Novelists Quotes - Page 23

• Most contemporary novelists, especially the American and the French, are too subjective, mesmerized by private demons; theyre enraptured by their navels and confined by a view that ends with their own toes.

  Truman Capote

  Views, Toes, Demon

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• When young people say I want to be a novelist, I'd say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few rewards, you probably won't make any money, you probably won't become famous, and you will spend your whole life locked up in a room by yourself worrying about how to survive.

  Paul Auster

  Thinking, People, Worry

  "A Connoisseur of Clouds, a Meteorologist of Whims: The Rumpus Interview with Paul Auster". Interview with Juliet Linderman, therumpus.net. November 16, 2009.

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• If you write a screenplay that gets circulated, you have a bigger readership than any literary novelist. And it's an educated audience as well.

  William Monahan

  Writing, Bigger, Educated

  Source: collider.com

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• A bonus, being a writer, is that the true-life source material is fabulously bizarre. There's so much corruption, violence and free-floating depravity that the well never runs dry, whether you're a novelist, a journalist, or both.

  Carl Hiaasen

  Running, True Life, Floating

  ""True-life Source Material Is Fabulously Bizarre" - Carl Hiaasen Answers Our Questions about "Razor Girl"". Interview with Adrian Liang, www.omnivoracious.com. September 08, 2016.

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• The novelist can't successfully depict such horrifying reality. But she can, and must, try, to bear witness. There are many ways of doing this; the mode I prefer is indirect.

  Teju Cole

  Reality, Trying, Way

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• There are so many other people involved in the making of a play or a television series or whatever... even if you're a novelist there's so much in just the marketing of a book, or even the time... the zeitgeist, the moment at which it comes out. There's a lot you can't control.

  Peter Morgan

  Book, Play, People

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• I read a lot of graphic novels - some of my favorites graphic novelists or artists are Rebecca Kraatz, Gabrielle Bell, Graham Roumieu, Tom Gauld, and Renee French.

  Matthea Harvey

  Artist, Bells, Graphic Novels

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• When you take a child who's hollering like hell, sit him on your knee, and say "once upon a time", you stop him hollering. As long as you go on telling him a story, he will listen. Novelists who neglect this fundamental effect do so at their peril. They become what is known as the experimental novelist, and an experimental novel is not really a novel at all.

  William Golding

  Children, Long, Once Upon A Time

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• I wrote four novels, but then I realized that the world didn't need me to be a novelist, but the world could use me as a nonfiction writer.

  David Quammen

  Needs, Use, World

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• If you want to understand human beings, there are plenty of people to go to besides psychologists.... Most of these people are incapable of communicating their knowledge, but those who can communicate it are novelists. They are good novelists precisely because they are good psychologists.

  Anthony Standen

  Communication, Science, People

  Anthony Standen (1950). “Science is a sacred cow”

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• I think, if you want to grow a novelist, for that person to have a lot of boring time trying to entertain themselves is very important.

  Ann Patchett

  Thinking, Important, Trying

  "Novelist Ann Patchett on how independent bookstores build community". "PBS Newshour", www.pbs.org. September 13, 2016.

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• In terms of style, I think the memoirist should have a novelist's skill and all the elements of a novelist's toolbox. When I read a memoir, I want to really, deeply experience what the author experienced. I want to see the characters and hear the way they speak and understand how they think. And so in that way, writing a memoir feels similar to writing a novel.

  Danielle Trussoni

  Character, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• When a novelist manages to describe or evoke something you thought or felt, without realizing that other people also found themselves in the same situation and had the same feelings, it creates that same solidarity. Maybe it's better to think of humor not as a tool to express the solidarity, but a kind of by-product. Maybe the realization "I'm not on my own on this one" is always, or often, funny.

  Elif Batuman

  Thinking, People, Feelings

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• At the meeting you behaves exactly as Marathi novelists of the last century tell is husbands do in sari shops.

  Sachin Kundalkar

  Husband, Sari, Lasts

  Sachin Kundalkar (2016). “Cobalt Blue: A Novel”, p.24, New Press, The

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• I couldn't be a novelist for instance. It feels like a very lonely endeavor. I don't know that I could survive the solitude of that.

  Brit Marling

  Lonely, Solitude, Endeavor

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I feel like the reason I ended up becoming a playwright is because I never choose the right word. As a kid, my fantasy profession was to be a novelist. But the thing about writing prose - and maybe great prose writers don't feel this way - but I always felt it was about choosing words. I was always like, "I have to choose the perfect word." And then it would kill me, and I would choose the wrong word or I would choose too many perfect words - I wrote really purple prose.

  Annie Baker

  Writing, Kids, Purple

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• In the end, of course, all novelists will be judged by their novels, but let's not forget that we will also need new ways of assessing the latter. There are people who will continue to write nineteenth-century novels in the early twenty-first, and even win major prizes for them, but that's not very interesting, intellectually or emotionally.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Writing, Winning, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

  Saul Bellow

  Hands, Feelings, Accepting

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• That's what a good crime novelist - any good novelist - should do with you: play with your perceptions while showing you everything in plain sight.

  Harlan Coben

  Sight, Play, Perception

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• I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Writing, Researchers

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• Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Fiction, Letters, