took me back to Lord Dunsany, William Morris, James Branch Cabell, E.R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake and the like. I was in heaven when Lin Carter began the Unicorn imprint for Ballantine and scoured the other publishers for similar good finds, delighting when I discovered someone like Thomas Burnett Swann, who still remains a favourite.

This was before there was such a thing as a fantasy genre, when you'd be lucky to have one fantasy book published in a month, little say the hundreds per year we have now. I also found myself reading Robert E. Howard (the Cormac and Bran mac Morn books were my favourites), Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and finally started reading science fiction after coming across Andre Norton's Huon of the Horn. That book wasn't sf, but when I went to read more by her, I discovered everything else was. So I tried a few and that led me to Clifford Simak, Roger Zelazny and any number of other fine sf writers.

These days my reading tastes remain eclectic, as you might know if you've been following my monthly book review column in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I'm as likely to read Basil Johnston as Stephen King, Jeanette Winterson as Harlan Ellison, Barbara Kingsolver as Patricia McKillip, Andrew Vachss as Parke Godwin—in short, my criteria is that the book must be good; what publisher's slot it fits into makes absolutely no difference to me. ~ Charles de Lint,
1314:L’idée de fonder en quelque sorte une science sur la répétition trahit encore une autre illusion d’ordre quantitatif, celle qui consiste à croire que la seule accumulation d’un grand nombre de faits peut servir de « preuve » à une théorie ; il est pourtant évident, pour peu qu’on y réfléchisse, que les faits d’un même genre sont toujours en multitude indéfinie, de sorte qu’on ne peut jamais les constater tous, sans compter que les mêmes faits s’accordent généralement tout aussi bien avec plusieurs théories différentes. On dira que la constatation d’un plus grand nombre de faits donne tout au moins plus de « probabilité » à la théorie ; mais c’est là reconnaître qu’on ne peut jamais arriver de cette façon à une certitude quelconque, donc que les conclusions qu’on énonce n’ont jamais rien d’« exact » ; et c’est aussi avouer le caractère tout « empirique » de la science moderne, dont les partisans, par une étrange ironie, se plaisent pourtant à taxer d’« empirisme » les connaissances des anciens alors que c’est précisément tout le contraire qui est vrai car ces connaissances, dont ils ignorent totalement la véritable nature, partaient des principes et non point des constatations expérimentales, si bien qu’on pourrait dire que la science profane est construite exactement au rebours de la science traditionnelle. Encore, si insuffisant que soit l’« empirisme » en lui-même, celui de cette science moderne est-il bien loin d’être intégral, puisqu’elle néglige ou écarte une partie considérable des données de l’expérience, toutes celles en somme qui présentent un caractère proprement qualitatif ; l’expérience sensible, pas plus que tout autre genre d’expérience, ne peut jamais porter sur la quantité pure, et plus on s’approche de celle-ci, plus on s’éloigne par là même de la réalité qu’on prétend constater et expliquer ; ~ Ren Gu non,
1315:The Enlightenment emphasized ways of learning that weren’t subservient to human power hierarchies. Instead, Enlightenment thinking celebrates evidence-based scientific method and reasoning. The cultures of sciences and engineering used to embrace Enlightenment epistemology, but now they have been overridden by horribly regressive BUMMER epistemology. You probably know the word “meme” as meaning a BUMMER posting that can go viral. But originally, “meme” suggested a philosophy of thought and meaning. The term was coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins proposed memes as units of culture that compete and are either passed along or not, according to a pseudo-Darwinian selection process. Thus some fashions, ideas, and habits take hold, while others become extinct. The concept of memes provides a way of framing everything non-nerds do—the whole of humanities, culture, arts, and politics—as similar instances of meme competition, mere subroutines of a higher-level algorithm that nerds can master. When the internet took of, Dawkins’s ideas were in vogue, because they flattered techies. There was a ubiquitous genre of internet appreciation from the very beginning in which someone would point out the viral spread of a meme and admire how cute that was. The genre exists to this day. Memes started out as a way of expressing solidarity with a philosophy I used to call cybernetic totalism that still underlies BUMMER. Memes might seem to amplify what you are saying, but that is always an illusion. You might launch an infectious meme about a political figure, and you might be making a great point, but in the larger picture, you are reinforcing the idea that virality is truth. Your point will be undone by whatever other point is more viral. That is by design. The architects of BUMMER were meme believers. ~ Jaron Lanier,
1316:Despite the popularity of this view, the DeValoises felt it was only a partial truth. To test their assumption they used Fourier's equations to convert plaid and checkerboard patterns into simple wave forms. Then they tested to see how the brain cells in the visual cortex responded to these new wave-form images. What they found was that the brain cells responded not to the original patterns, but to the Fourier translations of the patterns. Only one conclusion could be drawn. The brain was using Fourier mathematics—the same mathematics holography employed—to convert visual images into the Fourier language of wave forms. 12 The DeValoises' discovery was subsequently confirmed by numerous other laboratories around the world, and although it did not provide absolute proof the brain was a hologram, it supplied enough evidence to convince Pribram his theory was correct. Spurred on by the idea that the visual cortex was responding not to patterns but to the frequencies of various wave forms, he began to reassess the role frequency played in the other senses. It didn't take long for him to realize that the importance of this role had perhaps been overlooked by twentieth-century scientists. Over a century before the DeValoises' discovery, the German physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz had shown that the ear was a frequency analyzer. More recent research revealed that our sense of smell seems to be based on what are called osmic frequencies. Bekesy's work had clearly demonstrated that our skin is sensitive to frequencies of vibration, and he even produced some evidence that taste may involve frequency analysis. Interestingly, Bekesy also discovered that the mathematical equations that enabled him to predict how his subjects would respond to various frequencies of vibration were also of the Fourier genre. ~ Michael Talbot,
1317:Mozart began composing highly intricate pieces of music in a period of time when the most popular genre of music was style galant—an elegant genre to be sure, but defined by the simplicity of its structure. The style galant was in and of itself a reaction to the musical style that had come directly before it, commonly referred to as the Baroque period. Music in the Baroque style was highly embellished, defined by the use of ornamentation, or unnecessarily complicated measures inserted throughout the piece of music. Critics of the period were quick to say that the Baroque style lacked a coherent melody and was largely dissonant, even to the trained ear. Popular musical forms in the Baroque period included sonatas and cantatas, the former of which Mozart would return to and utilize toward the end of his career. Baroque music was defined by its seriousness—it was often cited as being largely unpleasant to listen to unless one was a musician oneself. The style galant, in response, depended on its light-heartedness and its wide range of appeal to a variety of audiences. The Classical style, which Mozart and his peers pioneered, was another response to the oversimplification of popular music that the style galant characterized. As previously discussed, Mozart spent a great deal of his early years in Paris studying the works of Baroque masters Bach and Handel, and that period of music greatly influenced many of his most recognizable works. Mozart, however, had the talent (and the distance from the period when Baroque music was at its height) to study the most valid criticisms of the Baroque style and pick and choose the intricacies of the style that worked, while discarding the ones that did not. He was able to adapt the dated style to form a completely new aesthetic while steering popular music back toward the trend of compositions that were more complex than the style galant afforded. ~ Hourly History,
1318:C’est ainsi que l’étude des « sciences traditionnelles », quelle que soit leur provenance, s’il en est qui veulent dès maintenant l’entreprendre (non dans leur intégralité, ce qui est présentement impossible, mais dans certains éléments tout au moins), nous parait une chose digne d’être approuvée, mais à la double condition que cette étude soit faite avec des données suffisantes pour ne point s’y égarer, ce qui suppose déjà beaucoup plus qu’on ne pourrait le croire, et qu’elle ne fasse jamais perdre de vue l’essentiel. Ces deux conditions, d’ailleurs, se tiennent de près : celui qui possède une intellectualité assez développée pour se livrer avec sûreté à une telle étude ne risque plus d’être tenté de sacrifier le supérieur à l’inférieur ; dans quelque domaine qu’il ait à exercer son activité, il n’y verra jamais à faire qu’un travail auxiliaire de celui qui s’accomplit dans la région des principes. Dans les mêmes conditions, s’il arrive parfois que la « philosophie scientifique » rejoigne accidentellement, par certaines de ses conclusions, les anciennes « sciences traditionnelles », il peut y avoir quelque intérêt à le faire ressortir, mais en évitant soigneusement de paraître rendre ces dernières solidaires de n’importe quelle théorie scientifique ou philosophique particulière, car toute théorie de ce genre change et passe, tandis que tout ce qui repose sur une base traditionnelle en reçoit une valeur permanente, indépendante des résultats de toute recherche ultérieure. Enfin, de ce qu’il y a des rencontres ou des analogies, il ne faut jamais conclure à des assimilations impossibles, étant donné qu’il s’agit de modes de pensée essentiellement différents ; et l’on ne saurait être trop attentif à ne rien dire qui puisse être interprété dans ce sens, car la plupart de nos contemporains, par la façon même dont est borné leur horizon mental, ne sont que trop portés à ces assimilations injustifiées. ~ Ren Gu non,
1319:I built an idea in my head of the hero I wanted to be, a grab bag of traits from heroes, villains, and side characters. I did not have book role models, I had book blueprints.

But there remained a huge gap between the person I wanted to be and the person who I was. This was because no matter how many book blueprints I had, as much as I wanted to make myself the hero of my own life, it didn’t matter as long as I kept telling the story wrong.

Nowadays, as a storyteller, I know what the problem was. I had all the elements I needed to tell a good story. But I was telling it the wrong way, so I could never get to the ending I wanted.

If you tell yourself you’re a winner, you know what kind of story you’re telling, and you will march toward that... Likewise, if you tell yourself you’re a loser, you’ve made that your story, and you will march toward that instead. The same setbacks could happen in the loser’s story as in the winner’s story, but the self-defined loser would let them be proof that they were never going to be anything.

Here’s the story I was telling myself back when I was little edible child waiting to be carried away by hawks and making OCD rituals for herself: once upon a time, there was a girl who was afraid of everything. When I was 16, I realized that I knew what this story looked like and how it ended, and it wasn’t the life I wanted for myself. If I wanted my ending to look different, I needed to change the kind of story I was telling about myself. I needed to shape my events into a different genre: once upon a time, there was a woman who was afraid of nothing. At age 16, I legally changed my name from my birthname — Heidi — to one I thought sounded like the hero I wanted to be: Maggie. And I vowed that I would never be afraid of anything ever again.

Did it work? No, of course not. Not right away. But it became a mission statement, my hero’s journey. ~ Maggie Stiefvater,
1320:A ce discours, Candide s’évanouit encore; mais revenue à soi, et ayant dit tout ce qu’il devait dire, il s’enquit de la cause et de l’effet, et de la raison suffisante qui avait mis Pangloss dans un si piteux état. Hélas! dit l’autre, c’est l’amour: l’amour, le consolateur du genre humain, le conservateur de l’univers, l’âme de tous les êtres sensibles, le tender amour. Hélas! dit Candide, je l’ai connu cet amour, ce souverain des coeurs, cette âme de notre âme, il ne m’a jamais valu qu’un baiser et vingt coups de pied au cul. Comment cette belle cause a-t-elle pu produire en vous un effet si abominable?

Pangloss répondit en ces termes: O mon cher Candide! vous avez connu Paquette, cette jolie suivante de notre auguste baronne: j’ai goûté dans ses bras les délices du paradis, qui ont produit ces tourments d’enfer dont vous me voyez dévoré; elle en était infectée, elle en est peut-être morte. Paquette tenait ce present d’un Cordelier très savant qui avait remonté à la source, car il l’avait eu d’une vieille comtesse, qui l’avait reçu d’un capitaine de cavalerie, qui le devait à une marquise, qui le tenait d’un page, qui l’avait reçu d’un jésuite, qui, étant novice, l’avait eu en droite ligne d’un des compagnons de Christophe Colomb. Pour moi, je ne le donnerai à personne, car je me meurs.

O Pangloss! s’écria Candide, voilà une étrange généalogie! n’est-ce pas le diable qui en fut la souche? Point du tout, répliqua ce grand home; c’était une chose indispensable dans le meilleur des mondes, un ingredient nécessaire; car si Colomb n’avait pas attrapé dans une île de l'Amérique cette maladie qui empoisonne la source de la generation, qui souvent meme empêche la generation, et qui est évidemment l’opposé du grand but de la nature, nous n’aurions ni le chocolat ni la cochenille; il faut encore observer que jusqu’aujourd’hui, dans notre continent, cette maladie nous est particulière, comme la controverse. ~ Voltaire,
1321:And against whom is this censorship directed? By way of answer, think back to the big subcultural debates of 2011 – debates about how gritty fantasy isn’t really fantasy; how epic fantasy written from the female gaze isn’t really fantasy; how women should stop complaining about sexism in comics because clearly, they just hate comics; how trying to incorporate non-Eurocentric settings into fantasy is just political correctness gone wrong and a betrayal of the genre’s origins; how anyone who finds the portrayal of women and relationships in YA novels problematic really just wants to hate on the choices of female authors and readers; how aspiring authors and bloggers shouldn’t post negative reviews online, because it could hurt their careers; how there’s no homophobia in publishing houses, so the lack of gay YA protagonists can only be because the manuscripts that feature them are bad; how there’s nothing problematic about lots of pretty dead girls on YA covers; how there’s nothing wrong with SF getting called ‘dystopia’ when it’s marketed to teenage girls, because girls don’t read SF. Most these issues relate to fear of change in the genre, and to deeper social problems like sexism and racism; but they are also about criticism, and the freedom of readers, bloggers and authors alike to critique SFF and YA novels without a backlash that declares them heretical for doing so.


It’s not enough any more to tiptoe around the issues that matter, refusing to name the works we think are problematic for fear of being ostracized. We need to get over this crushing obsession with niceness – that all fans must act nicely, that all authors must be nice to each other, that everyone must be nice about everything even when it goes against our principles – because it’s not helping us grow, or be taken seriously, or do anything other than throw a series of floral bedspreads over each new room-hogging elephant.


We, all of us, need to get critical.

Blog post: Criticism in SFF and YA ~ Foz Meadows,
1322:Ce qui est tout à fait extraordinaire, c’est la rapidité avec laquelle la civilisation du Moyen-Âge tomba dans le plus complet oubli ; les hommes du XVIIe siècle n’en avaient plus la moindre notion, et les monuments qui en subsistaient ne représentaient plus rien à leurs yeux, ni dans l’ordre intellectuel, ni même dans l’ordre esthétique ; on peut juger par là combien la mentalité avait été changée dans l’intervalle. Nous n’entreprendrons pas de rechercher ici les facteurs, certainement fort complexes, qui concoururent à ce changement, si radical qu’il semble difficile d’admettre qu’il ait pu s’opérer spontanément et sans l’intervention d’une volonté directrice dont la nature exacte demeure forcément assez énigmatique ; il y a, à cet égard, des circonstances bien étranges, comme la vulgarisation, à un moment déterminé, et en les présentant comme des découvertes nouvelles, de choses qui étaient connues en réalité depuis fort longtemps, mais dont la connaissance, en raison de certains inconvénients qui risquaient d’en dépasser les avantages, n’avait pas été répandue jusque là dans le domaine public (1). Il est bien invraisemblable aussi que la légende qui fit du moyen âge une époque de « ténèbres », d’ignorance et de barbarie, ait pris naissance et se soit accréditée d’elle-même, et que la véritable falsification de l’histoire à laquelle les modernes se sont livrés ait été entreprise sans aucune idée préconçue ; mais nous n’irons pas plus avant dans l’examen de cette question, car, de quelque façon que ce travail se soit accompli, c’est, pour le moment, la constatation du résultat qui, en somme, nous importe le plus.

(1) Nous ne citerons que deux exemples, parmi les faits de ce genre qui devaient avoir les plus graves conséquences : la prétendue invention de l’imprimerie, que les Chinois connaissaient antérieurement à l’ère chrétienne et la découverte « officielle » de l’Amérique, avec laquelle des communications beaucoup plus suivies qu’on ne le pense avaient existé durant tout le moyen âge. ~ Ren Gu non,
1323:Ce qui est tout à fait extraordinaire, c'est la rapidité avec laquelle la civilisation du moyen âge tomba dans le plus complet oubli ; les hommes du XVIIe siècle n'en avaient plus la moindre notion, et les monuments qui en subsistaient ne représentaient plus rien à leurs yeux, ni dans l'ordre intellectuel, ni même dans l'ordre esthétique ; on peut juger par là combien la mentalité avait été changée dans l'intervalle. Nous n'entreprendrons pas de rechercher ici les facteurs, certainement fort complexes, qui concoururent à ce changement, si radical qu'il semble difficile d'admettre qu'il ait pu s'opérer spontanément et sans l'intervention d'une volonté directrice dont la nature exacte demeure forcément assez énigmatique ; il y a, à cet égard, des circonstances bien étranges, comme la vulgarisation, à un moment déterminé, et en les présentant comme des découvertes nouvelles, de choses qui étaient connues en réalité depuis fort longtemps, mais dont la connaissance, en raison de certains inconvénients qui risquaient d'en dépasser les avantages, n'avait pas été répandue jusque là dans le domaine public (1). Il est bien invraisemblable aussi que la légende qui fit du moyen âge une époque de « ténèbres », d'ignorance et de barbarie, ait pris naissance et se soit accréditée d'elle-même, et que la véritable falsification de l'histoire à laquelle les modernes se sont livrés ait été entreprise sans aucune idée préconçue ; mais nous n'irons pas plus avant dans l'examen de cette question, car, de quelque façon que ce travail se soit accompli, c'est, pour le moment, la constatation du résultat qui, en somme, nous importe le plus.»

(1) Nous ne citerons que deux exemples, parmi les faits de ce genre qui devaient avoir les plus graves conséquences : la prétendue invention de l'imprimerie, que les Chinois connaissaient antérieurement à l’ère chrétienne et la découverte « officielle » de l'Amérique, avec laquelle des communications beaucoup plus suivies qu'on ne le pense avaient existé durant tout le moyen âge. ~ Ren Gu non,
1324:Writing is a solitary act—but it's only the first act. What comes next is what really matters. However, personally, I have never been all that comfortable with the second act. I'm a solitary person by nature and not much of a joiner. Yet still I've come to see the nonfiction writer's solitary act as important to the greater cause—really the only cause—of decreasing cruelty and increasing sympathy. In that service, nonfiction writers can perform two fundamental tasks that are unavailable to the writers of fiction. Like Florence Reece, we can bear witness and we can call for change—for an end to injustices. It is precisely on this subject of bearing witness that I find John D'Agata's recent writing about the genre of nonfiction so malicious and inept. D'Agata argues that nonfiction must serve the greater good of art, and therefore reality can be altered in the name of art. But to elevate reality to the level of art is one of the fundamental tasks of the nonfiction writer, and to say it cannot be done honestly, as D'Agata claims, displays an astonishing lack of imagination as well as an equally unflattering amount of arrogance and pedantry. But let's put aside the either-or nature of this line of thinking. The real problem here is that such an attitude robs nonfiction of it greatest strength and virtue—its ability to bear witness and the veracity that comes from that act. To admit that one only has a passing interest in representing reality is to forfeit one's moral authority to call that reality into question. That is to say, I have no right to call mountaintop removal an injustice—one in need of a new reality—if I cannot be trusted to depict the travesty of strip mining as it now exists. To play D'Agata's game is to lose the reader's trust, and without that, it seems to me that the nonfiction writer has very little left. Writers of that persuasion can align themselves with Picasso's famous sentiment that art is the lie that tells the truth, but I have no truck with such pretentiousness. The work of the nonfiction writers I most admire is telling a truth that exposes a lie. ~ Sean Prentiss,
1325:Conversation with the Tsatsawassa House
Bernadette: O sweet delightful house
why do so many things get lost in you?
House: Maybe you just dream you lose them.
B: How do you know what dreams are?
H: I pride myself on knowing everything you know.
B: Oh, so you know we're getting you new windows?
H: I have trouble with no & know. With knew & new too.
Why do people do that?
B: I don't know; I don't mean I don't no.
H: See, you make it hard for a house. Anyway I don't
usually speak.
B: Do you write poetry?
H: I dabble. I don't know if it's poetry or prose though.
B: It's prose?—?it's shaped like you.
H: What about my roof?
B: That would be a concrete poem.
H: Even the time the tree fell through it?
B: That would be a different genre, perhaps
conceptual art.
H: I'd like to climb mountains. You can leave me
whenever you want but I'm stuck with you.
B: What was it like when people prayed in you?
H: It was kind of creepy. I liked the Jewish people
better?—?more love of life. People can do anything they
want to me, I'd like to be more proactive. I'm just
stuck here. Even a cult could move in.
B: I've never been a therapist for a house. How was
your childhood? Were you born?
H: I was made of mostly local stuff. Don't set me
me on fire. I tremble every time you light that wood stove.
B: There was no heat when we moved into you; there
were also 24 doors.
H: Don't blame me, I didn't do it.
B: You didn't do anything but be here like an immobile
tree, but you provided shelter. Can houses tremble?
Do you have a sex life?
H: None of your business. The sex life of houses isn't
known to humans, nor will it ever be.
B: You seem to have mastered grammar but not homonyms.
H: I liked it when I was unoccupied, full of birds' nests
on the porch & ghosts inside, I felt fulfilled.
B: How did you like the Hebrew books?
H: They reminded me of my bat mitzvah.
B: You never told me you were Jewish.
H: I thought you'd never ask.
~ Bernadette Mayer,
1326:Popularity does not guarantee literary quality, as everybody knows, but it never comes about for no reason. Nor are those reasons always and necessarily feeble or meretricious ones, though there has long been a tendency among the literary and educational elite to think so. To give just one example, in my youth Charles Dickens was not regarded as a suitable author for those reading English Studies at university, because for all his commercial popularity (or perhaps because of his commercial popularity) he had been downgraded from being ‘a novelist’ to being ‘an entertainer’. The opinion was reversed as critics developed broader interests and better tools; but although critical interest has stretched to include Dickens, it has not for the most part stretched to include Tolkien, and is still uneasy about the whole area of fantasy and the fantastic – though this includes, as has been said, many of the most serious and influential works of the whole of the later twentieth century, and its most characteristic, novel and distinctive genres (such as science fiction).
The qualitative case for these genres, including the fantasy genre, needs to be made, and the qualitative case for Tolkien must be a major part of it. It is not a particularly difficult case to make, but it does require a certain open-mindedness as to what people are allowed to get from their reading. Too many critics have defined ‘quality’ in such a way as to exclude anything other than what they have been taught to like. To use the modern jargon, they ‘privilege’ their own assumptions and prejudices, often class-prejudices, against the reading choices of their fellowmen and fellow-women, often without thinking twice about it. But many people have been deeply and lastingly moved by Tolkien’s works, and even if one does not share the feeling, one should be able to understand why.
In the following sections, I consider further the first two arguments outlined above, and set out the plan and scope of the chapters which follow, which form in their entirety my expansion of the third argument, about literary quality; and my answer to the question about what Tolkien felt he had to say. ~ Tom Shippey,
1327:Follow Your Passion” Is Terrible Advice “I think it misconstrues the nature of finding a satisfying career and satisfying job, where the biggest predictor of job satisfaction is mentally engaging work. It’s the nature of the job itself. It’s not got that much to do with you. . . . It’s whether the job provides a lot of variety, gives you good feedback, allows you to exercise autonomy, contributes to the wider world—Is it actually meaningful? Is it making the world better?—and also, whether it allows you to exercise a skill that you’ve developed.” * Most gifted books for life improvement and general effectiveness Mindfulness by Mark Williams and Danny Penman. This book is a friendly and accessible introduction to mindfulness meditation, and includes an 8-week guided meditation course. Will completed this course, and it had a significant impact on his life. The Power of Persuasion by Robert Levine. The ability to be convincing, sell ideas, and persuade other people is a meta-skill that transfers to many areas of your life. This book didn’t become that popular, but it’s the best book on persuasion that Will has found. It’s much more in-depth than other options in the genre. * Advice to your 20-year-old self? “One is emphasizing that you have 80,000 working hours in the course of your life. It’s incredibly important to work out how best to spend them, and what you’re doing at the moment—20-year-old Will—is just kind of drifting and thinking. [You’re] not spending very much time thinking about this kind of macro optimization. You might be thinking about ‘How can I do my coursework as well as possible?’ and micro optimization, but not really thinking about ‘What are actually my ultimate goals in life, and how can I optimize toward them?’ “An analogy I use is, if you’re going out for dinner, it’s going to take you a couple of hours. You spend 5 minutes working out where to go for dinner. It seems reasonable to spend 5% of your time on how to spend the remaining 95%. If you did that with your career, that would be 4,000 hours, or 2 working years. And actually, I think that’s a pretty legitimate thing to do—spending that length of time trying to work out how should you be spending the rest of your life. ~ Timothy Ferriss,
1328:As a result of the work done by all these stratifying force in language, there are no "neutral" words and forms - words and forms that can belong to "no one"; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms, but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. All words have the "taste" of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived it socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions. Contextual overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in the word.

As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes "one's own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own. And not all words for just anyone submit equally easy to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated - overpopulated - with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process. ~ Mikhail Bakhtin,
1329:At one point when I was in the middle of the first season, I asked myself why I would want to watch a conservative Democrat destroy teachers’ unions and have joyless sex with a woman who looks like a very young teenager. I still had not answered the question when Claire pushed things to the next level in a scene so intensely creepy that it might count as the most revolting thing I have ever witnessed on television. A longtime member of the couple’s Secret Service security detail is dying of cancer, and Claire goes to visit him alone. On his deathbed, he reveals that he was always secretly in love with her and thought that Frank wasn’t good enough for her. Her response is almost incomprehensible in its cruelty—she mocks and taunts him for thinking he could ever attain a woman like her, and then puts her hand down his pants and begins to give him a handjob, all the while saying, in true perverse style, “This is what you wanted, right?” Surely Claire doesn’t have to emotionally destroy a man who is dying of cancer—and yet perhaps in a way she does, because she uses it as a way of convincing herself that Frank really is the right man for her. Not only could an average, hardworking, sentimental man never satisfy her, but she would destroy him. By contrast, Frank not only can take her abuse, but actively thrives on it, as she does on his. Few images of marriage as a true partnership of equals are as convincing as this constant power struggle between two perverse creeps.
Claire is not the first wife in the “high-quality TV drama” genre to administer a humiliating handjob. In fact, she is not even the first wife to administer a humiliating handjob to a man who is dying of cancer. That distinction belongs to Skyler White of Breaking Bad, who does the honors in the show’s pilot. It is intended as a birthday treat for her husband Walt, who is presumably sexually deprived due to his wife’s advanced pregnancy, and so in contrast to Claire’s, it would count as a generous gesture if not for the fact that Skyler continues to work on her laptop the entire time, barely even acknowledging Walt’s presence in the room. In her own way, Skyler is performing her dominance just as much as Claire was with her cancer patient, but Skyler’s detachment from the act makes it somehow even creepier than Claire’s. ~ Adam Kotsko,
1330:When people dis fantasy—mainstream readers and SF readers alike—they are almost always talking about one sub-genre of fantastic literature. They are talking about Tolkien, and Tolkien's innumerable heirs. Call it 'epic', or 'high', or 'genre' fantasy, this is what fantasy has come to mean. Which is misleading as well as unfortunate.

Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious—you can't ignore it, so don't even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there's a lot to dislike—his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien's clichés—elves 'n' dwarfs 'n' magic rings—have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader.

That is a revolting idea, and one, thankfully, that plenty of fantasists have ignored. From the Surrealists through the pulps—via Mervyn Peake and Mikhael Bulgakov and Stefan Grabiński and Bruno Schulz and Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison and I could go on—the best writers have used the fantastic aesthetic precisely to challenge, to alienate, to subvert and undermine expectations.

Of course I'm not saying that any fan of Tolkien is no friend of mine—that would cut my social circle considerably. Nor would I claim that it's impossible to write a good fantasy book with elves and dwarfs in it—Michael Swanwick's superb ,
1331:When people dis fantasy—mainstream readers and SF readers alike—they are almost always talking about one sub-genre of fantastic literature. They are talking about Tolkien, and Tolkien's innumerable heirs. Call it 'epic', or 'high', or 'genre' fantasy, this is what fantasy has come to mean. Which is misleading as well as unfortunate.

Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious—you can't ignore it, so don't even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there's a lot to dislike—his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien's clichés—elves 'n' dwarfs 'n' magic rings—have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader.

That is a revolting idea, and one, thankfully, that plenty of fantasists have ignored. From the Surrealists through the pulps—via Mervyn Peake and Mikhael Bulgakov and Stefan Grabiński and Bruno Schulz and Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison and I could go on—the best writers have used the fantastic aesthetic precisely to challenge, to alienate, to subvert and undermine expectations.

Of course I'm not saying that any fan of Tolkien is no friend of mine—that would cut my social circle considerably. Nor would I claim that it's impossible to write a good fantasy book with elves and dwarfs in it—Michael Swanwick's superb ,
1332:...while epic fantasy is based on the fairy tale of the just war, that’s not one you’ll find in Grimm or Disney, and most will never recognize the shape of it. I think the fantasy genre pitches its tent in the medieval campground for the very reason that we even bother to write stories about things that never happened in the first place: because it says something subtle and true about our own world, something it is difficult to say straight out, with a straight face. Something you need tools to say, you need cheat codes for the human brain--a candy princess or a sugar-coated unicorn to wash down the sour taste of how bad things can really get.

See, I think our culture has a slash running through the middle of it, too. Past/Future, Conservative/Liberal, Online/Offline. Virgin/Whore. And yes: Classical/Medieval. I think we’re torn between the Classical Narrative of Self and the Medieval Narrative of Self, between the choice of Achilles and Keep Calm and Carry On.

The Classical internal monologue goes like this: do anything, anything, only don’t be forgotten. Yes, this one sacrificed his daughter on a slab at Aulis, that one married his mother and tore out his eyes, and oh that guy ate his kids in a pie. But you remember their names, don’t you? So it’s all good in the end. Give a Greek soul a choice between a short life full of glory and a name echoing down the halls of time and a long, gentle life full of children and a quiet sort of virtue, and he’ll always go down in flames. That’s what the Iliad is all about, and the Odyssey too. When you get to Hades, you gotta have a story to tell, because the rest of eternity is just forgetting and hoping some mortal shows up on a quest and lets you drink blood from a bowl so you can remember who you were for one hour.

And every bit of cultural narrative in America says that we are all Odysseus, we are all Agamemnon, all Atreus, all Achilles. That we as a nation made that choice and chose glory and personal valor, and woe betide any inconvenient “other people” who get in our way. We tell the tales around the campfire of men who came from nothing to run dotcom empires, of a million dollars made overnight, of an actress marrying a prince from Monaco, of athletes and stars and artists and cowboys and gangsters and bootleggers and talk show hosts who hitched up their bootstraps and bent the world to their will. Whose names you all know. And we say: that can be each and every one of us and if it isn’t, it’s your fault. You didn’t have the excellence for it. You didn’t work hard enough. The story wasn’t about you, and the only good stories are the kind that have big, unignorable, undeniable heroes. ~ Catherynne M Valente,
1333:On nous dira sans doute que la réalité d'un Dieu créateur n'a pas été démontrée ; mais, outre qu'il n'est pas difficile de démontrer cette réalité avec des arguments proportionnés à sa nature, – mais inaccessible pour cette raison même à certains esprits, – le moins qu'on puisse dire est que l'évolution n'a jamais été démontrée par qui que ce soit, et pour cause ; on admet l'évolution transformante à titre de postulat utile et provisoire, comme on admettra n'importe quoi, pourvu qu'on ne se sente pas obligé d'admettre la primauté de l'Immatériel, puisque celui-ci échappe au contrôle de nos sens. Quand on part de la constatation de ce mystère immédiatement tangible qu'est la subjectivité ou l'intelligence, il est pourtant facile de concevoir que l'origine de l'Univers est, non la matière inerte et inconsciente mais une Substance spirituelle qui, de coagulation en coagulation et de segmentation en segmentation, – et autres projection à la fois manifestantes et limitatives, – produit en fin de compte la matière en la faisant émerger d'une substance plus subtile, mais déjà éloignée de la Substance principielle. On nous objectera qu'il n'y a là aucune preuve, à quoi nous répondons – outre que le phénomène de la subjectivité comporte précisément cette preuve, abstraction faite d'autres preuves intellectuelles possibles, mais dont l'Intellection n'a nul besoin, – à quoi nous répondons donc qu'il y a infiniment moins de preuve à cette absurdité inconcevable qu'est l'évolutionnisme, lequel fait sortir le miracle de la conscience d'un tas de terre ou de cailloux, métaphoriquement parlant.

[...] L'intelligence séparée de sa source supra-individuelle s'accompagne ipso facto de ce manque de sens des proportions qu'on appelle l'orgueil ; inversement, l'orgueil empêche l'intelligence devenue rationalisme de remonter à sa source ; il ne peut que nier l'Esprit et le remplacer par la matière ; c'est de celle-ci qu'il fait jaillir la conscience, dans la mesure où il ne peut la nier en la réduisant -- et les essais ne manquent pas -- à une sorte de matière particulièrement raffinée ou "évoluée"(1).(...)

(1) Que l'on parle d' "énergie" plutôt que de "matière" -- et autres subtilités de ce genre -- ne change rien au fond du problème et ne fait que reculer les limites de la difficulté. Notons qu'un soi-disant "sociobiologiste"-- ce mot est tout un programme -- a poussé l'ingéniosité jusqu'à remplacer la matière par des "gênes" dont l'égoïsme aveugle, combiné avec un instinct de fournis ou d'abeilles, aurait fini par constituer non seulement les corps mais aussi la conscience et en fin de compte l'intelligence humaine, miraculeusement capable de disserter sur les gênes qui se sont amusés à la produire. » ~ Frithjof Schuon,
1334:banquet oifert à un député par ses électeurs reconnaissants. La cheminée est ornée d’une pendule d’un goût atrocement troubadour, représentant le templier Bois-Guilbert enlevant une Rébecca dorée sur un cheval argenté. A droite et à gauche de cette odieuse horloge sont placés deux flambeaux de plaqué sous un globe. Ces magnificences sont l’objet de la secrète envie de plus d’une ménagère de Pont-de-Arche, et la servante elle-même ne les essuie qu’en tremblant. Je ne parle pas de quelques caniches en verre filé, d’un petit saint Jean en pâte de sucre, d’un Napoléon en chocolat, d’un cabaret chargé de porcelaines communes et pompeusement installé sur une table ronde, de gravures représentant les Adieux de Fontainebleau, Souvenirs et regrets, la Famille du marin, les Petits Braconniers et autres vulgarités du même genre. — Concevez-vous rien de pareil ? Je n’ai jamais su comprendre, pour ma part, cet amour du commun et du laid. Je conçois que tout le monde n’ait pas pour logement des Alhambras, des Louvres ou des Parthénons ; mais il est toujours si facile de ne pas avoir de pendule ! de laisser les murailles nues, et de se priver de lithographies de Maurin ou d’aquatintes de Jazet ! Les gens qui remplissaient ce salon me semblaient, à force de vulgarité, les plus étranges du monde ; ils avaient des façons de parler incroyables, et s’exprimaient en style fleuri, comme feu Prudhomme, élève de Brard et Saint-Omer. Leurs têtes, épanouies sur leurs cravates blanches, et leurs cols de chemise gigantesques faisaient penser à certains produits de la famille des cucurbitacés. Quelques hommes ressemblent à des animaux, au lion, au cheval, à l’âne ; ceux-ci, tout bien considéré, avaient l’air encore plus végétal que bestial. Des femmes, je n’en dirai rien, m’étant promis de ne jamais tourner en ridicule ce sexe charmant. Au milieu de ces légumes humains, Louise faisait l’effet d’une rose dans un carré de choux. Elle portait une simple robe blanche serrée à la taille par un ruban bleu ; ses cheveux, séparés en bandeaux, encadraient harmonieusement son front pur. Une grosse natte se tordait derrière sa nuque, couverte de cheveux follets et d’un duvet de pêche. Une quakeresse n’aurait rien trouvé à redire à cette mise, qui faisait paraître d’un grotesque et d’un ridicule achevés les harnais et les plumets de corbillard. des autres femmes ; il était impossible d’être de meilleur goût. J’avais peur que mon infante ne profitât de la circonstance pour déployer quelque toilette excessive et prétentieuse, achetée d’occasion. Cette pauvre robe de mousseline qui n’a jamais vu l’Inde, et qu’elle a probablement faite elle-même, m’a touché et séduit ; je ne tiens pas à la parure. J’ai eu pour maîtresse une gitana grenadine qui n’avait pour tout vêtement que des pantoufles bleues et un collier de grains d’ambre ; mais rien ne me contrarie comme un fourreau mal taillé et d’une couleur hostile. Les dandies bourgeois préférant de ~ Th ophile Gautier,
1335:Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it’s a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it’s hard, because someone’s in trouble and you have to know how it’s all going to end … that’s a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you’re on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.

It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.

We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy.

[from, Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming] ~ Neil Gaiman,
1336:… Le Bouddha ne fut tout d’abord figuré que par des empreintes de pieds, ou par des symboles tels que l’arbre ou la roue (et il est remarquable que, de la même façon, le Christ aussi ne fut représenté pendant plusieurs siècles que par des figurations purement symboliques) ; comment et pourquoi en vint-on à admettre par la suite une image anthropomorphique ? Il faut voir là comme une concession aux besoins d’une époque moins intellectuelle, où la compréhension doctrinale était déjà affaiblie ; les « supports de contemplation », pour être aussi efficaces que possible, doivent en effet être adaptés aux conditions de chaque époque ; mais encore convient-il de remarquer que l’image humaine elle-même, ici comme dans le cas des « déités » hindoues, n’est réellement « anthropomorphique » que dans une certaine mesure, en ce sens qu’elle n’est jamais « naturaliste » et qu’elle garde toujours, avant tout et dans tous ses détails, un caractère essentiellement symbolique. Cela ne veut d’ailleurs point dire qu’il s’agisse d’une représentation « conventionnelle » comme l’imaginent les modernes, car un symbole n’est nullement le produit d’une invention humaine ; « le symbolisme est un langage hiératique et métaphysique, non un langage déterminé par des catégories organiques ou psychologiques ; son fondement est dans la correspondance analogique de tous les ordres de réalité, états d’être ou niveaux de référence ». La forme symbolique « est révélée » et « vue » dans le même sens que les incantations vêdiques ont été révélées et « entendues », et il ne peut y avoir aucune distinction de principe entre vision et audition, car ce qui importe n’est pas le genre de support sensible qui est employé, mais la signification qui y est en quelque sorte « incorporée ». L’élément proprement « surnaturel » est partie intégrante de l’image, comme il l’est des récits ayant une valeur « mythique », au sens originel de ce mot ; dans les deux cas, il s’agit avant tout de moyens destinés, non à communiquer, ce qui est impossible, mais à permettre de réaliser le « mystère », ce que ne saurait évidemment faire ni un simple portrait ni un fait historique comme tel. C’est donc la nature même de l’art symbolique en général qui échappe inévitablement au point de vue « rationaliste » des modernes, comme lui échappe, pour les mêmes raisons, le sens transcendant des « miracles » et le caractère « théophanique » du monde manifesté lui-même ; l’homme ne peut comprendre ces choses que s’il est à la fois sensitif et spirituel, et s’il se rend compte que « l’accès à la réalité ne s’obtient pas en faisant un choix entre la matière et l’esprit supposés sans rapports entre eux, mais plutôt en voyant dans les choses matérielles et sensibles une similitude formelle des prototypes spirituels que les sens ne peuvent atteindre directement » ; il s’agit là « d’une réalité envisagée à différents niveaux de référence, ou, si l’on préfère, de différents ordres de réalité, mais qui ne s’excluent pas mutuellement. ~ Ren Gu non,
1337:Comme l'impôt est obligatoire pour tous, qu'ils votent ou non, une large proportion de ceux qui votent le font sans aucun doute pour éviter que leur propre argent ne soit utilisé contre eux; alors que, en fait, ils se fussent volontiers abstenus de voter, si par là ils avaient pu échapper ne serait-ce qu'à l'impôt, sans parler de toutes les autres usurpations et tyrannies du gouvernement. Prendre le bien d'un homme sans son accord, puis conclure à son consentement parce qu'il tente, en votant, d'empêcher que son bien ne soit utilisé pour lui faire tort, voilà une preuve bien insuffisante de son consentement à soutenir la Constitution. Ce n'est en réalité aucunement une preuve.

Puisque tous les hommes qui soutiennent la Constitution en votant (pour autant qu'il existe de tels hommes) le font secrètement (par scrutin secret), et de manière à éviter toute responsabilité personnelle pour l'action de leurs agents ou représentants, on ne saurait dire en droit ou en raison qu'il existe un seul homme qui soutienne la Constitution en votant.

Puisque tout vote est secret (par scrutin secret), et puisque tout gouvernement secret est par nécessité une association secrète de voleurs, tyrans et assassins, le fait général que notre gouvernement, dans la pratique, opère par le moyen d'un tel vote prouve seulement qu'il y a parmi nous une association secrète de voleurs, tyrans et assassins, dont le but est de voler, asservir et -- s'il le faut pour accomplir leurs desseins -- assassiner le reste de la population. Le simple fait qu'une telle association existe ne prouve en rien que "le peuple des Etats-Unis", ni aucun individu parmi ce peuple, soutienne volontairement la Constitution.

Les partisans visibles de la Constitution, comme les partisans visibles de la plupart des autres gouvernements, se rangent dans trois catégories, à savoir: 1. Les scélérats, classe nombreuse et active; le gouvernement est pour eux un instrument qu'ils utiliseront pour s'agrandir ou s'enrichir; 2. Les dupes -- vaste catégorie, sans nul doute, dont chaque membre, parce qu'on lui attribue une voix sur des millions pour décider ce qu'il peut faire de sa personne et de ses biens, et parce qu'on l'autorise à avoir, pour voler, asservir et assassiner autrui, cette même voix que d'autres ont pour le voler, l'asservir et l'assassiner, est assez sot pour imaginer qu'il est "un homme libre", un "souverain"; assez sot pour imaginer que ce gouvernement est "un gouvernement libre", "un gouvernement de l'égalité des droits", "le meilleur gouvernement qu'il y ait sur terre", et autres absurdités de ce genre; 3. Une catégorie qui a quelque intelligence des vices du gouvernement, mais qui ou bien ne sait comment s'en débarrasser, ou bien ne choisit pas de sacrifier ses intérêts privés au point de se dévouer sérieusement et gravement à la tâche de promouvoir un changement.

Le fait est que le gouvernement, comme un bandit de grand chemin, dit à un individu: "La bourse ou la vie." Quantité de taxes, ou même la plupart, sont payées sous la contrainte d'une telle menace. ~ Lysander Spooner,
1338:The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic. This may appear a surprising claim, which would not have seemed even remotely
conceivable at the start of the century and which is bound to encounter fierce resistance even now. However, when the time comes to look back at the century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of our present, will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. The list could readily be extended, back to the late nineteenth century with H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and up to writers currently active like Stephen R. Donaldson and George R.R. Martin. It could take in authors as different, not to say opposed, as Kingsley and Martin Amis, Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Don DeLillo, and Julian Barnes. By the end of the century, even authors deeply committed to the realist novel have often found themselves unable to resist the gravitational pull of the fantastic as a literary mode.

This is not the same, one should note, as fantasy as a literary genre – of the authors listed above, only four besides Tolkien would find their works regularly placed on the ‘fantasy’ shelves of bookshops, and ‘the fantastic’ includes many genres besides fantasy: allegory and parable, fairy-tale, horror and science fiction, modern ghost-story and medieval romance. Nevertheless, the point remains.
Those authors of the twentieth century who have spoken most powerfully to and for their contemporaries have for some reason found it necessary to use the metaphoric mode of fantasy, to write about worlds and creatures which we know do not exist, whether Tolkien’s ‘Middle-earth’, Orwell’s ‘Ingsoc’, the remote islands of Golding and Wells, or the Martians and Tralfa-madorians who burst into peaceful English or American suburbia in Wells and Vonnegut. A ready explanation for this phenomenon is of course that it represents a kind of literary disease, whose sufferers – the millions of readers of fantasy – should be scorned, pitied, or rehabilitated back to correct and proper taste. Commonly the disease is said to be ‘escapism’: readers and writers of fantasy are fleeing from reality. The problem with this is that so many of the originators of the later twentieth-century fantastic mode, including all four of those first mentioned above (Tolkien, Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut) are combat veterans, present at or at least deeply involved in the most traumatically significant events of the century, such as the Battle of the Somme (Tolkien), the bombing of Dresden (Vonnegut), the rise and early victory of fascism (Orwell). Nor can anyone say that they turned their backs on these events. Rather, they had to find some way of communicating and commenting on them. It is strange that this had, for some reason, in so many cases to involve fantasy as well as realism, but that is what has happened. ~ Tom Shippey,
1339:Augmentez la dose de sports pour chacun, développez l'esprit d'équipe, de compétition, et le besoin de penser est éliminé, non ? Organiser, organisez, super-organisez des super-super-sports. Multipliez les bandes dessinées, les films; l'esprit a de moins en moins d'appétits. L'impatience, les autos-trades sillonnées de foules qui sont ici, là, partout, nulle part. Les réfugiés du volant. Les villes se transforment en auberges routières; les hommes se déplacent comme des nomades suivant les phases de la lune, couchant ce soir dans la chambre où tu dormais à midi et moi la veille. (1re partie)

On vit dans l'immédiat. Seul compte le boulot et après le travail l'embarras du choix en fait de distractions. Pourquoi apprendre quoi que ce soit sinon à presser les boutons, brancher des commutateurs, serrer des vis et des écrous ?

Nous n'avons pas besoin qu'on nous laisse tranquilles. Nous avons besoin d'être sérieusement tracassés de temps à autre. Il y a combien de temps que tu n'as pas été tracassée sérieusement ? Pour une raison importante je veux dire, une raison valable ?

- Tu dois bien comprendre que notre civilisation est si vaste que nous ne pouvons nous permettre d'inquiéter ou de déranger nos minorités. Pose-toi la question toi-même. Que recherchons-nous, par-dessus tout, dans ce pays ? Les gens veulent être heureux, d'accord ? Ne l'as-tu pas entendu répéter toute la vie ? Je veux être heureux, déclare chacun. Eh bien, sont-ils heureux ? Ne veillons-nous pas à ce qu'ils soient toujours en mouvement, toujours distraits ? Nous ne vivons que pour ça, c'est bien ton avis ? Pour le plaisir, pour l'excitation. Et tu dois admettre que notre civilisation fournit l'un et l'autre à satiété.

Si le gouvernement est inefficace, tyrannique, vous écrase d'impôts, peu importe tant que les gens n'en savent rien. La paix, Montag. Instituer des concours dont les prix supposent la mémoire des paroles de chansons à la mode, des noms de capitales d'État ou du nombre de quintaux de maïs récoltés dans l'Iowa l'année précédente. Gavez les hommes de données inoffensives, incombustibles, qu'ils se sentent bourrés de "faits" à éclater, renseignés sur tout. Ensuite, ils s'imagineront qu'ils pensent, ils auront le sentiment du mouvement, tout en piétinant. Et ils seront heureux, parce que les connaissances de ce genre sont immuables. Ne les engagez pas sur des terrains glissants comme la philosophie ou la sociologie à quoi confronter leur expérience. C'est la source de tous les tourments. Tout homme capable de démonter un écran mural de télévision et de le remonter et, de nos jours ils le sont à peu près tous, est bien plus heureux que celui qui essais de mesurer, d'étalonner, de mettre en équations l'univers ce qui ne peut se faire sans que l'homme prenne conscience de son infériorité et de sa solitude.

Nous sommes les joyeux drilles, les boute-en-train, toi, moi et les autres. Nous faisons front contre la marée de ceux qui veulent plonger le monde dans la désolation en suscitant le conflit entre la théorie et la pensée. Nous avons les doigts accrochés au parapet. Tenons bon. Ne laissons pas le torrent de la mélancolie et de la triste philosophie noyer notre monde. Nous comptons sur toi. Je ne crois pas que tu te rendes compte de ton importance, de notre importance pour protéger l'optimisme de notre monde actuel. ~ Ray Bradbury,
1340:ONCE YOU’VE HOOKED readers, your next task is to put your early chapters to work introducing your characters, settings, and stakes. The first 20-25% of the book comprises your setup. At first glance, this can seem like a tremendous chunk of story to devote to introductions. But if you expect readers to stick with you throughout the story, you first have to give them a reason to care. This important stretch is where you accomplish just that. Mere curiosity can only carry readers so far. Once you’ve hooked that sense of curiosity, you then have to deepen the pull by creating an emotional connection between them and your characters. These “introductions” include far more than just the actual moment of introducing the characters and settings or explaining the stakes. In themselves, the presentations of the characters probably won’t take more than a few scenes. After the introduction is when your task of deepening the characters and establishing the stakes really begins. The first quarter of the book is the place to compile all the necessary components of your story. Anton Chekhov’s famous advice that “if in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired” is just as important in reverse: if you’re going to have a character fire a gun later in the book, that gun should be introduced in the First Act. The story you create in the following acts can only be assembled from the parts you’ve shown readers in this First Act. That’s your first duty in this section. Your second duty is to allow readers the opportunity to learn about your characters. Who are these people? What is the essence of their personalities? What are their core beliefs (even more particularly, what are the beliefs that will be challenged or strengthened throughout the book)? If you can introduce a character in a “characteristic moment,” as we talked about earlier, you’ll be able to immediately show readers who this person is. From there, the plot builds as you deepen the stakes and set up the conflict that will eventually explode in the Inciting and Key Events. Authors sometimes feel pressured to dive right into the action of their stories, at the expense of important character development. Because none of us wants to write a boring story, we can overreact by piling on the explosions, fight sequences, and high-speed car chases to the point we’re unable to spend important time developing our characters. Character development is especially important in this first part of the story, since readers need to understand and sympathize with the characters before they’re hit with the major plot revelations at the quarter mark, halfway mark, and three-quarters mark. Summer blockbusters are often guilty of neglecting character development, but one enduring exception worth considering is Stephen Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. No one would claim the film is a leisurely character study, but it rises far above the monster movie genre through its expert use of pacing and its loving attention to character, especially in its First Act. It may surprise some viewers to realize the action in this movie doesn’t heat up until a quarter of the way into the film—and even then we have no scream-worthy moments, no adrenaline, and no extended action scenes until halfway through the Second Act. Spielberg used the First Act to build suspense and encourage viewer loyalty to the characters. By the time the main characters arrive at the park, we care about them, and our fear for their safety is beginning to manifest thanks to a magnificent use of foreshadowing. We understand that what is at stake for these characters is their very lives. Spielberg knew if he could hook viewers with his characters, he could take his time building his story to an artful Climax. ~ K M Weiland,
1341:O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?

Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.

O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.

P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.

O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.

P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.

Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.

(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself. ~ Terry Pratchett,
1342:Le Masque (The Mask)
Statue allégorique dans le goût de la Renaissance
Contemplons ce trésor de grâces florentines;
Dans l'ondulation de ce corps musculeux
L'Elégance et la Force abondent, soeurs divines.
Cette femme, morceau vraiment miraculeux,
Divinement robuste, adorablement mince,
Est faite pour trôner sur des lits somptueux
Et charmer les loisirs d'un pontife ou d'un prince.
— Aussi, vois ce souris fin et voluptueux
Où la Fatuité promène son extase;
Ce long regard sournois, langoureux et moqueur;
Ce visage mignard, tout encadré de gaze,
Dont chaque trait nous dit avec un air vainqueur:
«La Volupté m'appelle et l'Amour me couronne!»
À cet être doué de tant de majesté
Vois quel charme excitant la gentillesse donne!
Approchons, et tournons autour de sa beauté.
Ô blasphème de l'art! ô surprise fatale!
La femme au corps divin, promettant le bonheur,Par le haut se termine en
monstre bicéphale!
— Mais non! ce n'est qu'un masque, un décor suborneur,
Ce visage éclairé d'une exquise grimace,
Et, regarde, voici, crispée atrocement,
La véritable tête, et la sincère face
Renversée à l'abri de la face qui ment
Pauvre grande beauté! le magnifique fleuve
De tes pleurs aboutit dans mon coeur soucieux
Ton mensonge m'enivre, et mon âme s'abreuve
Aux flots que la Douleur fait jaillir de tes yeux!
— Mais pourquoi pleure-t-elle? Elle, beauté parfaite,
Qui mettrait à ses pieds le genre humain vaincu,
Quel mal mystérieux ronge son flanc d'athlète?
— Elle pleure insensé, parce qu'elle a vécu!
303
Et parce qu'elle vit! Mais ce qu'elle déplore
Surtout, ce qui la fait frémir jusqu'aux genoux,
C'est que demain, hélas! il faudra vivre encore!
Demain, après-demain et toujours! — comme nous!
The Mask
Allegorical Statue in the Style of the Renaissance
Let us gaze at this gem of Florentine beauty;
In the undulation of this brawny body
Those divine sisters, Gracefulness and Strength, abound.
This woman, a truly miraculous marble,
Adorably slender, divinely robust,
Is made to be enthroned upon sumptuous beds
And to charm the leisure of a Pope or a Prince.
— And see that smile, voluptuous and delicate,
Where self-conceit displays its ecstasy;
That sly, lingering look, mocking and languorous;
That dainty face, framed in a veil of gauze,
Whose every feature says, with a triumphant air:
'Pleasure calls me and Love gives me a crown!'
To that being endowed with so much majesty
See what exciting charm is lent by prettiness!
Let us draw near, and walk around its loveliness.
O blasphemy of art! Fatal surprise!
That exquisite body, that promise of delight,
At the top turns into a two-headed monster!
Why no! it's but a mask, a lying ornament,
That visage enlivened by a dainty grimace,
And look, here is, atrociously shriveled,
The real, true head, the sincere countenance
Reversed and hidden by the lying face.
Poor glamorous beauty! the magnificent stream
Of your tears flows into my anguished heart;
Your falsehood makes me drunk and my soul slakes its thirst
At the flood from your eyes, which Suffering causes!
304
— But why is she weeping? She, the perfect beauty,
Who could put at her feet the conquered human race,
What secret malady gnaws at those sturdy flanks?
— She is weeping, fool, because she has lived!
And because she lives! But what she deplores
Most, what makes her shudder down to her knees,
Is that tomorrow, alas! she will still have to live!
Tomorrow, after tomorrow, always! — like us!
— Translated by William Aggeler
The Mask
(An allegoric statue in Renaissance style)
vStudy with me this Florentinian treasure,
Whose undulous and muscular design
Welds Grace with Strength in sisterhood divine;
A marvel only wonderment can measure,
Divinely strong, superbly slim and fine,
She's formed to reign upon a bed of pleasure
And charm some prince or pontiff in his leisure.
See, too, her smile voluptuously shine,
Where sheer frivolity displays its sign:
That lingering look of languor, guile, and cheek,
The dainty face, which veils of gauze enshrine,
That seems in conquering accents thus to speak:
'Pleasure commands me. Love my brow has crowned!'
Enamouring our thoughts in humble duty,
True majesty with merriment is found.
Approach, let's take a turn about her beauty.
O blasphemy! Dread shock! Our hopes to pique,
This lovely body, promising delight,
Ends at the top in a two-headed freak.
305
But no! it's just a mask that tricked our sight,
Fooling us with that exquisite grimace:
On the reverse you see her proper face,
Fiercely convulsed, in its true self revealed,
Which from our sight that lying mask concealed.
— O sad great beauty! The grand river, fed
By your rich tears, debouches in my heart.
Though I am rapt with your deceptive art,
My soul is slaked upon the tears you shed.
And yet why does she weep? Such peerless grace
Could trample down the conquered human race.
What evil gnaws her flank so strong and sleek?
She weeps because she's lived, and that she lives.
Madly she weeps for that. But more she grieves
(And at the knees she trembles and goes weak)
Because tomorrow she must live, and then
The next day, and forever — like us men.
— Translated by Roy Campbell
The Mask
An Allegorical Statue in Renaissance Style
Behold this prize of beauties wholly Florentine,
See in this muscled body, lithe and sinuous,
Divine concinnity married to strength divine.
This woman sculpted by hands that wrought, miraculous.
So strangely strong, and so strangely slim in scope,
She was born to throne on beds made rich and sumptuous
To charm the happy leisure of a Prince or Pope.
Behold these smiling lips, suave and voluptuous,
Whose ecstasies of arrant self-love give us pause;
The mocking pawkishness of that long languid stare,
Those dainty features framed in luminous light gauze,
Whose every facet says with an all-conquering air:
306
'Lo, Pleasure calls and Love crowns my triumphant head!'
On this proud creature vested with such stateliness,
See what exciting charms her daintiness has shed.
Let us draw close and walk around her. O excess,
O blasphemy of Art! O treachery unique!
That body filled with promise, rapturous and rare,
Turns at the top into a double-headed freak!
No, this is but a mask, a decorative snare,
Poor visage lighted by a delicate grimace!
And look! contracted here, in raw and hideous troubles,
The genuine head and the authentic, candid face
Are overturned and darkened by their lying doubles.
Poor noble beauty, the magnificent broad river
Of your sad tears flows through my heart; your lie of lies
Intoxicates me, and my thirsty soul aquiver
Is slaked by the salt flood Pain dredges from your eyes.
But why is it she weeps, whose loveliness outranks
All others, and who binds all humans by her laws?
What hushed mysterious ill gnaws at her athlete flanks?
She weeps because, O madman, she has lived, because
She must live on. But her most pitiful misgiving —
What chills her very knees and turns her tremulous —
Is that alas! tomorrow she must go on living —
Tomorrow and tomorrow — evermore — like us!
— Translated by Jacques LeClercq
~ Charles Baudelaire,
1343:financially and employed him as his unofficial secretary.
In March 768, he began his journey again and got as far as Hunan province,
where he died in Tanzhou (now Changsha) in November or December 770, in his
58th year. He was survived by his wife and two sons, who remained in the area
for some years at least. His last known descendant is a grandson who requested
a grave inscription for the poet from Yuan Zhen in 813.
Hung summarises his life by concluding that, "He appeared to be a filial son, an
affectionate father, a generous brother, a faithful husband, a loyal friend, a
dutiful official, and a patriotic subject."
Works
Criticism of ~ Du Fu



's works has focused on his strong sense of history, his moral
engagement, and his technical excellence.
History
Since the Song dynasty, critics have called ~ Du Fu



the "poet historian". The most
directly historical of his poems are those commenting on military tactics or the
successes and failures of the government, or the poems of advice which he wrote
to the emperor. Indirectly, he wrote about the effect of the times in which he
lived on himself, and on the ordinary people of China. As Watson notes, this is
information "of a kind seldom found in the officially compiled histories of the
era".
~ Du Fu



's political comments are based on emotion rather than calculation: his
prescriptions have been paraphrased as, "Let us all be less selfish, let us all do
what we are supposed to do". Since his views were impossible to disagree with,
his forcefully expressed truisms enabled his installation as the central figure of
Chinese poetic history.
Moral engagement
A second favourite epithet of Chinese critics is that of "poet sage" (?? shi shèng),
a counterpart to the philosophical sage, Confucius. One of the earliest surviving
works, The Song of the Wagons (from around 750), gives voice to the sufferings
of a conscript soldier in the imperial army, even before the beginning of the
rebellion; this poem brings out the tension between the need of acceptance and
fulfilment of one's duties, and a clear-sighted consciousness of the suffering
which this can involve. These themes are continuously articulated in the poems
on the lives of both soldiers and civilians which ~ Du Fu



produced throughout his
life.
Although ~ Du Fu



's frequent references to his own difficulties can give the
impression of an all-consuming solipsism, Hawkes argues that his "famous
compassion in fact includes himself, viewed quite objectively and almost as an
afterthought". He therefore "lends grandeur" to the wider picture by comparing it
to "his own slightly comical triviality".
~ Du Fu



's compassion, for himself and for others, was part of his general
broadening of the scope of poetry: he devoted many works to topics which had
previously been considered unsuitable for poetic treatment. Zhang Jie wrote that
for ~ Du Fu



, "everything in this world is poetry", and he wrote extensively on
subjects such as domestic life, calligraphy, paintings, animals, and other poems.
Technical excellence
~ Du Fu



's work is notable above all for its range. Chinese critics traditionally used
the term txt (jídàchéng- "complete symphony"), a reference to Mencius'
description of Confucius. Yuan Zhen was the first to note the breadth of ~ Du Fu



's
achievement, writing in 813 that his predecessor, "united in his work traits which
previous men had displayed only singly". He mastered all the forms of Chinese
poetry: Chou says that in every form he "either made outstanding advances or
contributed outstanding examples". Furthermore, his poems use a wide range of
registers, from the direct and colloquial to the allusive and self-consciously
literary. This variety is manifested even within individual works: Owen identifies
the, "rapid stylistic and thematic shifts" in poems which enable the poet to
represent different facets of a situation, while Chou uses the term "juxtaposition"
as the major analytical tool in her work. ~ Du Fu



is noted for having written more
on poetics and painting than any other writer of his time. He wrote eighteen
poems on painting alone, more than any other Tang poet. ~ Du Fu



's seemingly
negative commentary on the prized horse paintings of Han Gan ignited a
controversy that has persisted to the present day.
The tenor of his work changed as he developed his style and adapted to his
surroundings ("chameleon-like" according to Watson): his earliest works are in a
relatively derivative, courtly style, but he came into his own in the years of the
rebellion. Owen comments on the "grim simplicity" of the Qinzhou poems, which
mirrors the desert landscape; the works from his Chengdu period are "light, often
finely observed"; while the poems from the late Kuizhou period have a "density
and power of vision".
Influence
According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, ~ Du Fu



's writings are considered by
many literary critics to be among the greatest of all time, and it states "his
dense, compressed language makes use of all the connotative overtones of a
phrase and of all the intonational potentials of the individual word, qualities that
no translation can ever reveal."
In his lifetime and immediately following his death, ~ Du Fu



was not greatly
appreciated. In part this can be attributed to his stylistic and formal innovations,
some of which are still "considered extremely daring and bizarre by Chinese
critics." There are few contemporary references to him—only eleven poems from
six writers—and these describe him in terms of affection, but not as a paragon of
poetic or moral ideals. ~ Du Fu



is also poorly represented in contemporary
anthologies of poetry.
However, as Hung notes, he "is the only Chinese poet whose influence grew with
time", and his works began to increase in popularity in the ninth century. Early
positive comments came from Bai Juyi, who praised the moral sentiments of
some of ~ Du Fu



's works (although he found these in only a small fraction of the
poems), and from Han Yu, who wrote a piece defending ~ Du Fu



and Li Bai on
aesthetic grounds from attacks made against them. Both these writers showed
the influence of ~ Du Fu



in their own poetic work. By the beginning of the 10th
century, Wei Zhuang constructed the first replica of his thatched cottage in
Sichuan.
It was in the 11th century, during the Northern Song era that ~ Du Fu



's reputation
reached its peak. In this period a comprehensive re-evaluation of earlier poets
took place, in which Wang Wei, Li Bai and ~ Du Fu



came to be regarded as
representing respectively the Buddhist, Daoist and Confucian strands of Chinese
culture. At the same time, the development of Neo-Confucianism ensured that
~ Du Fu



, as its poetic exemplar, occupied the paramount position. Su Shi famously
expressed this reasoning when he wrote that ~ Du Fu



was "preeminent...
because... through all his vicissitudes, he never for the space of a meal forgot his
sovereign". His influence was helped by his ability to reconcile apparent
opposites: political conservatives were attracted by his loyalty to the established
order, while political radicals embraced his concern for the poor. Literary
conservatives could look to his technical mastery, while literary radicals were
inspired by his innovations. Since the establishment of the People's Republic of
China, ~ Du Fu



's loyalty to the state and concern for the poor have been
interpreted as embryonic nationalism and socialism, and he has been praised for
his use of simple, "people's language".
~ Du Fu



's popularity grew to such an extent that it is as hard to measure his
influence as that of Shakespeare in England: it was hard for any Chinese poet not
to be influenced by him. While there was never another ~ Du Fu



, individual poets
followed in the traditions of specific aspects of his work: Bai Juyi's concern for the
poor, Lu You's patriotism, and Mei Yaochen's reflections on the quotidian are a
few examples. More broadly, ~ Du Fu



's work in transforming the lushi from mere
word play into "a vehicle for serious poetic utterance" set the stage for every
subsequent writer in the genre.
~ Du Fu



has also been influential beyond China, although in common with the other
High Tang poets, his reception into the Japanese literary culture was relatively
late. It was not until the 17th century that he was accorded the same level of
fame in Japan as in China, but he then had a profound influence on poets such as
Matsuo Basho. In the 20th century, he was the favourite poet of Kenneth
Rexroth, who has described him as "the greatest non-epic, non-dramatic poet
who has survived in any language", and commented that, "he has made me a
better man, as a moral agent and as a perceiving organism".
A Homeless Man's Departure
After the Rebellion of 755, all was silent wasteland,
gardens and cottages turned to grass and thorns.
My village had over a hundred households,
but the chaotic world scattered them east and west.
No information about the survivors;
the dead are dust and mud.
I, a humble soldier, was defeated in battle.
I ran back home to look for old roads
and walked a long time through the empty lanes.
The sun was thin, the air tragic and dismal.
I met only foxes and raccoons,
their hair on end as they snarled in rage.
Who remains in my neighborhood?
One or two old widows.
A returning bird loves its old branches,
how could I give up this poor nest?
In spring I carry my hoe all alone,
yet still water the land at sunset.
The county governor's clerk heard I'd returned
and summoned me to practice the war-drum.
This military service won't take me from my state.
I look around and have no one to worry about.
It's just me alone and the journey is short,
but I will end up lost if I travel too far.
Since my village has been washed away,
near or far makes no difference.
I will forever feel pain for my long-sick mother.
I abandoned her in this valley five years ago.
She gave birth to me, yet I could not help her.
We cry sour sobs till our lives end.
In my life I have no family to say farewell to,
so how can I be called a human being?
~ Du Fu,
1344:L’invention
O fils du Mincius, je te salue, ô toi
Par qui le dieu des arts fut roi du peuple-roi!
Et vous, à qui jadis, pour créer l'harmonie,
L'Attique et l'onde Égée, et la belle Ionie,
Donnèrent un ciel pur, les plaisirs, la beauté,
Des moeurs simples, des lois, la paix, la liberté,
Un langage sonore aux douceurs souveraines,
Le plus beau qui soit né sur des lèvres humaines!
Nul âge ne verra pâlir vos saints lauriers,
Car vos pas inventeurs ouvrirent les sentiers;
Et du temple des arts que la gloire environne
Vos mains ont élevé la première colonne.
A nous tous aujourd'hui, vos faibles nourrissons,
Votre exemple a dicté d'importantes leçons.
Il nous dit que nos mains, pour vous être fidèles,
Y doivent élever des colonnes nouvelles.
L'esclave imitateur naît et s'évanouit;
La nuit vient, le corps reste, et son ombre s'enfuit.
Ce n'est qu'aux inventeurs que la vie est promise.
Nous voyons les enfants de la fière Tamise,
De toute servitude ennemis indomptés;
Mieux qu'eux, par votre exemple, à vous vaincre excités,
Osons; de votre gloire éclatante et durable
Essayons d'épuiser la source inépuisable.
Mais inventer n'est pas, en un brusque abandon,
Blesser la vérité, le bon sens, la raison;
Ce n'est pas entasser, sans dessein et sans forme,
Des membres ennemis en un colosse énorme;
Ce n'est pas, élevant des poissons dans les airs,
A l'aile des vautours ouvrir le sein des mers;
Ce n'est pas sur le front d'une nymphe brillante
Hérisser d'un lion la crinière sanglante:
Délires insensés! fantômes monstrueux!
Et d'un cerveau malsain rêves tumultueux!
Ces transports déréglés, vagabonde manie,
Sont l'accès de la fièvre et non pas du génie;
D'Ormus et d'Ariman ce sont les noirs combats,
Où, partout confondus, la vie et le trépas,
74
Les ténèbres, le jour, la forme et la matière,
Luttent sans être unis; mais l'esprit de lumière
Fait naître en ce chaos la concorde et le jour:
D'éléments divisés il reconnaît l'amour,
Les rappelle; et partout, en d'heureux intervalles,
Sépare et met en paix les semences rivales.
Ainsi donc, dans les arts, l'inventeur est celui
Qui peint ce que chacun put sentir comme lui;
Qui, fouillant des objets les plus sombres retraites,
Étale et fait briller leurs richesses secrètes;
Qui, par des noeuds certains, imprévus et nouveaux,
Unissant des objets qui paraissaient rivaux,
Montre et fait adopter à la nature mère
Ce qu'elle n'a point fait, mais ce qu'elle a pu faire;
C'est le fécond pinceau qui, sûr dans ses regards,
Retrouve un seul visage en vingt belles épars,
Les fait renaître ensemble, et, par un art suprême,
Des traits de vingt beautés forme la beauté même.
La nature dicta vingt genres opposés
D'un fil léger entre eux chez les Grecs divisés.
Nul genre, s'échappant de ses bornes prescrites,
N'aurait osé d'un autre envahir les limites,
Et Pindare à sa lyre, en un couplet bouffon,
N'aurait point de Marot associé le ton.
De ces fleuves nombreux dont l'antique Permesse
Arrosa si longtemps les cités de la Grèce,
De nos jours même, hélas! nos aveugles vaisseaux
Ont encore oublié mille vastes rameaux.
Quand Louis et Colbert, sous les murs de Versailles,
Réparaient des beaux-arts les longues funérailles,
De Sophocle et d'Eschyle ardents admirateurs,
De leur auguste exemple élèves inventeurs,
Des hommes immortels firent sur notre scène
Revivre aux yeux français les théâtres d'Athène.
Comme eux, instruits par eux, Voltaire offre à nos pleurs
Des grands infortunés les illustres douleurs;
D'autres esprits divins, fouillant d'autres ruines,
Sous l'amas des débris, des ronces, des épines,
Ont su, pleins des écrits des Grecs et des Romains,
Retrouver, parcourir leurs antiques chemins,
Mais, oh! la belle palme et quel trésor de gloire
75
Pour celui qui, cherchant la plus noble victoire,
D'un si grand labyrinthe affrontant les hasards,
Saura guider sa muse aux immenses regards,
De mille longs détours à la fois occupée,
Dans les sentiers confus d'une vaste épopée;
Lui dire d'être libre, et qu'elle n'aille pas
De Virgile et d'Homère épier tous les pas,
Par leur secours à peine à leurs pieds élevée;
Mais, qu'auprès de leurs chars, dans un char enlevée,
Sur leurs sentiers marqués de vestiges si beaux,
Sa roue ose imprimer des vestiges nouveaux!
Quoi! faut-il, ne s'armant que de timides voiles,
N'avoir que ces grands noms pour nord et pour étoiles,
Les côtoyer sans cesse, et n'oser un instant,
Seul et loin de tout bord, intrépide et flottant,
Aller sonder les flancs du plus lointain Nérée
Et du premier sillon fendre une onde ignorée?
Les coutumes d'alors, les sciences, les moeurs
Respirent dans les vers des antiques auteurs.
Leur siècle est en dépôt dans leurs nobles volumes.
Tout a changé pour nous, moeurs, sciences, coutumes.
Pourquoi donc nous faut-il, par un pénible soin,
Sans rien voir près de nous, voyant toujours bien loin,
Vivant dans le passé, laissant ceux qui commencent,
Sans penser, écrivant d'après d'autres qui pensent,
Retraçant un tableau que nos yeux n'ont point vu,
Dire et dire cent fois ce que nous avons lu?
De la Grèce héroïque et naissante et sauvage
Dans Homère à nos yeux vit la parfaite image.
Démocrite, Platon, Epicure, Thalès,
Ont de loin à Virgile indiqué les secrets
D'une nature encore à leurs yeux trop voilée.
Torricelli, Newton, Kepler et Galilée,
Plus doctes, plus heureux dans leurs puissants efforts,
A tout nouveau Virgile ont ouvert des trésors.
Tous les arts sont unis: les sciences humaines
N'ont pu de leur empire étendre les domaines,
Sans agrandir aussi la carrière des vers.
Quel long travail pour eux a conquis l'univers!
Aux regards de Buffon, sans voile, sans obstacles,
La terre ouvrant son sein, ses ressorts, ses miracles,
Ses germes, ses coteaux, dépouille de Téthys;
76
Les nuages épais, sur elle appesantis,
De ses noires vapeurs nourrissant leur tonnerre;
Et l'hiver ennemi, pour envahir la terre,
Roi des antres du Nord, et, de glaces armés,
Ses pas usurpateurs sur nos monts imprimés;
Et l'oeil perçant du verre, en la vaste étendue,
Allant chercher ces feux qui fuyaient notre vue,
Aux changements prédits, immuables, fixés,
Que d'une plume d'or Bailly nous a tracés;
Aux lois de Cassini les comètes fidèles;
L'aimant, de nos vaisseaux seul dirigeant les ailes;
Une Cybèle neuve et cent mondes divers
Aux yeux de nos Jasons sortis du sein des mers;
Quel amas de tableaux, de sublimes images,
Naît de ces grands objets réservés à nos âges!
Sous ces bois étrangers qui couronnent ces monts,
Aux vallons de Cusco, dans ces antres profonds,
Si chers à la fortune et plus chers au génie,
Germent des mines d'or, de gloire et d'harmonie.
Pensez-vous, si Virgile ou l'Aveugle divin
Renaissaient aujourd'hui, que leur savante main
Négligeât de saisir ces fécondes richesses,
De notre Pinde auguste éclatantes largesses?
Nous en verrions briller leurs sublimes écrits;
Et ces mêmes objets, que vos doctes mépris
Accueillent aujourd'hui d'un front dur et sévère,
Alors à vos regards auraient seuls droit de plaire.
Alors, dans l'avenir, votre inflexible humeur
Aurait soin de défendre à tout jeune rimeur
D'oser sortir jamais de ce cercle d'images
Que vos yeux auraient vu tracé dans leurs ouvrages.
Mais qui jamais a su, dans des vers séduisants,
Sous des dehors plus vrais peindre l'esprit aux sens?
Mais quelle voix jamais d'une plus pure flamme
Et chatouilla l'oreille et pénétra dans l'âme?
Mais leurs moeurs et leurs lois, et mille autres hasards,
Rendaient leur siècle heureux plus propice aux beaux-arts.
Eh bien! l'âme est partout; la pensée a des ailes.
Volons, volons chez eux retrouver leurs modèles;
Voyageons dans leur âge, où, libre, sans détour,
Chaque homme ose être un homme et penser au grand jour.
Au tribunal de Mars, sur la pourpre romaine,
77
Là du grand Cicéron la vertueuse haine
Écrase Céthégus, Catilina, Verrès;
Là tonne Démosthène; ici de Périclès
La voix; l'ardente voix, de tous les coeurs maîtresse,
Frappe, foudroie, agite, épouvante la Grèce.
Allons voir la grandeur et l'éclat de leurs jeux.
Ciel! la mer appelée en un bassin pompeux!
Deux flottes parcourant cette enceinte profonde,
Combattant sous les yeux du conquérant du monde!
O terre de Pélops! avec le monde entier
Allons voir d'Épidaure un agile coursier,
Couronné dans les champs de Némée et d'Élide;
Allons voir au théâtre, aux accents d'Euripide,
D'une sainte folie un peuple furieux
Chanter: _Amour, tyran des hommes et des dieux_;
Puis, ivres des transports qui nous viennent surprendre,
Parmi nous, dans nos vers, revenons les répandre;
Changeons en notre miel leurs plus antiques fleurs;
Pour peindre notre idée empruntons leurs couleurs;
Allumons nos flambeaux à leurs feux poétiques;
Sur des pensers nouveaux faisons des vers antiques.
Direz-vous qu'un objet né sur leur Hélicon
A seul de nous charmer pu recevoir le don?
Que leurs fables, leurs dieux, ces mensonges futiles,
Des Muses noble ouvrage, aux Muses sont utiles?
Que nos travaux savants, nos calculs studieux,
Qui subjuguent l'esprit et répugnent aux yeux,
Que l'on croit malgré soi, sont pénibles, austères,
Et moins grands, moins pompeux que leurs belles chimères?
Ces objets, hérissés, dans leurs détours nombreux,
Des ronces d'un langage obscur et ténébreux,
Pour l'âme, pour les sens offrent-ils rien à peindre?
Le langage des vers y pourrait-il atteindre?
Voilà ce que traités, préfaces, longs discours,
Prose, rime, partout nous disent tous les jours.
Mais enfin, dites-moi, si d'une oeuvre immortelle
La nature est en nous la source et le modèle,
Pouvez-vous le penser que tout cet univers,
Et cet ordre éternel, ces mouvements divers,
L'immense vérité, la nature elle-même,
Soit moins grande en effet que ce brillant système
78
Qu'ils nommaient la nature, et dont d'heureux efforts
Disposaient avec art les fragiles ressorts?
Mais quoi! ces vérités sont au loin reculées,
Dans un langage obscur saintement recélées:
Le peuple les ignore. O Muses, ô Phoebus!
C'est là, c'est là sans doute un aiguillon de plus.
L'auguste poésie, éclatante interprète,
Se couvrira de gloire en forçant leur retraite.
Cette reine des coeurs, à la touchante voix,
A le droit, en tous lieux, de nous dicter son choix,
Sûre de voir partout, introduite par elle,
Applaudir à grands cris une beauté nouvelle,
Et les objets nouveaux que sa voix a tentés
Partout, de bouche en bouche, après elle chantés.
Elle porte, à travers leurs nuages plus sombres,
Des rayons lumineux qui dissipent leurs ombres,
Et rit quand dans son vide un auteur oppressé
Se plaint qu'on a tout dit et que tout est pensé.
Seule, et la lyre en main, et de fleurs couronnée,
De doux ravissements partout accompagnée,
Aux lieux les plus déserts, ses pas, ses jeunes pas,
Trouvent mille trésors qu'on ne soupçonnait pas.
Sur l'aride buisson que son regard se pose,
Le buisson à ses yeux rit et jette une rose.
Elle sait ne point voir, dans son juste dédain,
Les fleurs qui trop souvent, courant de main en main,
Ont perdu tout l'éclat de leurs fraîcheurs vermeilles;
Elle sait même encore, ô charmantes merveilles!
Sous ses doigts délicats réparer et cueillir
Celles qu'une autre main n'avait su que flétrir.
Elle seule connaît ces extases choisies,
D'un, esprit tout de feu mobiles fantaisies,
Ces rêves d'un moment, belles illusions,
D'un monde imaginaire aimables visions,
Qui ne frappent jamais, trop subtile lumière,
Des terrestres esprits l'oeil épais et vulgaire.
Seule, de mots heureux, faciles, transparents,
Elle sait revêtir ces fantômes errants:
Ainsi des hauts sapins de la Finlande humide,
De l'ambre, enfant du ciel, distille l'or fluide,
Et sa chute souvent rencontre dans les airs
Quelque insecte volant qu'il porte au fond des mers;
79
De la Baltique enfin les vagues orageuses
Roulent et vont jeter ces larmes précieuses
Où la fière Vistule, en de nobles coteaux,
Et le froid Niémen expirent dans ses eaux.
Là, les arts vont cueillir cette merveille utile,
Tombe odorante où vit l'insecte volatile:
Dans cet or diaphane il est lui-même encor;
On dirait qu'il respire et va prendre l'essor.
Qui que tu sois enfin, ô toi, jeune poète,
Travaille, ose achever cette illustre conquête.
De preuves, de raisons, qu'est-il encor besoin?
Travaille. Un grand exemple est un puissant témoin.
Montre ce qu'on peut faire en le faisant toi-même.
Si pour toi la retraite est un bonheur suprême;
Si chaque jour les vers de ces maîtres fameux
Font bouillonner ton sang et dressent tes cheveux;
Si tu sens chaque jour, animé de leur âme,
Ce besoin de créer, ces transports, cette flamme,
Travaille. A nos censeurs c'est à toi de montrer
Tous ces trésors nouveaux qu'ils veulent ignorer.
Il faudra bien les voir, il faudra bien se taire
Quand ils verront enfin, cette gloire étrangère
De rayons inconnus ceindre ton front brillant.
Aux antres de Paros, le bloc étincelant
N'est aux vulgaires yeux qu'une pierre insensible.
Mais le docte ciseau, dans son sein invisible,
Voit, suit, trouve la vie, et l'âme, et tous ses traits.
Tout l'Olympe respire en ses détours secrets.
Là vivent de Vénus les beautés souveraines;
Là des muscles nerveux, là de sanglantes veines
Serpentent; là des flancs invaincus aux travaux,
Pour soulager Atlas des célestes fardeaux,
Aux volontés du fer leur enveloppe énorme
Cède, s'amollit, tombe; et de ce bloc informe
Jaillissent, éclatants, des dieux pour nos autels:
C'est Apollon lui-même, honneur des immortels;
C'est Alcide vainqueur des monstres de Némée;
C'est du vieillard troyen la mort envenimée;
C'est des Hébreux errants le chef, le défenseur:
Dieu tout entier habite en ce marbre penseur.
Ciel! n'entendez-vous pas de sa bouche profonde
80
Éclater cette voix créatrice du monde?
Oh! qu'ainsi parmi nous des esprits inventeurs
De Virgile et d'Homère atteignent les hauteurs,
Sachent dans la mémoire avoir comme eux un temple,
Et sans suivre leurs pas imiter leur exemple;
Faire, en s'éloignant d'eux avec un soin jaloux,
Ce qu'eux-mêmes ils feraient s'ils vivaient parmi nous!
Que la nature seule, en ses vastes miracles,
Soit leur fable et leurs dieux, et ses lois leurs oracles;
Que leurs vers, de Téthys respectant le sommeil,
N'aillent plus dans ses flots rallumer le soleil;
De la cour d'Apollon que l'erreur soit bannie,
Et qu'enfin Calliope, élève d'Uranie,
Montant sa lyre d'or sur un plus noble ton,
En langage des dieux fasse parler Newton!
Oh! si je puis un jour!... Mais quel est ce murmure?
Quelle nouvelle attaque et plus forte et plus dure?
O langue des Français! est-il vrai que ton sort
Est de ramper toujours, et que toi seule as tort?
Ou si d'un faible esprit l'indolente paresse
Veut rejeter sur toi sa honte et sa faiblesse?
Il n'est sot traducteur, de sa richesse enflé,
Sot auteur d'un poème ou d'un discours sifflé,
Ou d'un recueil ambré de chansons à la glace,
Qui ne vous avertisse, en sa fière préface,
Que, si son style épais vous fatigue d'abord,
Si sa prose vous pèse et bientôt vous endort,
Si son vers est gêné, sans feu, sans harmonie,
Il n'en est point coupable: il n'est pas sans génie;
Il a tous les talents qui font les grands succès;
Mais enfin, malgré lui, ce langage français,
Si faible en ses couleurs, si froid et si timide,
L'a contraint d'être lourd, gauche, plat, insipide,
Mais serait-ce Le Brun, Racine, Despréaux
Qui l'accusent ainsi d'abuser leurs travaux?
Est-ce à Rousseau, Buffon, qu'il résiste infidèle?
Est-ce pour Montesquieu, qu'impuissant et rebelle,
Il fuit? Ne sait-il pas, se reposant sur eux,
Doux, rapide, abondant, magnifique, nerveux,
Creusant dans les détours de ces âmes profondes,
81
S'y teindre, s'y tremper de leurs couleurs fécondes?
Un rimeur voit partout un nuage, et jamais
D'un coup d'oeil ferme et grand n'a saisi les objets;
La langue se refuse à ses demi-pensées,
De sang-froid, pas à pas, avec peine amassées;
Il se dépite alors, et, restant en chemin,
Il se plaint qu'elle échappe et glisse de sa main.
Celui qu'un vrai démon presse, enflamme, domine,
Ignore un tel supplice: il pense, il imagine;
Un langage imprévu, dans son âme produit,
Naît avec sa pensée, et l'embrasse et la suit;
Les images, les mots que le génie inspire,
Où l'univers entier vit, se meut et respire,
Source vaste et sublime et qu'on ne peut tarir,
En foule en son cerveau se hâtent de courir.
D'eux-mêmes ils vont chercher un noeud qui les rassemble;
Tout s'allie et se forme, et tout va naître ensemble.
Sous l'insecte vengeur envoyé par Junon,
Telle Io tourmentée, en l'ardente saison,
Traverse en vain les bois et la longue campagne,
Et le fleuve bruyant qui presse la montagne;
Tel le bouillant poète, en ses transports brûlants,
Le front échevelé, les yeux étincelants,
S'agite, se débat, cherche en d'épais bocages
S'il pourra de sa tête apaiser les orages
Et secouer le dieu qui fatigue son sein.
De sa bouche à grands flots ce dieu dont il est plein
Bientôt en vers nombreux s'exhale et se déchaîne;
Leur sublime torrent roule, saisit, entraîne.
Les tours impétueux, inattendus, nouveaux,
L'expression de flamme aux magiques tableaux
Qu'a trempés la nature en ses couleurs fertiles,
Les nombres tour à tour turbulents ou faciles,
Tout porte au fond des coeurs le tumulte ou la paix;
Dans la mémoire au loin tout s'imprime à jamais.
C'est ainsi que Minerve, en un instant formée,
Du front de Jupiter s'élance tout armée,
Secouant et le glaive et le casque guerrier,
Et l'horrible Gorgone à l'aspect meurtrier.
Des Toscans, je le sais, la langue est séduisante:
82
Cire molle, à tout peindre habile et complaisante,
Qui prend d'heureux contours sous les plus faibles mains
Quand le Nord, s'épuisant de barbares essaims,
Vint par une conquête en malheurs plus féconde
Venger sur les Romains l'esclavage du monde,
De leurs affreux accents la farouche âpreté
Du Latin en tous lieux souilla la pureté.
On vit de ce mélange étranger et sauvage
Naître des langues soeurs, que le temps et l'usage,
Par des sentiers divers guidant diversement,
D'une lime insensible ont poli lentement,
Sans pouvoir en entier, malgré tous leurs prodiges,
De la rouille barbare effacer les vestiges.
De là du Castillan la pompe et la fierté,
Teint encor des couleurs du langage indompté
Qu'au Tage transplantaient les fureurs musulmanes.
La grâce et la douceur sur les lèvres toscanes
Fixèrent leur empire; et la Seine à la fois
De grâce et de fierté sut composer sa voix.
Mais ce langage, armé d'obstacles indociles,
Lutte et ne veut plier que sons des mains habiles.
Est-ce un mal? Eh! plutôt rendons grâces aux dieux.
Un faux éclat longtemps ne peut tromper nos yeux;
Et notre langue même, à tout esprit vulgaire
De nos vers dédaigneux fermant le sanctuaire,
Avertit dès l'abord quiconque y veut monter
Qu'il faut savoir tout craindre et savoir tout tenter,
Et, recueillant affronts ou gloire sans mélange,
S'élever jusqu'au faîte ou ramper dans la fange.
~ Andre Marie de Chenier,
1345:or Callistratus. Similarly, the hero in The Acharnians complains about Cleon
"dragging me into court" over "last year's play" but here again it is not clear if
this was said on behalf of ~ Aristophanes



or Callistratus, either of whom might
have been prosecuted by Cleon.
Comments made by the Chorus on behalf of ~ Aristophanes



in The Clouds have
been interpreted as evidence that he can have been hardly more than 18 years
old when his first play The Banqueters was produced. The second parabasis in
Wasps appears to indicate that he reached some kind of temporary
accommodation with Cleon following either the controversy over The Babylonians
or a subsequent controversy over The Knights.[ It has been inferred from
statements in The Clouds and Peace that ~ Aristophanes



was prematurely bald.
We know that ~ Aristophanes



was probably victorious at least once at the City
Dionysia (with Babylonians in 427)and at least three times at the Lenaia, with
Acharnians in 425, Knights in 424, and Frogs in 405. Frogs in fact won the
unique distinction of a repeat performance at a subsequent festival. We know
that a son of ~ Aristophanes



, Araros, was also a comic poet and he could have
been heavily involved in the production of his father's play Wealth II in s is also
thought to have been responsible for the posthumous performances of the now
lost plays Aeolosicon II and Cocalus, and it is possible that the last of these won
the prize at the City Dionysia in 387. It appears that a second son, Philippus, was
twice victorious at the Lenaia and he could have directed some of Eubulus’
comedies.A third son was called either Nicostratus or Philetaerus, and a man by
the latter name appears in the catalogue of Lenaia victors with two victories, the
first probably in the late 370s.
Plato's The Symposium appears to be a useful source of biographical information
about ~ Aristophanes



, but its reliability is open to doubt. It purports to be a record
of conversations at a dinner party at which both ~ Aristophanes



and Socrates are
guests, held some seven years after the performance of The Clouds, the play in
which Socrates was cruelly caricatured. One of the guests, Alcibiades, even
quotes from the play when teasing Socrates over his appearance and yet there is
no indication of any ill-feeling between Socrates and ~ Aristophanes



. Plato's
~ Aristophanes



is in fact a genial character and this has been interpreted as
evidence of Plato's own friendship with him (their friendship appears to be
corroborated by an epitaph for ~ Aristophanes



, reputedly written by Plato, in which
the playwright's soul is compared to an eternal shrine for the Graces). Plato was
only a boy when the events in The Symposium are supposed to have occurred
and it is possible that his ~ Aristophanes



is in fact based on a reading of the plays.
For example, conversation among the guests turns to the subject of Love and
~ Aristophanes



explains his notion of it in terms of an amusing allegory, a device
he often uses in his plays. He is represented as suffering an attack of hiccoughs
and this might be a humorous reference to the crude physical jokes in his plays.
He tells the other guests that he is quite happy to be thought amusing but he is
wary of appearing ridiculous. This fear of being ridiculed is consistent with his
declaration in The Knights that he embarked on a career of comic playwright
warily after witnessing the public contempt and ridicule that other dramatists had
incurred.
~ Aristophanes



survived The Peloponnesian War, two oligarchic revolutions and two
democratic restorations; this has been interpreted as evidence that he was not
actively involved in politics despite his highly political plays. He was probably
appointed to the Council of Five Hundred for a year at the beginning of the fourth
century but such appointments were very common in democratic tes, in the trial
leading up to his own death, put the issue of a personal conscience in those
troubled times quite succinctly:
"...he who will really fight for the right, if he would live even for a little while,
must have a private station and not a public one.
~ Aristophanes



the Poet
The language in ~ Aristophanes



' plays, and in Old Comedy generally, was valued
by ancient commentators as a model of the Attic dialect. The orator Quintilian
believed that the charm and grandeur of the Attic dialect made Old Comedy an
example for orators to study and follow, and he considered it inferior in these
respects only to the works of
A full appreciation of ~ Aristophanes



' plays requires an understanding of the poetic
forms he employed with virtuoso skill, and of their different rhythms and
associations. There were three broad poetic forms: iambic dialogue, tetrameter
verses and lyrics:
Iambic dialogue: ~ Aristophanes



achieves an effect resembling natural speech
through the use of the iambic hexameter (corresponding to the effects achieved
by English poets such as

based on words that are similar rather than identical, and it has been observed
that there could be more of them than scholars have yet been able to identify.
Others are based on double meanings. Sometimes entire scenes are constructed
on puns, as in The Acharnians with the Megarian farmer and his pigs: the
Megarian farmer defies the Athenian embargo against Megarian trade, and tries
to trade his daughters disguised as pigs, except "pig" was ancient slang for
"vagina". Since the embargo against Megara was the pretext for the
Peloponnesian War, ~ Aristophanes



naturally concludes that this whole mess
happened because of "three cunts".
It can be argued that the most important feature of the language of the plays is
imagery, particularly the use of similes, metaphors and pictorial expressions. In
'The Knights', for example, the ears of a character with selective hearing are
represented as parasols that open and close.In The Frogs, Aeschylus is said to
compose verses in the manner of a horse rolling in a sandpit. Some plays feature
revelations of human perfectibility that are poetic rather than religious in
character, such as the marriage of the hero Pisthetairos to Zeus's paramour in
The Birds and the 'recreation' of old Athens, crowned with roses, at the end of
The Knights.
~ Aristophanes



and Old Comedy
The Greek word for 'comedy' (komoidía) derives from the words for 'revel' and
'song' (komos and ode) and according to Aristotle comic drama actually
developed from song. The first, official comedy at the City Dionysia was not
staged until 487/6 BC, by which time tragedy had already been long established
there. The first comedy at the Lenaia was staged later still, only about 20 years
before the performance there of The Acharnians, the first of ~ Aristophanes



'
surviving plays. According to Aristotle, comedy was slow to gain official
acceptance because nobody took it seriously yet, only sixty years after comedy
first appeared at 'The City Dionysia', ~ Aristophanes



observed that producing
comedies was the most difficult work of tition at the Dionysian festivals needed
dramatic conventions for plays to be judged, but it also fuelled innovations.
Developments were quite rapid and Aristotle was able to distinguish between
'old' and 'new' comedy by 330 BC. The trend from Old Comedy to New Comedy
saw a move away from highly topical concerns with real individuals and local
issues towards generalized situations and stock characters. This was partly due
to the internationalization of cultural perspectives during and after the
Peloponnesian War. For ancient commentators such as Plutarch, New Comedy
was a more sophisticated form of drama than Old Comedy. However Old Comedy
was in fact a complex and sophisticated dramatic form incorporating many
approaches to humour and entertainment. In ~ Aristophanes



' early plays, the
genre appears to have developed around a complex set of dramatic conventions
and these were only gradually simplified and abandoned.
The City Dionysia and the Lenaia were celebrated in honour of Dionysus, a god
who represented Man's darker nature (Euripides' play The Bacchae offers the
best insight into 5th Century ideas about this god). Old Comedy can be
understood as a celebration of the exuberant sense of release inherent in his
worship It was more interested in finding targets for satire than in any kind of
advocacy. During the City Dionysia, a statue of the god was brought to the
theatre from a temple outside the city and it remained in the theatre throughout
the festival, overseeing the plays like a privileged member of the audience.[102]
In The Frogs, the god appears also as a dramatic character and he enters the
theatre ludicrously disguised as Hercules. He observes to the audience that every
time he is on hand to hear a joke from a comic dramatist like Phrynichus (one of
~ Aristophanes



' rivals) he ages by more than a year. The scene opens the play and
it is a reminder to the audience that nobody is above mockery in Old Comedy —
not even its patron god and its practitioners! Gods, artists, politicians and
ordinary citizens were legitimate targets, comedy was a kind of licensed
buffoonery and there was no legal redress for anyone who was slandered in a
play. There were some limits to the scope of the satire, but they are not easily
defined. Impiety could be punished in 5th century Athens but absurdities implicit
in traditional religion were open to ridicule. The polis was not allowed to be
slandered but, as stated in the biography section of this article, that could
depend on who was in the audience and which festival was involved.
For convenience, Old Comedy, as represented by ~ Aristophanes



' early plays, is
analysed below in terms of three broad characteristics — topicality, festivity and
complexity. Dramatic structure contributes to the complexity of ~ Aristophanes



'
plays. However it is associated with poetic rhythms and meters that have little
relevance to English translations and it is therefore treated in a separate section.
Influence and legacy
The tragic dramatists, Sophocles and Euripides, died near the end of the
Peloponnesian War and the art of tragedy thereafter ceased to develop, yet
comedy did continue to develop after the defeat of Athens and it is possible that
it did so because, in ~ Aristophanes



, it had a master craftsman who lived long
enough to help usher it into a new age. Indeed, according to one ancient source
(Platonius, c.9th Century AD), one of ~ Aristophanes



's last plays, Aioliskon, had
neither a parabasis nor any choral lyrics (making it a type of Middle Comedy),
while Kolakos anticipated all the elements of New Comedy, including a rape and
a recognition scene. ~ Aristophanes



seems to have had some appreciation of his
formative role in the development of comedy, as indicated by his comment in
Clouds that his audience would be judged by other times according to its
reception of his plays. Clouds was awarded third (i.e. last) place after its original
performance and the text that has come down to the modern age was a
subsequent draft that ~ Aristophanes



intended to be read rather than circulation of
his plays in manuscript extended their influence beyond the original audience,
over whom in fact they seem to have had little or no practical influence: they did
not affect the career of Cleon, they failed to persuade the Athenians to pursue an
honourable peace with Sparta and it is not clear that they were instrumental in
the trial and execution of Socrates, whose death probably resulted from public
animosity towards the philosopher's disgraced associates (such as Alcibiades),
exacerbated of course by his own intransigence during the plays, in manuscript
form, have been put to some surprising uses — as indicated earlier, they were
used in the study of rhetoric on the recommendation of Quintilian and by
students of the Attic dialect in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries AD. It is possible
that Plato sent copies of the plays to Dionysius of Syracuse so that he might
learn about Athenian life and government.
Latin translations of the plays by Andreas Divus (Venice 1528) were circulated
widely throughout Europe in the Renaissance and these were soon followed by
translations and adaptations in modern languages. Racine, for example, drew Les
Plaideurs (1668) from The Wasps.

winged."
Drama
1909: Wasps, original Greek, Cambridge University undergraduate production,
music by Vaughan Williams;
2004, July–October: The Frogs (musical), adapted by Nathan Lane, music and
lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, performed at The Vivian Beaumont Theatre
Broadway;
1962-2006: various plays by students and staff, Kings College London, in the
original Greek:Frogs 1962,1971,1988; Thesmophoriazusae 1965, 1974, 1985;
Acharnians 1968, 1992, 2004; Clouds 1977, 1990; Birds 1982, 2000;
Ecclesiazusae 2006; Peace 1970; Wasps 1981
2002: Lysistrata, adapted by Robert Brustein, music by Galt McDermot,
performed by American Repertory Theatre, Boston U.S.A.;
10
2008, May–June: Frogs, adapted by David Greenspan, music by Thomas
Cabaniss, performed by Classic Stage Company, New York, U.S.A.
Literature
The romantic poet, Percy Shelley, wrote a comic, lyrical drama (Swellfoot the
Tyrrant) in imitation of ~ Aristophanes



' play The Frogs after he was reminded of
the Chorus in that play by a herd of pigs passing to market under the window of
his lodgings in San Giuliano, Italy.
~ Aristophanes



(particularly in reference to The Clouds) is mentioned frequently by
the character Menedemos in the Hellenic Traders series of novels by H N
Turteltaub.
A liberal version of the comedies have been published in comic book format,
initially by "Agrotikes Ekdoseis" during the 1990s and republished over the years
by other companies. The plot was written by Tasos Apostolidis and the sketches
were of George Akokalidis. The stories feature either ~ Aristophanes



narrating
them, directing the play, or even as a character inside one of his stories.
Electronic Media
The Wasps, radio play adapted by David Pountney, music by Vaughan Williams,
recorded 26–28 July 2005, Albert Halls, Bolten, in association with BBC, under
Halle label;
Acropolis Now is a comedy radio show for the BBC set in Ancient Greece. It
features ~ Aristophanes



, Socrates and many other famous Greeks. (Not to be
confused with the Australian sitcom of the same name.) ~ Aristophanes



is
characterised as a celebrity playwright, and most of his plays have the title
formula: One of Our [e.g] Slaves has an Enormous Knob (a reference to the
exaggerated appendages worn by Greek comic actors)
~ Aristophanes



Against the World was a radio play by Martyn Wade and broadcast
on BBC Radio 4. Loosely based on several of his plays, it featured Clive Merrison
as ~ Aristophanes



.
In The Odd Couple, Oscar and Felix are on Password, and when the password is
bird, Felix’s esoteric clue is "~ Aristophanes



" because of his play The Birds. During
the commercial break (having failed to guess the password and lost the round),
Oscar orders Felix not to give any more Greek clues and angrily growls,
"~ Aristophanes



is ridiculous"! Then when it's Oscar’s turn to give the clue on the
11
team’s next shot, the password is ridiculous and Oscar angrily growls
"~ Aristophanes



", to which Felix gleefully responds, "Ridiculous!"
Music
Satiric Dances for a Comedy by ~ Aristophanes



is a three-movement piece for
concert band composed by Norman Dello Joio. It was commissioned in
commemoration of the Bicentennial of April 19, 1775 (the start of the American
Revolutionary War) by the Concord (Massachusetts) Band. The commission was
funded by the Town of Concord and assistance was given by the Eastern National
Park and Monument Association in cooperation with the National Park Service.
12
A Parody On Euripides's Lyric Verse
Halcyons ye by the flowing sea
Waves that warble twitteringly,
Circling over the tumbling blue,
Dipping your down in its briny dew,
Spi-i-iders in corners dim
Spi-spi-spinning your fairy film,
Shuttles echoing round the room
Silver notes of the whistling loom,
Where the light-footed dolphin skips
Down the wake of the dark-prowed ships,
Over the course of the racing steed
Where the clustering tendrils breed
Grapes to drown dull care in delight,
Oh! mother make me a child again just for to-night!
I don't exactly see how that last line is to scan,
But that's a consideration I leave to our musical man.
~ Aristophanes,

IN CHAPTERS [7/7]



   2 Integral Yoga
   1 Alchemy






0 1969-11-22, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   It would be the same genre as the Adventure of Consciousness?
   Ah, you know, its a growing success.

02.03 - The Shakespearean Word, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   All these images however, or most of them, belong to one category or genre. They are painted pictures,still life, on the whole, presented in two dimensions. Kalidasa himself has described the nature or character of this artistic effect. In describing a gesture of Uma he says, 'she moved not, she stopped not' (na yayau na tasthau); it was, as it were, a movement suddenly arrested and held up on a canvas. The imagery is as though of a petrification. The figures of statuary present themselves to our eyes in this connection-a violent or intense action held at one point and stilled, as for example, in the Laocoon or the Discabolo.
   This is usually what the poets, the great poets have done. They have presented living and moving bodies as fixed, stable entities, as a procession of statues. But Shakespeare's are not fixed stable pictures but living and moving beings. They do not appear as pictures, even like moving pictures on a screen, a two-dimensional representation. Life in Shakespeare appears, as in life, exactly like a three-dimensional phenomenon. You seem to see forms and figures in the round, not simply in a frontal view. A Shakespearean scene is not only a feast for the eye but is apprehended as though through all the' senses.

1.01 - To Watanabe Sukefusa, #Beating the Cloth Drum Letters of Zen Master Hakuin, #unset, #Zen
  Watanabe Sukefusa, which takes up less than a third of volume one, and is followed by twenty-two more stories of karmic cause and effect. Hakuin returned to this genre in later collections such as
  Accounts of the Miraculous Effects of the Ten Phrase Kannon Sutra for Prolonging Life. Whereas

Book of Imaginary Beings (text), #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  There is a strange literary genre which, spontaneously, has
  sprung up in various lands and at various times. This is the

The Act of Creation text, #The Act of Creation, #Arthur Koestler, #Psychology
  architecture or painting, has its genres, 'movements', schools, theories
  which it pursues with increasing perfection until the level of saturation
  --
  'Even Dutch genre paintings that appear to mirror life in all its
  bustle and variety will turn out to be created from a limited number
  --
  its genre but not au thenticated, is held in lower esteem than a work of
  lesser perfection, guaranteed to have come from the ageing master's

The Dwellings of the Philosophers, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  appear to exist as there are writers of the genre.
  After all we should not forget that the treatises which have reached us were composed during

The Garden of Forking Paths 1, #Selected Fictions, #unset, #Zen
  "I do not think that your illustrious ancestor toyed idly with variations. I do not find it believable that he would waste thirteen years laboring over a never ending experiment in rhetoric. In your country the novel is an inferior genre; in Ts'ui Pen's period, it was a despised one. Ts'ui Pen was a fine novelist but he was also a man of letters who, doubtless, considered himself more than a mere novelist. The testimony of his contemporaries attests to this, and certainly the known facts of his life confirm his leanings toward the metaphysical and the mystical. Philosophical conjectures take up the greater part of his novel. I know that of all problems, none disquieted him more, and none concerned him more than the profound one of time. Now then, this is the only problem that does not figure in the pages of The Garden. He does not even use the word which means time. How can these voluntary omissions be explained?"
  I proposed various solutions, all of them inadequate. We discussed them. Finally Stephen Albert said: "In a guessing game to which the answer is chess, which word is the only one prohibited?" I thought for a moment and then replied:

WORDNET



--- Overview of noun genre

The noun genre has 4 senses (first 1 from tagged texts)
                    
1. (1) genre ::: (a kind of literary or artistic work)
2. writing style, literary genre, genre ::: (a style of expressing yourself in writing)
3. music genre, musical genre, genre, musical style ::: (an expressive style of music)
4. genre ::: (a class of art (or artistic endeavor) having a characteristic form or technique)


--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun genre

4 senses of genre                          

Sense 1
genre
   => kind, sort, form, variety
     => category
       => concept, conception, construct
         => idea, thought
           => content, cognitive content, mental object
             => cognition, knowledge, noesis
               => psychological feature
                 => abstraction, abstract entity
                   => entity

Sense 2
writing style, literary genre, genre
   => expressive style, style
     => communication
       => abstraction, abstract entity
         => entity

Sense 3
music genre, musical genre, genre, musical style
   => expressive style, style
     => communication
       => abstraction, abstract entity
         => entity
   => music
     => auditory communication
       => communication
         => abstraction, abstract entity
           => entity

Sense 4
genre
   => art, fine art
     => creation
       => artifact, artefact
         => whole, unit
           => object, physical object
             => physical entity
               => entity


--- Hyponyms of noun genre

3 of 4 senses of genre                        

Sense 2
writing style, literary genre, genre
   => drama
   => prose
   => form
   => poetry, poesy, verse

Sense 3
music genre, musical genre, genre, musical style
   => black music, African-American music
   => classical music, classical, serious music
   => religious music, church music
   => marching music, march
   => popular music, popular music genre

Sense 4
genre
   => abstractionism, abstract art
   => chinoiserie
   => folk art
   => genre painting
   => landscape, landscape painting
   => magic realism
   => modernism
   => outsider art, self-taught art, vernacular art, naive art, primitive art
   => pointillism
   => postmodernism
   => primitivism
   => synthetism


--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun genre

4 senses of genre                          

Sense 1
genre
   => kind, sort, form, variety

Sense 2
writing style, literary genre, genre
   => expressive style, style

Sense 3
music genre, musical genre, genre, musical style
   => expressive style, style
   => music

Sense 4
genre
   => art, fine art




--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun genre

4 senses of genre                          

Sense 1
genre
  -> kind, sort, form, variety
   => description
   => type
   => antitype
   => art form
   => style
   => flavor, flavour
   => color, colour
   => species
   => genus
   => brand, make
   => genre
   => like, ilk
   => manner
   => model
   => stripe
   => like, the like, the likes of

Sense 2
writing style, literary genre, genre
  -> expressive style, style
   => allegory
   => analysis
   => bathos
   => black humor, black humour
   => device
   => eloquence, fluency, smoothness
   => euphuism
   => flatness
   => formulation, expression
   => grandiosity, magniloquence, ornateness, grandiloquence, rhetoric
   => headlinese
   => jargon
   => journalese
   => legalese
   => manner of speaking, speech, delivery
   => music genre, musical genre, genre, musical style
   => officialese
   => pathos
   => prose
   => rhetoric
   => saltiness, coarseness
   => self-expression
   => sesquipedality
   => terseness
   => turn of phrase, turn of expression
   => vein
   => verboseness, verbosity
   => writing style, literary genre, genre
   => poetry

Sense 3
music genre, musical genre, genre, musical style
  -> expressive style, style
   => allegory
   => analysis
   => bathos
   => black humor, black humour
   => device
   => eloquence, fluency, smoothness
   => euphuism
   => flatness
   => formulation, expression
   => grandiosity, magniloquence, ornateness, grandiloquence, rhetoric
   => headlinese
   => jargon
   => journalese
   => legalese
   => manner of speaking, speech, delivery
   => music genre, musical genre, genre, musical style
   => officialese
   => pathos
   => prose
   => rhetoric
   => saltiness, coarseness
   => self-expression
   => sesquipedality
   => terseness
   => turn of phrase, turn of expression
   => vein
   => verboseness, verbosity
   => writing style, literary genre, genre
   => poetry
  -> music
   => section, subdivision
   => pizzicato
   => monophony, monophonic music, monody
   => polyphony, polyphonic music, concerted music
   => polytonality, polytonalism
   => popularism
   => harmony, musical harmony
   => tune, melody, air, strain, melodic line, line, melodic phrase
   => part music
   => musical composition, opus, composition, piece, piece of music
   => instrumental music
   => prelude
   => overture
   => antiphony
   => refrain, chorus
   => ballet
   => dance music
   => serialism, serial music
   => syncopation
   => music genre, musical genre, genre, musical style
   => Bach
   => Beethoven
   => Brahms
   => Chopin
   => Gilbert and Sullivan
   => Handel
   => Haydn
   => Mozart
   => Stravinsky
   => Wagner
   => Ta'ziyeh
   => vocal music, vocal

Sense 4
genre
  -> art, fine art
   => artificial flower
   => commercial art
   => cyberart
   => decoupage
   => diptych
   => gem, treasure
   => genre
   => graphic art
   => grotesque
   => kitsch
   => mosaic
   => plastic art
   => triptych
   => work of art
   => dance




--- Grep of noun genre
genre
genre painter
genre painting
literary genre
music genre
musical genre
popular music genre



IN WEBGEN [10000/1210]

Wikipedia - 2-step garage -- UK Garage subgenre
Wikipedia - 4X -- Genre of strategy-based video and board games
Wikipedia - Acid rock -- Subgenre of psychedelic rock music
Wikipedia - Action-adventure game -- Video game genre
Wikipedia - Action film -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Action hero -- Archetypal protagonist of action-genre fiction
Wikipedia - Acts of the Apostles (genre)
Wikipedia - Actuality film -- Non-fiction film genre that uses footage of real events
Wikipedia - Adamanduga -- genre of literature
Wikipedia - Adult animated television series in the United States -- Television genre
Wikipedia - Adult animation in the United States -- Animation genre
Wikipedia - Adult animation -- Animation genre
Wikipedia - Adult chat (television) -- Genre of television programming
Wikipedia - Adult contemporary music -- Radio format and music genre
Wikipedia - Adventure film -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Adventure game -- Video game genre
Wikipedia - Afrobeat -- West African music genre, distinct from Afrobeats
Wikipedia - Afro-Cuban jazz -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Aguinaldo (music) -- Folk genre of Christmas music
Wikipedia - Airport novel -- Type of genre fiction novel
Wikipedia - Alternate history -- Genre of speculative fiction, where one or more historical events occur differently
Wikipedia - Alternative country -- Sub-genre of country music
Wikipedia - Alternative reggaeton -- Subgenre of reggaeton
Wikipedia - Alternative rock -- Genre of rock music
Wikipedia - Amapiano -- genre of Electronic dance music
Wikipedia - Amateur flight simulation -- Video game genre
Wikipedia - Ambient pop -- Music subgenre
Wikipedia - American burlesque -- Genre of variety show
Wikipedia - Amish romance -- Literary subgenre of Christian fiction
Wikipedia - Andalusian classical music -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Andalusi nubah -- North African musical genre
Wikipedia - Animated sitcom -- Subgenre of television show
Wikipedia - Anne Burke (writer) -- Irish novelist in the Gothic genre
Wikipedia - Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction -- Genre of fiction
Wikipedia - Apocalyptic literature -- Genre of prophetical writing
Wikipedia - Arena rock -- Genre of rock played in arena
Wikipedia - Argentine tango -- Musical genre and accompanying social dance
Wikipedia - Armchair detective -- genre of detective fiction
Wikipedia - Art film -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Artificial intelligence art -- Genre of art
Wikipedia - Art pop -- pop music genre that emphasizes artistic styles over personal expressions
Wikipedia - Art rock -- subgenre of rock music
Wikipedia - Atari 2600 homebrew -- Video game genre
Wikipedia - Australian country music -- Genre of popular music from Australia
Wikipedia - Austropop -- Musical Genre
Wikipedia - Autobiografiction -- Literary genre, a blend of autobiography and fiction
Wikipedia - Avant-garde metal -- Subgenre of heavy metal music
Wikipedia - Avant-garde music -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Bachata (music) -- Music genre from the Dominican Republic
Wikipedia - Backyard wrestling -- Professional wrestling genre
Wikipedia - Bangladeshi folk literature -- Bengali literary genre
Wikipedia - Bara (genre)
Wikipedia - Bardcore -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Bassline (music genre) -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Battle royale game -- Video game genre with the last-man-standing gameplay
Wikipedia - Beach party film -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Bebop -- Subgenre of jazz music originated in the United States in mid-1940s
Wikipedia - Belles-lettres -- Type of written work in which fictive stories take place (not 'popular' for 'genre' fiction)
Wikipedia - Bert I. Gordon -- American genre filmmaker
Wikipedia - Bibliography of film by genre -- Wikipedia bibliography
Wikipedia - Big beat -- Electronic music genre
Wikipedia - Biker metal -- fusion genre
Wikipedia - Bildungsroman -- Literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood (coming of age)
Wikipedia - Biographical film -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Bitpop -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Bizarro fiction -- Literary genre
Wikipedia - Blackened death metal -- fusion genre of black metal and death metal
Wikipedia - Blackgaze -- fusion genre of black metal and shoegaze
Wikipedia - Black metal -- Subgenre of heavy metal music
Wikipedia - Black MIDI -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Black music -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Blaxploitation -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Block programming -- Form of programming where programs of a particular genre or similar are grouped together
Wikipedia - Bluegrass music -- Genre of American roots music and sub-genre of country music
Wikipedia - Blues rock -- Music genre combining elements of blues and rock
Wikipedia - Blues -- Musical form and music genre
Wikipedia - B movies (Hollywood Golden Age) -- Film genre
Wikipedia - B movie -- Low-budget commercial film genre
Wikipedia - Bolero -- Genre of Hispanic music, Cuban origins
Wikipedia - Bongo Flava -- Tanzanian popular music genre
Wikipedia - Boogaloo -- Genre of Latin music and dance
Wikipedia - Boogie (genre)
Wikipedia - Boogie rock -- Music genre which came out of the hard heavy blues rock of the late 1960s
Wikipedia - Border ballad -- Song genre from the Anglo-Scottish border
Wikipedia - Bouyon soca -- Music genre
Wikipedia - British hip hop -- British genres of hip hop
Wikipedia - Brooklyn drill -- Subgenre of hip-hop
Wikipedia - Buddy film -- Film genre in which two people of the same sex (historically men) are non-romantically paired.
Wikipedia - Budots -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Bukkake -- Sex act and pornography genre
Wikipedia - Burlesque -- Literary, dramatic or musical work or genre
Wikipedia - Bush ballad -- Music genre of Australia
Wikipedia - Cancion -- Genre of Latin American music
Wikipedia - Cape jazz -- Genre of jazz that is performed in the very southern part of Africa
Wikipedia - Captivity narrative -- Genre of accounts by survivors
Wikipedia - Carnatic music -- Music genre originating in southern India
Wikipedia - Casual game -- Video game genre
Wikipedia - Catalan rumba -- Spanish music genre originating among Barcelona Romani.
Wikipedia - Category:Alternative rock genres
Wikipedia - Category:Ancient Greek poets by genre
Wikipedia - Category:Biography (genre)
Wikipedia - Category:British rock music genres
Wikipedia - Category:Christian genres
Wikipedia - Category:Christian music genres
Wikipedia - Category:Comedy genres
Wikipedia - Category:Extra genres
Wikipedia - Category:Fantasy genres
Wikipedia - Category:Film genres
Wikipedia - Category:Genres of poetry
Wikipedia - Category:Horror genres
Wikipedia - Category:Literature by genre
Wikipedia - Category:Pages using infobox music genre with unknown parameters
Wikipedia - Category:Poetry by genre
Wikipedia - Category:Poets by genre
Wikipedia - Category talk:Poets by genre
Wikipedia - Category:Video game genres
Wikipedia - Chaabi (Algeria) -- Algerian music genre
Wikipedia - Cha-cha-cha (music) -- Genre of Cuban music
Wikipedia - Chalga -- Bulgarian music genre
Wikipedia - Chamame -- Folk music genre from Northeast Argentina and Argentinian Mesopotamia
Wikipedia - Chamber pop -- Subgenre of indie pop or indie rock
Wikipedia - Changgeuk -- Genre of Korean opera
Wikipedia - Chicago house -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Children's film -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Children's non-fiction literature -- Literary genre
Wikipedia - Chillwave -- Electronic pop genre from the late 2000s
Wikipedia - Chinese science fiction -- Genre of speculative fiction
Wikipedia - Christian art -- Art genre
Wikipedia - Christian country music -- Music genre, country music with Christian message
Wikipedia - Christian hip hop -- Subgenre of hip hop music and Christian music
Wikipedia - Circus music -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Citizen journalism -- Journalism genre
Wikipedia - City pop -- Sub-genre of music
Wikipedia - Clare Chambers (novelist) -- British novelist of different genres
Wikipedia - Classical period (music) -- Genre of Western music (c.1730-1820)
Wikipedia - Class S (genre)
Wikipedia - Closed circle of suspects -- Subgenre of detective fiction
Wikipedia - Clothed female, naked male -- Genre of erotica
Wikipedia - Comedic genres
Wikipedia - Comedie mM-CM-*lee d'ariettes -- Opera genre
Wikipedia - Comedy hip hop -- Hip hop subgenre
Wikipedia - Comedy of manners -- Theatrical genre
Wikipedia - Comedy -- Genre of dramatic works intended to be humorous
Wikipedia - Commedia sexy all'italiana -- Italian film genre
Wikipedia - Compas -- Modern meringue, the national music genre of Haiti
Wikipedia - Computer and video game genres
Wikipedia - Computer art -- Art genre
Wikipedia - Computer screen film -- Film subgenre where the action takes place entirely on a screen of a computer or a smartphone
Wikipedia - Concrete poetry -- Genre of poetry with lines arranged as a shape
Wikipedia - Conspiracy fiction -- Subgenre of thriller fiction
Wikipedia - Conte (literature) -- Genre of prose fiction
Wikipedia - Contemporary Christian music -- Genre of modern popular music lyrically focused on matters concerned with the Christian faith
Wikipedia - Contemporary worship music -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Contradanza -- Hispanic music and dance genre
Wikipedia - Cooking manga -- Japanese comics genre
Wikipedia - Cooking show -- television genre that presents food preparation
Wikipedia - Cordel literature -- Brazilian literary genre
Wikipedia - Country music -- Genre of American popular music
Wikipedia - Country pop -- Pop-inspired subgenre of country music
Wikipedia - Country rap -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Country rock -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Coupe-decale -- Ivorian dance music genre
Wikipedia - Cowboy pop -- Subgenre of pop music
Wikipedia - C-pop -- Music genre by artists originating from mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan
Wikipedia - Cremation volume -- Genre of Thai literature
Wikipedia - Crime comics -- Comic genre
Wikipedia - Crime fiction -- Genre of fiction focusing on crime
Wikipedia - Crime film -- cinematic genre inspired by and analogous to the crime fiction literary genre
Wikipedia - Cross-genre -- Genre that blends themes and elements from two or more different genres
Wikipedia - Crunk -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Crust punk -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Crystal Cubism -- Subgenre of the painting style cubism
Wikipedia - Cuarteto -- Musical genre born in Cordoba, Argentina
Wikipedia - Cuban rumba -- Music genre originating from Cuba
Wikipedia - Cumbia (Panama) -- Folkloric genre and dance from Panama
Wikipedia - Cyberpunk derivatives -- Subgenres of this speculative fiction genre
Wikipedia - Cyberpunk -- Postmodern science fiction genre in a futuristic dystopian setting
Wikipedia - Dancehall pop -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Dancehall -- Genre of Jamaican popular music
Wikipedia - Dangdut -- Genre of Indonesian folk and traditional popular music
Wikipedia - Danza -- Musical genre that originated in Ponce, Puerto Rico
Wikipedia - Danzon -- Musical genre and dance of Cuba
Wikipedia - Darkcore -- UK rave subgenre of breakbeat hardcore
Wikipedia - Dark fantasy -- Subgenre of fantasy
Wikipedia - D-beat -- Genre of hardcore punk
Wikipedia - DC FanDome -- Multi-genre entertainment and comic convention
Wikipedia - Deathcore -- |Fusion subgenre of death metal and metalcore
Wikipedia - Death-doom -- Extreme subgenre of heavy metal
Wikipedia - Death metal -- Extreme subgenre of heavy metal music
Wikipedia - Death poem -- Genre of poetry
Wikipedia - Death rock -- Rock music subgenre
Wikipedia - Deconstructed club -- Experimental electronic music genre
Wikipedia - Deep house -- Subgenre of house music that originated in the 1980s
Wikipedia - Detective fiction -- Subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction
Wikipedia - DharmaM-EM-^[astra -- A genre of Sanskrit theological texts dealing with dharma
Wikipedia - Dhrupad -- Ancient genre of classical Indian music
Wikipedia - Dialect comedy -- American genre of ethnic humor shows
Wikipedia - Dictator novel -- Latin American literary genre
Wikipedia - Dieselpunk -- Retrofuturistic science fiction subgenre inspired by early-to-mid 20th-century diesel-based technology
Wikipedia - Disaster books -- Literary genre
Wikipedia - Disco -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Dixieland -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Djent -- |Subgenre of progressive metal
Wikipedia - Docudrama -- Documentary genre that features dramatized re-enactments of actual events
Wikipedia - Docufiction -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Doom metal -- Subgenre of heavy metal music
Wikipedia - Downtempo -- Electronic music genre
Wikipedia - Draft:Alternate Future Mapping -- Genre of alternate future
Wikipedia - Draft:Lazer (music) -- rock music genre
Wikipedia - Draft:Retro Soul -- Genre of music
Wikipedia - Drama (film and television) -- Film and television genre
Wikipedia - Drama (modern genre)
Wikipedia - Dramatic monologue -- genre of poetry
Wikipedia - Drill music -- Genre of hip hop
Wikipedia - Drone music -- minimalist musical genre
Wikipedia - Dubstep -- Genre of electronic dance music that originated in South London
Wikipedia - Dubtronica -- Music subgenre
Wikipedia - Dunedin sound -- Genre of indie pop music
Wikipedia - Dying Earth genre
Wikipedia - East Coast hip hop -- Regional subgenre of hip hop music
Wikipedia - Easy listening -- Popular music genre
Wikipedia - Ecological art -- Genre of art engaging ecological systems
Wikipedia - Edgar Award -- Literary award for work in the crime genre
Wikipedia - Educational video game -- Video game genre
Wikipedia - Electroacoustic music -- Art music genre, originated in 1950s
Wikipedia - Electroclash -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Electro (music) -- genre of electronic music
Wikipedia - Electronic body music -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Electronic literature -- Literary genre consisting of works of literature that originate within digital environments and require digital computation
Wikipedia - Electronicore -- fusion genre of metalcore and electronic music
Wikipedia - Electronic rock -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Emo rap -- Fusion genre of hip hop and emo
Wikipedia - Emo -- Music genre derivative of punk rock music with emotional, introspective lyrics as well as a subculture based around it
Wikipedia - Enuig -- Genre of Occitan poetry
Wikipedia - Epic (genre)
Wikipedia - Epinikion -- Genre of poetry
Wikipedia - Equestrian portrait -- Genre of portraiture
Wikipedia - Eric Ambler -- Author of thrillers, in particular spy novels, who introduced a new realism to the genre
Wikipedia - Errentai -- Genre of Chinese opera performed by two singers
Wikipedia - Ethnographic film -- Non-fiction film genre
Wikipedia - Eugene Daignault -- American-Canadian multi-genre performer and artist
Wikipedia - Eurodance -- Music genre
Wikipedia - European art cinema -- Film genre in Europe
Wikipedia - Eurospy film -- Genre of spy films
Wikipedia - Exotico -- Professional wrestling genre
Wikipedia - Experimental music -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Experimental rock -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Experimental theatre -- Genre of theater
Wikipedia - Exploitation film -- Informal film genre
Wikipedia - Extreme metal -- Any of a number of related heavy metal music subgenres
Wikipedia - Fabula palliata -- Theatrical genre
Wikipedia - Factual television -- Genre of non-fiction television programming
Wikipedia - Fado -- Portuguese music genre
Wikipedia - Fantasy film -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Fantasy wrestling -- Umbrella term representing the genre of role-playing games set in the world of professional wrestling.
Wikipedia - Fashionable novel -- 19th-century genre of English literature
Wikipedia - Feminist pornography -- Genre of pornographic film developed by and/or for those dedicated to gender equality
Wikipedia - Femslash -- Subgenre of slash fan fiction
Wikipedia - Fields and Gardens poetry -- Classical Chinese poetry genre
Wikipedia - Fighting game -- Video game genre
Wikipedia - Film genres
Wikipedia - Film genre -- Classification of films based on similarities in narrative elements
Wikipedia - Fine-art photography -- Genre of photography
Wikipedia - First-person shooter -- Action video game genre
Wikipedia - Flamenco rock -- Spanish cultural movement and music genre
Wikipedia - Flamenco -- Genre of Spanish music and dance
Wikipedia - Folk metal -- fusion genre of heavy metal music and traditional folk music
Wikipedia - Folk music -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Folk rock -- Fusion genre of American folk and rock music
Wikipedia - Folktronica -- Genre of music comprising various elements of folk music and electronica
Wikipedia - Forro -- Music genre from the northeast region of Brazil
Wikipedia - Free improvisation -- Genre of music
Wikipedia - Front-facing camera comedy -- Comedy genre
Wikipedia - Funk -- Music genre that originated in African-American communities in the mid-1960s
Wikipedia - Funky house -- Subgenre of house music
Wikipedia - Futanari -- Japanese word and pornographic genre
Wikipedia - Future garage -- Genre of electronic music
Wikipedia - Future history -- Postulated history of the future and is used by authors in the subgenre of speculative fiction
Wikipedia - Future house -- House subgenre with metallic sound and frequency-modulated basslines
Wikipedia - Gacha game -- Video game genre
Wikipedia - Galician rumba -- Music genre from Galicia, Spain.
Wikipedia - Game genre
Wikipedia - Gangsta rap -- Genre of rap music
Wikipedia - Gangster film -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Garage punk (fusion genre) -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Gay literature -- Literary genre
Wikipedia - Geek rock -- Genre of rock music
Wikipedia - Genericon -- Multi-genre convention held in Troy, NY
Wikipedia - Genre art -- Art genre that depicts scenes from everyday life
Wikipedia - Genre-busting -- Term for art that crosses over multiple established styles
Wikipedia - Genre fiction -- Fictional works written with the intent of fitting into a specific literary genre
Wikipedia - Genre Films -- American film production company
Wikipedia - Genre painting -- Paintings of scenes or events from everyday life
Wikipedia - Genre scene
Wikipedia - Genre-Specific Xperience -- 2011 album by Fatia Al Qadiri
Wikipedia - Genre studies
Wikipedia - Genres
Wikipedia - Genre -- Category of creative works based on stylistic and/or thematic criteria
Wikipedia - George H. Taggart -- American genre painter and portraitist
Wikipedia - G-funk -- Subgenre of hip hop music that emerged from West Coast gangsta rap in the early 1990s
Wikipedia - Ghetto house -- Sub-genre of house music
Wikipedia - Ghettotech -- Genre of electronic music originating from Detroit
Wikipedia - Ghostlore -- Genre of folklore
Wikipedia - Ghost story -- Literary genre, work of literature featuring supernatural elements
Wikipedia - Girl detective (genre) -- genre of detective fiction, based around a young female crime-solving protagonist
Wikipedia - Girls' video games -- 1990s video game genre
Wikipedia - Glam metal -- Genre of heavy metal music
Wikipedia - Glamour photography -- Photography genre; subjects are portrayed in glamorous poses
Wikipedia - Global K-pop -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Gospel music -- Genre of music emphasizing Christian lyrics
Wikipedia - Gothabilly -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Gothic fiction -- Genre or mode of literature and film that combines fiction and horror, death, and at times romance
Wikipedia - Gothic rock -- Musical subgenre of post-punk and alternative rock
Wikipedia - Gqom -- subgenre of house
Wikipedia - Grand opera -- 19th-century opera genre
Wikipedia - Grimdark -- Subgenre of speculative fiction
Wikipedia - Grime (music genre) -- Genre of electronic music originating in the United Kingdom
Wikipedia - Grindcore -- Extreme genre of music
Wikipedia - Grunge -- rock music genre
Wikipedia - Guaguanco -- Subgenre of Cuban rumba
Wikipedia - Guaracha -- A genre of Cuban popular music, of rapid tempo and with picaresque lyrics
Wikipedia - Gypsy jazz -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Haikai -- Japanese verse genre
Wikipedia - Hanukkah film -- Film genre whose main subject matter is the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah
Wikipedia - Hardbass -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Hardboiled -- Literary genre
Wikipedia - Hardcore hip hop -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Hardcore punk -- Subgenre of punk rock
Wikipedia - Hardcore wrestling -- Professional wrestling genre
Wikipedia - Hard fantasy -- Genre of fantasy literature
Wikipedia - Harem (genre)
Wikipedia - Harsh noise wall -- Subgenre of harsh noise
Wikipedia - Hauntology (music) -- Musical genre
Wikipedia - Heartland rock -- Genre of rock music
Wikipedia - Heavy metal music -- Genre of rock music
Wikipedia - Helen Mabel Trevor -- Northern Irish landscape and genre painter
Wikipedia - Hierarchy of genres -- Ranks of different genres in an art form in terms of their prestige and cultural value
Wikipedia - High fantasy -- Subgenre of fiction
Wikipedia - High-speed photography -- Photography genre
Wikipedia - Hi-NRG -- Genre of uptempo disco or electronic dance music
Wikipedia - Hip hop music -- Music genre consisting of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping
Wikipedia - Hip house -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Historical fantasy -- Genre of fiction
Wikipedia - History painting -- Genre in painting defined by narrative subjects
Wikipedia - History (theatrical genre) -- Theatrical genre
Wikipedia - Holiday horror -- Horror subgenre set during a holiday
Wikipedia - Hood film -- Film genre originating in the United States
Wikipedia - Horrorcore -- Subgenre of hip hop music based in horror-themed lyrical content and imagery
Wikipedia - Horror fiction -- Genre of fiction
Wikipedia - Horror film -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Horror punk -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Hyperpop -- Microgenre of popular music
Wikipedia - Hysterical realism -- Pejorative term to describe certain realist-genre books
Wikipedia - Iambus (genre)
Wikipedia - Illusionistic tradition -- Theatrical genre originated in Italy during the mid-2nd millennium
Wikipedia - Improvisational theatre -- Theatrical genre featuring unscripted performance
Wikipedia - Indie folk -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Indie rock -- Genre of alternative rock music
Wikipedia - Industrial hip hop -- Subgenre of hip hop
Wikipedia - Industrial music -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Infancy gospels -- Genre of religious texts
Wikipedia - I-novel -- Literary genre in Japanese literature
Wikipedia - Inspirational fiction -- Literary genre
Wikipedia - Interactive film -- Video game genre
Wikipedia - Intergender wrestling -- Professional wrestling genre
Wikipedia - International Latin Music Hall of Fame -- Event honoring artists who have contributed to the Latin music genre
Wikipedia - International Mugham Center of Azerbaijan -- Music center aiming to preserve mugham genre
Wikipedia - Irish traditional music -- Genre of folk music that developed in Ireland
Wikipedia - Italo disco -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Japanese science fiction -- Genre of speculative fiction
Wikipedia - Jazz -- Musical style and genre
Wikipedia - Jersey club -- Genre of music from Newark, NJ
Wikipedia - Jew with a coin -- Stereotypical genre
Wikipedia - Jidaigeki -- Japanese film, TV, games, and theatre genre
Wikipedia - J-pop -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Juju music -- Nigerian genre of music
Wikipedia - Julien Genre -- Italian male curler
Wikipedia - Jungle music -- Genre of electronic music
Wikipedia - Kadongo Kamu -- Ugandan music genre
Wikipedia - Kaiju -- Japanese genre of films featuring giant monsters
Wikipedia - Kaizo -- genre of difficult, modified Super Mario video games
Wikipedia - Kawaii metal -- Subgenre of heavy metal
Wikipedia - Kizomba -- Music and dance genre
Wikipedia - Korban Blake -- British multi-genre author
Wikipedia - Korean idol -- Celebrity who is famous due to their involvement in the K-pop music genre
Wikipedia - Korean television drama -- Television program genre
Wikipedia - Korean variety show -- Subgenre of variety show from South Korea
Wikipedia - K-pop -- Genre of popular music originating in South Korea
Wikipedia - Krishnacore -- Hardcore punk subgenre
Wikipedia - Kuduro -- Music genre from Angola
Wikipedia - Kunstlerroman -- Literary genre
Wikipedia - Ladishah -- Musical style and genre
Wikipedia - Lakhon Khol -- Cambodian dance drama genre
Wikipedia - La Lupe -- Cuban singer of several musical genres: boleros, guarachas and Latin soul in particular
Wikipedia - Lament -- Literary genre
Wikipedia - Late-night talk show -- Genre of comedic talk show, airing late at night
Wikipedia - Latin ballad -- Music genre derivative of bolero
Wikipedia - Latin freestyle -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Latin R&B -- Music genre originated in Puerto Rico & Latin America
Wikipedia - Latin rock -- Term to describe a music subgenre consisting in melting traditional sounds and elements of Latin American and Caribbean folk with rock music
Wikipedia - Latin soul -- Musical genre
Wikipedia - Latin trap -- Music genre originated in Puerto Rico
Wikipedia - Legal thriller -- Fiction genre
Wikipedia - Leonaert Bramer -- 17th century Dutch artist known primarily for genre, religious, and history paintings
Wikipedia - Lesbian literature -- Subgenre of literature addressing lesbian themes
Wikipedia - Limited-run series -- Television genre
Wikipedia - List of books by genre or type
Wikipedia - List of Caribbean music genres -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Christian bands and artists by genre
Wikipedia - List of compositions by Antonin DvoM-EM-^Yak by genre -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of compositions by Franz Schubert by genre -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of compositions by FrM-CM-)dM-CM-)ric Chopin by genre -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of cultural and regional genres of music -- none
Wikipedia - List of electronic music genres -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of genres of music
Wikipedia - List of genres -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of hip hop genres -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of ID3v1 Genres -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of idol anime and manga -- Japanese anime industry genre
Wikipedia - List of industrial music genres -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - List of jazz genres -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Latin music subgenres -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - List of multigenre conventions -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - List of musical genres by era
Wikipedia - List of noise music sub-genres -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of opera genres -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - List of popular music genres
Wikipedia - List of science fiction television programs by genre -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - List of video game genres -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of writing genres -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List song -- Genre of songs
Wikipedia - Literary genre -- Category of literary composition
Wikipedia - Llwybr Llaethog -- Welsh multi-genre band
Wikipedia - Low fantasy -- Subgenre of fantasy fiction defined by a "mundane" setting
Wikipedia - Macro photography -- Photography genre and techniques of extreme close-up pictures
Wikipedia - Maddala Keli -- Genre in Carnatic music, featuring a set of maddalam drums as the main instrument
Wikipedia - Magical girl -- Genre of anime and manga
Wikipedia - Magic realism -- Artistic genre and movement
Wikipedia - Ma'luf -- Andalusian music genre
Wikipedia - Mambo (music) -- Cuban music genre
Wikipedia - Mandopop -- Mandarin pop music genre
Wikipedia - Martial music -- Genre of military music
Wikipedia - Massively multiplayer online role-playing game -- Video game genre
Wikipedia - Mathilde Esch -- Austrian genre painter
Wikipedia - Mathnawi -- Poetic genre
Wikipedia - Mawwal -- Egyptian genre of vocal music
Wikipedia - Medieval folk rock -- Musical genre
Wikipedia - Medieval metal -- Subgenre of folk metal music
Wikipedia - Melodic death metal -- Subgenre of heavy metal music
Wikipedia - Memphis rap -- Subgenre of hip hop that originated from Memphis, Tennessee
Wikipedia - Menippean satire -- Literary genre
Wikipedia - Merengue music -- Music genre originating in the Dominican Republic
Wikipedia - Merengue tipico -- Musical genre of the Dominican Republic
Wikipedia - Metafiction -- Genre of fiction
Wikipedia - Metalcore -- Genre of music
Wikipedia - Miami bass -- Subgenre of hip-hop from South Florida
Wikipedia - Microgenre -- Specialized or niche genre
Wikipedia - Micro movie -- Form of microcinema; short/micro film in any genre
Wikipedia - Midget wrestling -- Professional wrestling genre
Wikipedia - Midrash -- Genre of rabbinic literature which contains Jewish Biblical exegesis and hermeneutics, and compilations of homilies
Wikipedia - Miniature wargaming -- Wargame genre
Wikipedia - MM-CM-)ringue -- Music genre and national symbol in Haiti
Wikipedia - Mockumentary -- Film genre in which fictional events are presented in documentary style to create a parody
Wikipedia - Moombahton -- Fusion genre of house music and reggaeton
Wikipedia - Morality play -- Genre of Medieval and early Tudor theatrical entertainment
Wikipedia - Morna (music) -- Cabo Verdean music genre
Wikipedia - Moroccan pop -- Music genre in Morocco
Wikipedia - MUD -- Video game genre
Wikipedia - MuiM-CM-1eira -- Galician traditional dance and musical genre
Wikipedia - Mumblecore -- Film subgenre
Wikipedia - Mumble rap -- Subgenre of rap, usually associated with SoundCloud rap
Wikipedia - Musical film -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Music genre -- Category that identifies pieces of music as belonging to a shared tradition or set of conventions
Wikipedia - Music of Ireland -- Music created in various genres on the island of Ireland
Wikipedia - Music theatre -- Experimental performance genre
Wikipedia - Mystery film -- Sub-genre of crime film
Wikipedia - Mythopoeia -- Narrative genre in modern literature and film
Wikipedia - Narco pelicula -- Mexican action film sub-genre
Wikipedia - Nasheed -- Music genre
Wikipedia - National Socialist black metal -- Genre of rock music promoting Nazism and Satanism
Wikipedia - Nature writing -- Nonfiction or fiction prose or poetry about the natural environment, literary genre
Wikipedia - Ndombolo -- Congolese dance music genre
Wikipedia - Neo-Burlesque -- Performing arts genre
Wikipedia - Neoclassicism (music) -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Neofolk -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Neo-noir -- Film genre; modern form of film noir
Wikipedia - Neo-progressive rock -- Subgenre of progressive rock
Wikipedia - Neo soul -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Neue Deutsche HM-CM-$rte -- Subgenre of rock music
Wikipedia - Neue Deutsche Todeskunst -- Musical genre that developed in Germany in the late 1980s
Wikipedia - Neue Deutsche Welle -- Genre of German music originally derived from punk rock and new wave music
Wikipedia - New-age music -- Genre of music
Wikipedia - New jack swing -- fusion genre of music
Wikipedia - Newspaper poetry -- Genre of poetry
Wikipedia - Newsreel -- Film genre
Wikipedia - New wave music -- 1970s music genre
Wikipedia - Nightcore -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Nintendocore -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Noise music -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Noise pop -- Subgenre of alternative or indie rock
Wikipedia - Nonfiction -- Type of genre, true works
Wikipedia - Nordic Christmas calendar -- Television genre
Wikipedia - Nordic noir -- Genre of crime fiction originating from the Nordic countries
Wikipedia - Northern (genre) -- Multimedia genre set primarily in Northern Canada and Alaska
Wikipedia - Novelty piano -- Genre of music
Wikipedia - No wave -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Nu-disco -- Disco-associated dance music genre
Wikipedia - Nu metal -- Subgenre of alternative metal
Wikipedia - Oddly satisfying videos -- Genre of internet video clips
Wikipedia - Oi! -- Subgenre of punk rock
Wikipedia - Omegaverse -- Genre of speculative erotic fiction set in societies with strict social hierarchies
Wikipedia - Opera buffa -- Italian opera genre
Wikipedia - Operatic pop -- Subgenre of pop music
Wikipedia - Operetta -- Form of theatre and a genre of light opera
Wikipedia - OpM-CM-)ra comique -- Opera genre
Wikipedia - Origins of rock and roll -- Music genre that emerged as a defined musical style in the United States in the early 1950s
Wikipedia - Ostern -- Western-inspired film genre
Wikipedia - Outdoor literature -- A literature genre about or involving the outdoors
Wikipedia - Outlander (novel) -- First in a series of eight historical multi-genre novels by Diana Gabaldon
Wikipedia - Outlaw biker film -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Outlaw country -- Genre of country music
Wikipedia - Outsider music -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Pachanga -- musical genre that is a mixture of son montuno and merengue
Wikipedia - Pagan metal -- Subgenre of metal music
Wikipedia - Pakistani pop music -- Genre
Wikipedia - Pakistani rock -- Genre
Wikipedia - Paleoart -- Art genre attempting to depict prehistoric life according to scientific evidence
Wikipedia - Panamanian reggaeton -- Regional name for the musical genre from Panama
Wikipedia - Panel show -- Radio and TV genre
Wikipedia - Pantomime -- Genre of musical comedy stage production
Wikipedia - Paranormal television -- Genre of reality television
Wikipedia - Parody film -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Pasodoble -- Music genre and dance
Wikipedia - Passion gospels -- Genre of Christian texts
Wikipedia - Pastiche -- Art genre
Wikipedia - Pastoral (theatre of Soule) -- Folk theatre genreM-BM- from the Basque Country
Wikipedia - Pastoral -- Literary genre that takes its name from the lifestyle of shepherds herding livestock
Wikipedia - Persian hagiography -- Literary genre of biographies about holy people
Wikipedia - Philosophical fiction -- Literary genre of fiction with philosophical themes
Wikipedia - Phonk -- Subgenre of hip hop inspired by Memphis rap
Wikipedia - Picaresque novel -- Genre of prose fiction
Wikipedia - Pink film -- Japanese-origin film genre dealing with nudity or sexual content
Wikipedia - Pinoy pop -- Popular Genre in the Philippines
Wikipedia - Planetary romance -- Subgenre of science fiction focussing on adventures on alien planets
Wikipedia - Plena -- Genre of music and dance native to Puerto Rico
Wikipedia - Plunderphonics -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Police procedural -- Subgenre of detective fiction
Wikipedia - Political thriller -- genre of fiction
Wikipedia - Ponton (car) -- 1930s-1960s car design genre
Wikipedia - Pony book -- Genre in children's literature
Wikipedia - Pop culture fiction -- Genre of fiction
Wikipedia - Pop music -- Genre of popular music which originated in its modern form in the late-1950s deriving from rock and roll
Wikipedia - Pop-punk -- Rock genre that combines punk rock with pop and power pop
Wikipedia - Pop rap -- Genre of music which combines hip hop music with elements of pop music
Wikipedia - Pop rock -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Popular history -- Genre of historiography
Wikipedia - Popular music -- Music genres distributed to large audiences and considered to have wide appeal
Wikipedia - Pornographic film -- Film genre that depicts unsimulated sex activity as the central part of story
Wikipedia - Portrait painting -- Genre in painting, where the intent is to depict a specific human subject
Wikipedia - Post-hardcore -- Genre of music
Wikipedia - Post-metal -- | Genre of heavy metal music
Wikipedia - Post-progressive -- Rock subgenre related to progressive rock
Wikipedia - Post-punk -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Post-rock -- Subgenre of rock music, often instrumental
Wikipedia - Power metal -- Subgenre of heavy metal combining characteristics of traditional metal with speed metal
Wikipedia - Power pop -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Pre-Code crime films -- Film genre popular before The Hays Code
Wikipedia - Pre-Code sex films -- Film genre popular before The Hays Code
Wikipedia - Procedural drama -- Genre of television programming
Wikipedia - Progressive metal -- Music genre melding heavy metal and progressive rock
Wikipedia - Progressive pop -- Pop music genre that emphasizes complexity and form
Wikipedia - Progressive rock -- Rock music subgenre
Wikipedia - Prop comedy -- Comedy genre in which performers use humorous objects, or conventional objects in humorous ways
Wikipedia - Prose poetry -- Literary genre
Wikipedia - Proto-punk -- Subgenre of rock music
Wikipedia - Pseudo-documentary -- Documentary genre that features fictional events
Wikipedia - Psychedelic music -- Range of popular music styles and genres
Wikipedia - Psychedelic trance -- Genre of electronic music
Wikipedia - Psychobilly -- Musical genre; sub genre of rockabilly
Wikipedia - Psychological fiction -- Literary genre
Wikipedia - Psychological horror -- Narrative subgenre
Wikipedia - Punk rap -- Genre of hip hop
Wikipedia - Punk rock -- Genre of rock music
Wikipedia - Punto (Venezuela) -- music genre
Wikipedia - Qisas Al-Anbiya -- Genre of Islamic literature, describing the history and stories of the prophets in Islam
Wikipedia - Queercore -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Race film -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Racing game -- Video game genre
Wikipedia - Ragga -- Sub-genre of dancehall music or reggae
Wikipedia - Ragtime -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Rapso -- Trinidadian genre of music
Wikipedia - Reality legal programming -- Television programming subgenre of reality television
Wikipedia - Reality television -- Genre of television programming that documents unscripted situations and actual occurrences
Wikipedia - Real time (media) -- Theatrical genre
Wikipedia - Real-time strategy -- Strategy video game sub-genre
Wikipedia - Reggada -- Genre of music
Wikipedia - Reggae fusion -- Fusion genre of reggae
Wikipedia - Reggaeton -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Reggae -- Music genre from Jamaica
Wikipedia - Restoration comedy -- theatrical genre rooted in late 17th-century England
Wikipedia - Retro-soul -- Genre of music
Wikipedia - Revisionist Western -- subgenre of Western films
Wikipedia - Rhythm and blues -- Music genre that originated in African American communities in the 1940s
Wikipedia - Rhythm game -- Genre of music-themed action video game
Wikipedia - Richard Rothwell -- Irish portrait and genre painter
Wikipedia - Riddim (genre) -- Genre of electronic dance music
Wikipedia - Rishu -- Genre of divinatory texts in that circulated widely in China
Wikipedia - Road movie -- Film genre in which the main characters leave home on a road trip
Wikipedia - Robinsonade -- Literary genre with the themes of isolation, a new beginning for some of the characters and encounters with natives or apparent natives
Wikipedia - Rock and roll -- Genre of popular music
Wikipedia - Rock music -- Genre of popular music that originated as "rock and roll" in 1950s US
Wikipedia - Rocksteady -- Music genre that originated in Jamaica around 1966
Wikipedia - Roguelike -- Subgenre of role-playing video games
Wikipedia - Role-playing video game -- Video game genre
Wikipedia - Roman a clef -- Literary genre
Wikipedia - Romance film -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Romance novel -- Genre novel on the theme of romantic love
Wikipedia - Romantic comedy -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards -- Fan-based horror genre award
Wikipedia - Roots rock -- Genre of rock music
Wikipedia - Ruins photography -- Sub-genre of photography
Wikipedia - Rumberas film -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Ruritanian romance -- Literary genre of fictional royalty
Wikipedia - Russian classical music -- Genre of classical music
Wikipedia - Russian science fiction and fantasy -- Genre of speculative fiction
Wikipedia - Sambass -- Genre of music
Wikipedia - Sampledelia -- Sample-based music genre
Wikipedia - San Diego Comic-Con -- Multi-genre entertainment and comic convention
Wikipedia - Sardana -- Catalan musical genre and cultural dance
Wikipedia - Satanic film -- subgenre of horror film which depicts the Devil and associated wicked themes
Wikipedia - Satire -- Genre of arts and literature in the form of humor or ridicule
Wikipedia - Savoy opera -- Opera genre
Wikipedia - Schlager music -- Genre of popular music
Wikipedia - Science fantasy -- Science fiction genre
Wikipedia - Science fiction comedy -- Comedic subgenre of science fiction
Wikipedia - Science fiction comics -- comic genre
Wikipedia - Science fiction film -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Science fiction on television -- Television genre
Wikipedia - Science fiction -- Genre of speculative fiction
Wikipedia - Science journalism -- Journalism genre
Wikipedia - Scottish folk music -- Genre of traditional music from Scotland
Wikipedia - Scottish Gaelic punk -- Subgenre of punk rock
Wikipedia - Secular hymn (genre) -- Genre of non-religious popular song
Wikipedia - Sentimental novel -- Genre of literature that relied on emotional response, both from their readers and characters
Wikipedia - Sevillanas -- Musical genre, folk song, and dance in Sevilla, Spain
Wikipedia - Sewamono -- Genre of contemporary setting plays in Japanese traditional theatre
Wikipedia - Shaggy God story -- A sub-genre in science fiction.
Wikipedia - Shahr Ashob -- Urdu poetic genre
Wikipedia - Shakespearean comedy -- theatrical genre defined by William Shakespeare's comedic plays
Wikipedia - Shan shui -- Art genre to draw landscapes
Wikipedia - Shashmaqam -- Central Asian musical genre
Wikipedia - Shoegaze -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Shoot 'em up -- Subgenre of shooter game
Wikipedia - Shooter game -- Action video game genre
Wikipedia - Show tune -- Genre
Wikipedia - Sim racing -- Video game genre
Wikipedia - Sinsoseol -- Korean literary genre
Wikipedia - Sirventes -- Genre of Occitan poetry
Wikipedia - Sitcom -- Genre of comedy
Wikipedia - Ska punk -- Fusion music genre
Wikipedia - Skate punk -- Subgenre of punk rock
Wikipedia - Skate video -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Slasher film -- Film subgenre that involves a killer murdering people using blades
Wikipedia - Slash fiction -- Genre of fan fiction
Wikipedia - Slime punk -- Electronic music microgenre
Wikipedia - Slow air -- Musical genre
Wikipedia - Snake (video game genre) -- 1978 video game
Wikipedia - Snap music -- Hip hop music subgenre
Wikipedia - Soap opera -- Television genre, episodic work of dramatic fiction
Wikipedia - Soca music -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Social simulation game -- Video game genre involving social interactions
Wikipedia - Son montuno -- Music subgenre of son cubano
Wikipedia - Sophisti-pop -- Subgenre of pop music
Wikipedia - Soul music -- Genre of music
Wikipedia - Southern gospel -- Subgenre of gospel music
Wikipedia - Southern hip hop -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Southern rock -- Subgenre of rock music and a genre of Americana
Wikipedia - Southern soul -- Soul Genre
Wikipedia - South Seas genre
Wikipedia - Space age pop -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Space art -- Visual art genre
Wikipedia - Space opera -- Subgenre of science fiction
Wikipedia - Space Western -- Media genre
Wikipedia - Spaghetti Western -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Spanish science fiction -- Genre of speculative fiction
Wikipedia - Speculative evolution -- science fiction genre exploring hypothetical scenarios in the evolution of life
Wikipedia - Speculative fiction -- Genre of fiction including science fiction, horror and fantasy
Wikipedia - Speculative poetry -- Genre of poetry focussing on fantastic, science fictional and mythological themes
Wikipedia - Speed metal -- Extreme subgenre of heavy metal music
Wikipedia - Sports film -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Sports manga -- Japanese comics genre
Wikipedia - Sports photography -- Photography genre
Wikipedia - Spy fiction -- Genre involving espionage as an important context or plot device
Wikipedia - Spy film -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Spy-Fi (subgenre) -- Subgenre of spy fiction that includes elements of science fiction
Wikipedia - Stag film -- Silent pornographic film genre
Wikipedia - Standard (music) -- Well-known musical composition, considered part of the "standard repertoire" of one or more musical genres
Wikipedia - Stealth game -- Video game genre
Wikipedia - Steampunk -- Science fiction genre inspired by 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery
Wikipedia - Still life photography -- Genre of photography used for the depiction of inanimate subject matter, typically a small group of objects. It is the application of photography to the still life artistic style and it really cool and stuff
Wikipedia - Stoner film -- Subgenre of comedy films
Wikipedia - Stoner rock -- |Rock music genre
Wikipedia - Stoner TV -- Television subgenre revolving around cannabis
Wikipedia - Street photography -- Photography genre
Wikipedia - Subgenre
Wikipedia - Sufi rock -- Genre
Wikipedia - Sugama Sangeetha -- Indian song genre
Wikipedia - Summa -- Medieval genre of handbook, summing up a field of knowledge
Wikipedia - Supernatural fiction -- Literary genre
Wikipedia - Surf music -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Swashbuckler film -- Subgenre of the action film genre
Wikipedia - Sword and planet -- A subgenre of science fantasy
Wikipedia - Symphonic black metal -- Subgenre of black metal music
Wikipedia - Symphonic metal -- Music genre that blends heavy metal with classical music
Wikipedia - Synth-metal -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Synth-pop -- Music genre in which the synthesizer is a key instrument
Wikipedia - Synthwave (2000s genre)
Wikipedia - Taarab -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Tabloid talk show -- Subgenre of the talk show genre
Wikipedia - Tales of Phantasia -- 1995 SNES game in the role-playing video game genre
Wikipedia - Tanka -- Genre of classical Japanese poetry
Wikipedia - Techno-thriller -- Thriller sub-genre with high level of technical detail
Wikipedia - Telenovela -- Latin American television genre
Wikipedia - Template talk:Film genres
Wikipedia - Template talk:Films by genre
Wikipedia - Template talk:Video game genre
Wikipedia - Theatre of ancient Rome -- Theatrical genre
Wikipedia - The Destiny Map -- Cross-genre tabletop role-playing game supplement
Wikipedia - The Nile Empire -- Cross-genre tabletop role-playing game supplement
Wikipedia - The Possibility Chalice -- Cross-genre tabletop role-playing game adventure
Wikipedia - Thrash metal -- Subgenre of heavy metal
Wikipedia - Thriller film -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Thriller (genre) -- Genre of literature, film, and television programming
Wikipedia - Time Lord rock -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Time Management (video game genre)
Wikipedia - Time travel in fiction -- Concept and accompanying genre in science fiction
Wikipedia - Tokusatsu -- Japanese film genre
Wikipedia - Torneyamen -- Genre of Occitan poetry shaped as a competition
Wikipedia - Tragicomedy -- Genre of drama and literature
Wikipedia - Transgender pornography -- Pornography genre
Wikipedia - Transgressive fiction -- Genre of literature which focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual or illicit ways
Wikipedia - Trap music (EDM) -- Genre of music
Wikipedia - Trap music -- Subgenre of hip hop
Wikipedia - Travel literature -- Literary genre
Wikipedia - Trio sonata -- Musical genre popular in the Baroque era
Wikipedia - Trip hop -- Genre of electronic music
Wikipedia - Tropical house -- Subgenre of deep house
Wikipedia - Tropicalia -- Brazilian music genre and cultural movement
Wikipedia - True crime -- Literary genre
Wikipedia - Two-tone (music genre)
Wikipedia - Typing game -- Video game genre
Wikipedia - UK hard house -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Underground comix -- Comics genre
Wikipedia - Underwater photography -- Genre of photography
Wikipedia - Uplifting trance -- Genre of electronic dance music
Wikipedia - Urban champeta -- Subgenre of folk music and dance originating in the Atlantic coastal regions of Colombia
Wikipedia - Urban contemporary gospel -- Gospel music genre
Wikipedia - Urban contemporary -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Urban fantasy -- Genre of fiction, subgenre of fantasy
Wikipedia - Urbano music -- Transnational music genre
Wikipedia - Urban Pasifika -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Utopian and dystopian fiction -- Genres of literature that explore social and political structures
Wikipedia - Vallenato -- Colombian music genre
Wikipedia - Vampira (1974 film) -- 1974 comedy/horror film spoofing the vampire genre directed by Clive Donner
Wikipedia - Vaporwave -- Online musical genre and visual aesthetic
Wikipedia - Vaudeville -- Genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s
Wikipedia - Veduta -- Genre of large-scale paintings or prints of a cityscape or other vista
Wikipedia - Victorian burlesque -- Theatrical genre
Wikipedia - Video game genres
Wikipedia - Video game genre
Wikipedia - Video game journalism -- Journalism genre
Wikipedia - Viennese waltz -- genre of ballroom dance
Wikipedia - Viking metal -- Subgenre of heavy metal
Wikipedia - Vladimir Dubossarsky -- Russian painter working in pop art genre
Wikipedia - Vocal music -- Genre of music performed by one or more singers
Wikipedia - War film -- Film genre depicting wars
Wikipedia - War novel -- Literary genre
Wikipedia - Weird fiction -- Subgenre of speculative fiction originating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
Wikipedia - West Coast hip hop -- Regional subgenre of hip hop music
Wikipedia - Western comics -- Comic genre
Wikipedia - Western fiction -- Literary genre
Wikipedia - Western (genre) -- Multimedia genre of stories set primarily in the American Old West
Wikipedia - Wikipedia:WikiProject Music/Music genres task force/Assessment -- historical document
Wikipedia - Wikipedia:WikiProject Music/Music genres task force -- Sub-project of WikiProject Music
Wikipedia - Witch house (genre) -- Electronic music genre and visual aesthetic
Wikipedia - Women in music -- Women in music in different genres, eras, and all over the world.
Wikipedia - Women in prison film -- Film genre
Wikipedia - Wonky (genre) -- Fusion subgenre of electronic music known primarily for its off-kilter or M-bM-^@M-^\unstableM-bM-^@M-^] beats
Wikipedia - Woodlands style -- Great Lakes indigenous art genre
Wikipedia - Wuxia -- Genre of Chinese fiction
Wikipedia - X Division -- Professional wrestling genre
Wikipedia - Xianxia novel -- Chinese fantasy genre
Wikipedia - Xuc -- Genre of Salvadoran folk music
Wikipedia - Yacht rock -- Pop rock genre
Wikipedia - Yaoi -- Homoerotic fiction genre also known as boys' love or BL
Wikipedia - Yuri (genre) -- Lesbian genre of Japanese media
Wikipedia - Zarzuela -- Spanish lyric-dramatic genre
Wikipedia - Zouglou -- Ivorian dance music genre
Wikipedia - Zouk -- Music genre
Wikipedia - Zydeco -- Music genre developed in Louisiana, USA
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10412991-crossed-genres-quarterly-1
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1077376.Genreflecting
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1098268.Teen_Genreflecting
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11001876-many-genres-one-craft
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11247602-histoire-philosophique-du-genre-humain-ou-l-homme-tome-second
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11674890-crossed-genres-quarterly-2
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12751239-crossed-genres-quarterly-3
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1499043.The_Readers_Advisory_Guide_to_Genre_Fiction_Language_and_the_Teacher_
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16283799-genre-connections
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16651040-genreflecting
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17070951-genre-connections-book-study-bundle
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17167376-bending-genre
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1751878.Genre_and_Television
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1784857.Th_orie_des_genres
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/181621.Gender_Genre_and_Power_in_South_Asian_Expressive_Traditions
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18667578-the-far-edges-of-the-fourth-genre
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18749164-crossed-genres-magazine-2-0-issue-11
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1932230.Folk_Groups_And_Folklore_Genres
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201851.Speech_Genres_and_Other_Late_Essays
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20457591-crossed-genres-magazine-2-0-issue-13
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20731415-written-across-the-genres
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22083517-the-far-edges-of-the-fourth-genre
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22662623-crossed-genres-magazine-2-0-issue-19-flash-fiction
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22836728-crossed-genres-magazine-2-0-book-two
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22854607-crossed-genres-magazine-2-0-issue-20-time-travel
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2285640.Genreflecting
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23299719-crossed-genres-magazine-2-0-issue-22
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24816104-crossed-genres-magazine-2-0-issue-26
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25324875-crossed-genres-magazine-2-0-issue-28
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25471654-crossed-genres-magazine-2-0-book-three
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29640419-you-can-t-pick-your-genre
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32325621-genrenauts
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3234008-folk-groups-and-folklore-genres-reader
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39280566-reading-poetry-writing-genre
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42875342-genreflecting
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42989668-writing-for-video-game-genres
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44103670-elemental-tales---a-multi-genre-stone-soup-anthology
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6277463-the-readers-advisory-guide-to-genre-fiction
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6475199-writing-for-video-game-genres
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7627410-crossed-genres-year-one
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8395910-teen-genreflecting-3
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8448586-short-story-me---best-genre-short-stories
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9648302-crossed-genres-issue-23
http://de.fanfictions.wikia.com/wiki/MeerUndMehr:Portale/Genre
http://genrexfanfic.wikia.com
http://genrexfanfic.wikia.com/wiki/Generator_Rex_Fan_Fiction_Wiki
http://peel.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Genres
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Category:Art_genres
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Category:Christian_genres
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Category:Musical_Genres
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Category_talk:Christian_genres
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Genesis_creation_narrative#Questions_of_genre
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Historical_reliability_of_the_Acts_of_the_Apostles#Genre
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Mythopoeia_(genre)
Beyond Genre: Adventures in Rap, Rock, and Romance
Psychology Wiki - Genre
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - genrel-early
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Analysis/YaoiGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Analysis/YuriGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/DuelingWorks/FilmCrossGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/DuelingWorks/GamesCrossGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fr/Genres
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fr/GenresDeJeuVideo
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fr/GenreTropes
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fr/SchemasDeGenres
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreDeconstruction/AlanMoore
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreDeconstruction/AnimeAndManga
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreDeconstruction/ComicBooks
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreDeconstruction/Film
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreDeconstruction/Literature
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreDeconstruction/LiveActionTV
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreDeconstruction/OtherMedia
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreDeconstruction/TabletopGames
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreDeconstruction/Theatre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreDeconstruction/VideoGames
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreDeconstruction/Webcomics
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreDeconstruction/WebOriginal
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreDeconstruction/WesternAnimation
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreKiller/Film
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreKiller/LiveActionTV
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreKiller/Music
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreKiller/VideoGames
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreMashup/AnimeAndManga
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreMashup/Film
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreMashup/Literature
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreMashup/LiveActionTV
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreMashup/Music
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreMashup/VideoGames
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreMotif/Classical
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreMotif/Country
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreMotif/EasyListening
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreMotif/ElectronicDance
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreMotif/Folk
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreMotif/HipHop
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreMotif/Jazz
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreMotif/Metal
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreMotif/Pop
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreMotif/Punk
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreMotif/RAndB
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreMotif/Rock
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreMotif/Showtunes
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreSavvy/AnimeAndManga
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreSavvy/ComicBooks
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreSavvy/FanWorks
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreSavvy/Film
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreSavvy/Literature
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreSavvy/LiveActionTV
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreSavvy/Podcasts
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreSavvy/Roleplay
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreSavvy/TabletopGames
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreSavvy/VideoGames
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreSavvy/Webcomics
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreSavvy/WebOriginal
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreSavvy/WesternAnimation
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreShift/AnimeAndManga
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreShift/Literature
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreShift/LiveActionFilms
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreShift/LiveActionTV
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreShift/Music
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreShift/VideoGames
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreTurningPoint/Literature
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreTurningPoint/LiveActionFilms
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreTurningPoint/LiveActionTV
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreTurningPoint/Music
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreTurningPoint/Sports
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GenreTurningPoint/VideoGames
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/HaremGenre/AnimeAndManga
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/HaremGenre/FanWorks
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/HaremGenre/VideoGames
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/HaremGenre/VisualNovels
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ImageLinks/HaremGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/JustForFun/TheUniversalGenreSavvyGuide
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Laconic/ActionGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Laconic/GenreKiller
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Laconic/Genres
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Laconic/GenreSavvy
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Laconic/GenreShift
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Laconic/GenreTurningPoint
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Laconic/HaremGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/GenreSavvy
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/MorgenregenTheBlackForestFairy
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ActionGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ActionGenreHeroGuy
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnimationGenres
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnimeGenres
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AudioGameGenres
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BaraGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BoysLoveGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ContractualGenreBlindness
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeadHorseGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathByGenreSavviness
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FilmGenres
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FromClonesToGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FunctionalGenreSavvy
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Genre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreAdultery
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreAnthology
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreBlind
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreBlindness
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreBuster
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreBusting
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreConsistency
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreDeconstruction
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreKiller
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreMashup
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreMotif
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenrePopularizer
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreRefugee
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreRelaunch
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreRoulette
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Genres
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreSavvy
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreShift
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreThrowback
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreTitleGrabBag
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreTropes
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreTurningPoint
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HaremGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IdolGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LiteratureGenres
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicalGirlGenreDeconstruction
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicalGirlGenreIndex
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MidDevelopmentGenreShift
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OtokonokoGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OutOfGenreExperience
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OutsideGenreFoe
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Psychobillygenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityShowGenreBlindness
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealRobotGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SekaikeiGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ShowGenres
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SlipstreamGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SmallGenresAndUnclassifiedLiterature
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpiritCultivationGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SubGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuperRobotGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VideoGameGenres
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WrongGenreSavvy
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YaoiGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YuriGenre
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/GenreDeconstruction
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/GenreKiller
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/GenreMashup
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/GenreSavvy
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/GenreShift
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/GenreTurningPoint
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoExamples/GenreMashup
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoExamples/GenreSavvy
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/HaremGenre/AnimeAndManga
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Tropers/MorgenReiter
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:American_adult_animated_TV_shows_by_genre
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:American_comedy_TV_shows_by_genre
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:American_TV_shows_by_genre
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:Animated_TV_shows_by_genre
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:Australian_TV_shows_by_genre
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:Authors_by_genre
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:Children's_TV_shows_by_genre
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:Comedy_films_by_genre
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:Comedy_TV_shows_by_genre
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:Drama_TV_shows_by_genre
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:Films_by_genre
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:(GENRE_films)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:Genres
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:Literature_by_genre
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:Music_by_genre
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:Novels_by_genre
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:Sitcoms_by_genre
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:TV_shows_by_genre
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:UK_TV_shows_by_genre
Samurai Pizza Cats (1990 - 1991) - Three cats who work for a pizza parlor in Little Tokyo must suit up in every episode and stop the Big Cheese's latest plot to take over the city. Samurai Pizza Cats lived and died relatively unknown, but those who have seen it take pride in its quirky translation parodying the show and the genre in...
Cops (1989 - 2020) - "Cops" was among the earliest reality-based law enforcement shows, and remains one of the most popular of the genre. Each week, a camera crew followed the activities and daily beats of the officers of a different city's police department. Incidents ranged from routine traffic stops that evolve into...
CBS Movie (1983 - 1993) - The television network of CBS always had movie specials that would air on a certian night of the week. Movies from all genres like comedy, drama, action, science fiction, fantasy, horror, musicals, vintage/classics, and family/childrens movies.
Denshi Sentai Denjiman (1980 - 1981) - This series broke newgrounds for the sentai genre. it is the first super hero series to use a both a transforming robot and set a new standard for Japanese superhero costumes.
Magical DoReMi (1999 - 2004) - Magical DoReMi, known as Ojamajo Doremi in Japan, is a magical girl anime series that has obtained wide popularity among young girls in Japan. It's popularity rivals that of the also popular Sailor Moon in the magical girl genre of Japanese animation. There are four television series, two movies and...
He Is My Master (2005 - Current) - a television anime series in the harem genre[1] with a lolicon aspect.[2] The manga is authored by two individuals: Mattsu () who does the story and his ex-wife Asu Tsubaki () who does the artwork. Because of their acrimonious split, the manga will probably be drawn by someone else soon.Seven...
Sally the Witch (1966 - 1991) - also known as Sunny the Witch is one of the popular anime magical girls of what eventually become a genre in Japan. Due to its characteristics, may be considered the first shjo anime as well;[1] while titles such as Himitsu no Akko-chan predate Sally in manga form, the Sally anime predates Himitsu...
Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color (1954 - 1991) - A Disney-produced anthology covering many different genres. Theatrical animation, live-action features and other material from the studio's library.
VH1 New Visions (1986 - 1993) - This show featured videos from genres like New Age and Smooth Jazz.
Cracker (1997 - 1999) - Cracker is an American crime drama series produced by Granada Entertainment for ABC and based upon the British television crime drama of the same name created by Jimmy McGovern. An innovative but disturbing take on the standard police-detective genre, the Americanized Cracker consists of sixteen one...
Today (1952 - Current) - Today (also referred to as The Today Show), is an American morning news and talk show airing every morning from NBC News. Debuting on January 14, 1952, it was the first of its genre, spawning similar morning news and entertainment television programs across the United States and around the world. Th...
Marsalis on Music (1995 - 2013) - An educational music series on PBS starring jazz musician Wynton Marsalis. In each episode Marsalis talks about various types of music including various genres of music, types of instruments, and how music is composed and played. The series had music performed by a live orchestra or band, depending...
120 Minutes (1986 - 2013) - 120 Minutes is a television program in the United States dedicated to the alternative music genre, that originally aired on MTV from 1986 to 2000, and then aired on MTV's associate channel MTV2 from 2001 to 2003.
Prom Night(1980) - This low-budget, tongue-in-cheek horror film of the slasher genre which had recently been popularized by Halloween (1978) stars that film's lead, Jamie Lee Curtis, as Kim Hammond, a prom queen who becomes a scream queen. Six years ago, a little girl was taunted by four classmates and fell to...
Hot Shots!(1991) - From director Jim Abrahams, one of the minds behind the Airplane! and Naked Gun films, comes another parody. This time around, Abrahams has his sights set on the action-adventure genre, specifically Top Gun. Charlie Sheen stars as Topper Harley, a maverick air force pilot who constantly lives in the...
American Ninja(1985) - American Ninja is a 1985 martial arts action film produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus's Cannon Films. Like most other films produced by that studio, American Ninja was a low-budget action film. Directed by Sam Firstenberg, who specialized in this genre in the 80s, the film stars Michael Dudik...
The Dentist(1996) - In this spoofy horror outing from veteran genre director Brian Yuzna, L.A. Law vet Corbin Bernsen plays Dr. Feinstone, an anal-retentive Beverly Hills dentist with an amusement park of an office replete with Planet Hollywood-worthy, themed exam rooms, piped-in opera music, and a crisp, efficient sta...
The Delta Force(1986) - Menahem Golan melds a Chuck Norris action spectacle with the disaster film genre in The Delta Force. The story is based upon the June, 1985 hijacking of a TWA jet, where passengers were held at gun-point by terrorists in Beirut, Lebanon. The film re-enacts various real life incidents from the crisis...
Fallen(1998) - Gregory Hoblit (Primal Fear) directed this genre mix-in, a blend of police drama and supernatural thriller. Homicide detective John Hobbes (Denzel Washington) narrates, taking the audience back to "the time I almost died." This sets a flashback in motion, beginning at the prison cell of serial kille...
You've Got Mail(1998) - Sleepless In Seattle director Nora Ephron originally made a name for herself as the writer of romantic comedies such as When Harry Met Sally and This is My Life. She continues the genre with You've Got Mail, marking her second collaboration with actors Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. The story brings romanc...
Knock Off(1998) - Hong Kong action genre craftsman Tsui Hark directed this martial arts tale, his second collaboration with actor Jean-Claude Van Damme after Double Team (1997). Van Damme stars as Marcus Ray, a Hong Kong fashion designer who specializes in "knock-offs," cheaply produced jeans and sneakers meant to lo...
The Bride with White Hair(1993) - Following on the success of 1987's Chinese Ghost Story, Hong Kong was inundated with romantically themed tales of the supernatural. Most were awful, but Ronny Yu's The Bride With White Hair has become a classic of the genre. Based on a two-volumed 1954 novel written by Leung Yu-Sang, the film tells...
Cemetery High(1990) - This unbelievably poor slasher parody from director Gorman Bechard (Psychos in Love) concerns four nubile young women calling themselves "The Scumbusters." They team up and begin slaughtering dumb jocks on a college campus after being raped. As crass as the rape-revenge genre ever got, Cemetery High...
Nemesis 2: Nebula(1995) - In the future, cyborgs have taken over and they send Alex, a genetically superior child, back in time where she grows to womanhood in the African wilderness. A cyborg with the ability to cloak arrives at the same time and place to kill her. Director Albert Pyun takes from every classic in the genre,...
Dead Heat(1988) - Although many genre filmmakers have managed to blend horror and humor with great success, movies employing this formula often run the risk of both elements canceling each other out, resulting in a horror comedy that is neither scary nor funny. Alas, Dead Heat is a textbook example of this kind of fa...
Jumper(2008) - Following up his blockbuster action hit "Mr. and Mrs. Smith", director Doug Liman turns to an entirely new genre -- sci-fi -- for this tale of an underground world of teleporters. Based on the novel by Steven Gould, "Jumper" concerns David (Hayden Christensen), a young man who quite literally wills...
Camel Spiders(2011) - Camel Spiders is a 2011 made-for-television horror sci-fi film starring Brian Krause and C. Thomas Howell. It was directed by genre veteran Jim Wynorski and executive produced by Roger Corman.
Behind The Mask: The Rise Of Leslie Vernon(2006) - The next great psycho horror slasher has given a documentary crew exclusive access to his life as he plans his reign of terror over the sleepy town of Glen Echo, all the while deconstructing the conventions and archetypes of the horror genre for them.
'G' Men (1935) ::: 7.2/10 -- Approved | 1h 25min | Crime, Drama, Film-Noir | 4 May 1935 (USA) -- James Cagney helped jump-start the gangster genre as The Public Enemy. Outcries against movies that glorified underworld criminals put Cagneyon the side of the law in "G" Men. Director: William Keighley Writers:
Inside No. 9 ::: TV-MA | 30min | Comedy, Drama, Horror | TV Series (2014 ) -- Anthology series which mixes dark humor with genres like crime, horror or drama. The show invites viewers into some very different No.9s, where the ordinary and mundane rub shoulders with the extraordinary and macabre. Creators:
Love, Death & Robots ::: TV-MA | 15min | Animation, Short, Comedy | TV Series (2019 ) -- A collection of animated short stories that span various genres including science fiction, fantasy, horror and comedy. Creator: Tim Miller
Video Game High School ::: TV-14 | 42min | Action, Romance, Sci-Fi | TV Series (20122014) In a futuristic world where gaming is the top sport, a teenager attends a school which specializes in a curriculum of video games in each genre. Stars: Josh Blaylock, Ellary Porterfield, Johanna Braddy
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Ao no 6-gou -- -- Gonzo -- 4 eps -- Manga -- Action Adventure Mecha Military Sci-Fi -- Ao no 6-gou Ao no 6-gou -- The once famous and well respected scientist Zorndyke has bred a new genre of living being, one that thrives on the oceans and lives to destroy humans. Zorndyke believes it is time that the humans were relieved of their rule of the earth. It is up to Blue Submarine No. 6 and the rest of the Blue fleet to put an end to Zorndyke's madness and creations. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- -- Licensor: -- Bandai Entertainment, Discotek Media -- OVA - Oct 25, 1998 -- 47,229 7.04
Cencoroll -- -- Think Corporation -- 1 ep -- Original -- Action Sci-Fi -- Cencoroll Cencoroll -- When a gigantic, unearthly monster suddenly looms on the skyline of a Japanese city, the expected occurs—the Japan Self-Defense Forces roll out the tanks while the public panics. Nobody knows what it is or where it came from, but Yuki, a bold and inquisitive teenage girl, has a secret but might be a useful clue. Her friend Tetsu has been clandestinely caring for a bizarre creature called Cenco, which will soon prove itself to have some remarkable, even impossible characteristics. Another teenage boy, a stranger with some mysterious link to the monstrosity attacking the city, shows up, and his unwelcome interest in Tetsu's pet snuffs out any doubt of a connection—and lights the fuse for the coming battle. -- -- (Source: Rupert Bottenberg, Fantasia Genre Film Festival) -- -- Licensor: -- Aniplex of America -- Movie - Jul 28, 2009 -- 84,346 7.20
Cencoroll -- -- Think Corporation -- 1 ep -- Original -- Action Sci-Fi -- Cencoroll Cencoroll -- When a gigantic, unearthly monster suddenly looms on the skyline of a Japanese city, the expected occurs—the Japan Self-Defense Forces roll out the tanks while the public panics. Nobody knows what it is or where it came from, but Yuki, a bold and inquisitive teenage girl, has a secret but might be a useful clue. Her friend Tetsu has been clandestinely caring for a bizarre creature called Cenco, which will soon prove itself to have some remarkable, even impossible characteristics. Another teenage boy, a stranger with some mysterious link to the monstrosity attacking the city, shows up, and his unwelcome interest in Tetsu's pet snuffs out any doubt of a connection—and lights the fuse for the coming battle. -- -- (Source: Rupert Bottenberg, Fantasia Genre Film Festival) -- Movie - Jul 28, 2009 -- 84,346 7.20
Junjou Romantica -- -- Studio Deen -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Comedy Drama Romance Shounen Ai -- Junjou Romantica Junjou Romantica -- Misaki Takahashi is a regular high school student who is preparing for his university entrance exams. In order to reduce the stress of studying, or so he hopes, he accepts the help of his older brother's best friend, and famous author, Akihiko Usami. However, Masaki is about to find out that Usami's books are of a very naughty genre, and that there may be something naughty waking up inside Masaki as well. -- -- Junjou Romantica also follows the story of two other couples loosely connected to Masaki and Usami's "Romantica." -- -- Egoist shows the very passionate, but often complicated, relationship between university professor Hiroki Kamijou (whose life has reached an all time low) and paediatrician Nowaki Kusama, who falls for Hiroki at first sight and would do anything to make him happy. -- -- The third story, "Terrorist," shows just how obsessive love can become when rich eighteen-year-old Shinobu Takatsuki finally discovers something that he cannot have so easily—the literature professor You Miyagi. -- -- There is passion abound as these three couples try to achieve their goals in life while also falling into temptation and anguish with their partners. -- -- Licensor: -- Nozomi Entertainment -- TV - Apr 11, 2008 -- 211,072 7.62
Lingerie Senshi Papillon Rose -- -- Studio Kelmadick -- 1 ep -- - -- Ecchi Magic Sci-Fi Parody -- Lingerie Senshi Papillon Rose Lingerie Senshi Papillon Rose -- Tsubomi is a savvy and horny school girl who works at a lingerie club, a gentlemen's bar where scantily clad young women serve drinks to the patrons. She is useless at her job but is blackmailing her boss so she won't get fired. One day she runs into a gorgeous young man who she takes to bed. She meets into a perverted talking cat with a butterfly on its forehead, who recruits her to be a magical soldier. She has to fight off a dominatrix elf woman called Beene, a minion of Regina Apis, a matriarch bent on chaos and forming her new Dynasty. Tsubomi is learning of her powers when she is rescued by an oddly familiar masked man, known only as Dandelion. The plot of this anime is completely farcical and parodies the magical girl genre and Sailor Moon in particular. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- -- Licensor: -- Maiden Japan -- OVA - Apr 25, 2003 -- 6,656 4.70
Memories -- -- Madhouse, Studio 4°C -- 3 eps -- Manga -- Drama Horror Psychological Sci-Fi -- Memories Memories -- Memories is a compilation of three standalone short films encompassing different genres. -- -- Magnetic Rose -- In the far reaches of space, after tracing a distress signal to a large abandoned space station, a pair of engineers—Heintz Beckner and Miguel Costrela—find a derelict mansion and decide to explore on foot. Their investigation reveals a dark secret surrounding the fate of Eva Friedel, a renowned opera singer with a tragic history. Hallucinations soon begin to plague them, and they must fight to retain their sanity in order to escape the station alive. -- -- Stink Bomb -- Hapless lab technician Nobuo Tanaka consumes some pills at his laboratory to cure a cold. Unknown to him, however, the pills are actually experimental drugs that enhance his flatulence to a lethal degree. As the toxic gas escaping him kills everyone in his vicinity, he is ordered by his superiors to retreat to the company headquarters in Tokyo. The journey to the city is made all the more arduous as Nobuo struggles with his deadly odor while the police, military, and foreign adversaries are hot on his trail. -- -- Cannon Fodder -- In a fortress city filled to the brim with cannons, a young boy wishes to surpass his father by becoming a revered artillery officer. Despite no proof of an enemy nation, he cannot resist the urge to partake in the daily bombardment routines organized by the city. Whether at school or just before bedtime, he only dreams of someday firing a cannon for the sake of his homeland. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Discotek Media, Sony Pictures Entertainment -- Movie - Dec 23, 1995 -- 83,342 7.73
Memories -- -- Madhouse, Studio 4°C -- 3 eps -- Manga -- Drama Horror Psychological Sci-Fi -- Memories Memories -- Memories is a compilation of three standalone short films encompassing different genres. -- -- Magnetic Rose -- In the far reaches of space, after tracing a distress signal to a large abandoned space station, a pair of engineers—Heintz Beckner and Miguel Costrela—find a derelict mansion and decide to explore on foot. Their investigation reveals a dark secret surrounding the fate of Eva Friedel, a renowned opera singer with a tragic history. Hallucinations soon begin to plague them, and they must fight to retain their sanity in order to escape the station alive. -- -- Stink Bomb -- Hapless lab technician Nobuo Tanaka consumes some pills at his laboratory to cure a cold. Unknown to him, however, the pills are actually experimental drugs that enhance his flatulence to a lethal degree. As the toxic gas escaping him kills everyone in his vicinity, he is ordered by his superiors to retreat to the company headquarters in Tokyo. The journey to the city is made all the more arduous as Nobuo struggles with his deadly odor while the police, military, and foreign adversaries are hot on his trail. -- -- Cannon Fodder -- In a fortress city filled to the brim with cannons, a young boy wishes to surpass his father by becoming a revered artillery officer. Despite no proof of an enemy nation, he cannot resist the urge to partake in the daily bombardment routines organized by the city. Whether at school or just before bedtime, he only dreams of someday firing a cannon for the sake of his homeland. -- -- Movie - Dec 23, 1995 -- 83,342 7.73
Ookami to Koushinryou -- -- Imagin -- 13 eps -- Light novel -- Adventure Fantasy Historical Romance -- Ookami to Koushinryou Ookami to Koushinryou -- Holo is a powerful wolf deity who is celebrated and revered in the small town of Pasloe for blessing the annual harvest. Yet as years go by and the villagers become more self-sufficient, Holo, who stylizes herself as the "Wise Wolf of Yoitsu," has been reduced to a mere folk tale. When a traveling merchant named Kraft Lawrence stops at Pasloe, Holo offers to become his business partner if he eventually takes her to her northern home of Yoitsu. The savvy trader recognizes Holo's unusual ability to evaluate a person's character and accepts her proposition. Now in the possession of both sharp business skills and a charismatic negotiator, Lawrence inches closer to his goal of opening his own shop. However, as Lawrence travels the countryside with Holo in search of economic opportunities, he begins to realize that his aspirations are slowly morphing into something unexpected. -- -- Based on the popular light novel of the same name, Ookami to Koushinryou, also known as Spice and Wolf, fuses the two polar genres of economics and romance to create an enthralling story abundant with elaborate schemes, sharp humor, and witty dialogue. Ookami to Koushinryou is more than just a story of bartering; it turns into a journey of searching for a lost identity in an ever-changing world. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation, Kadokawa Pictures USA -- 660,637 8.26
Poputepipikku -- -- Kamikaze Douga -- 12 eps -- 4-koma manga -- Comedy Dementia Parody -- Poputepipikku Poputepipikku -- Poputepipikku turns absurdist comedy up to eleven with its pop culture references and surreal hilarity. With two bonafide high school girl protagonists—the short and exceptionally quick to anger Popuko, and the tall and unshakably calm Pipimi—they throw genres against the wall and don't wait to see what sticks. Parody is interlaced with drama, action, crudeness, and the show's overarching goal—to become a real anime. -- -- 174,464 7.28
Poputepipikku -- -- Kamikaze Douga -- 12 eps -- 4-koma manga -- Comedy Dementia Parody -- Poputepipikku Poputepipikku -- Poputepipikku turns absurdist comedy up to eleven with its pop culture references and surreal hilarity. With two bonafide high school girl protagonists—the short and exceptionally quick to anger Popuko, and the tall and unshakably calm Pipimi—they throw genres against the wall and don't wait to see what sticks. Parody is interlaced with drama, action, crudeness, and the show's overarching goal—to become a real anime. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation, Sentai Filmworks -- 174,464 7.28
Sakamichi no Apollon -- -- MAPPA, Tezuka Productions -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Drama Josei Music Romance School -- Sakamichi no Apollon Sakamichi no Apollon -- Introverted classical pianist and top student Kaoru Nishimi has just arrived in Kyushu for his first year of high school. Having constantly moved from place to place since his childhood, he abandons all hope of fitting in, preparing himself for another lonely, meaningless year. That is, until he encounters the notorious delinquent Sentarou Kawabuchi. -- -- Sentarou's immeasurable love for jazz music inspires Kaoru to learn more about the genre, and as a result, he slowly starts to break out of his shell, making his very first friend. Kaoru begins playing the piano at after-school jazz sessions, located in the basement of fellow student Ritsuko Mukae's family-owned record shop. As he discovers the immense joy of using his musical talents to bring enjoyment to himself and others, Kaoru's summer might just crescendo into one that he will remember forever. -- -- Sakamichi no Apollon is a heartwarming story of friendship, music, and love that follows three unique individuals brought together by their mutual appreciation for jazz. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Sentai Filmworks -- 295,472 8.35
Zombieland Saga -- -- MAPPA -- 12 eps -- Original -- Comedy Music Supernatural -- Zombieland Saga Zombieland Saga -- Sakura Minamoto dreams of becoming an idol. Unfortunately, reality hits her like a truck, and she dies in a sudden traffic accident. Ten years later, she wakes up in Saga Prefecture, only to find herself a zombie with no memory of her past. While still coming to terms with her demise, she meets a man named Koutarou Tatsumi, who explains that he has resurrected her and six other zombie girls from different eras for the purpose of economically revitalizing Saga by means of an idol group. Assuming the role of an abrasive manager, Koutarou begins scheduling events; the girls go along with it, eventually deciding to name their idol group Franchouchou. -- -- An absurdly comedic take on the idol genre, Zombieland Saga tells the story of Franchouchou's heartwarming struggle to save Saga Prefecture while hiding their zombie identities and rediscovering their past lives. -- -- 343,170 7.52
Zombieland Saga -- -- MAPPA -- 12 eps -- Original -- Comedy Music Supernatural -- Zombieland Saga Zombieland Saga -- Sakura Minamoto dreams of becoming an idol. Unfortunately, reality hits her like a truck, and she dies in a sudden traffic accident. Ten years later, she wakes up in Saga Prefecture, only to find herself a zombie with no memory of her past. While still coming to terms with her demise, she meets a man named Koutarou Tatsumi, who explains that he has resurrected her and six other zombie girls from different eras for the purpose of economically revitalizing Saga by means of an idol group. Assuming the role of an abrasive manager, Koutarou begins scheduling events; the girls go along with it, eventually deciding to name their idol group Franchouchou. -- -- An absurdly comedic take on the idol genre, Zombieland Saga tells the story of Franchouchou's heartwarming struggle to save Saga Prefecture while hiding their zombie identities and rediscovering their past lives. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 343,170 7.52
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Accordion music genres
Acts of the Apostles (genre)
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Biblical genre
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Classical Chinese poetry genres
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Dying Earth genre
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Satellite Award for Best Television Series Genre
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Timeline of electronic music genres
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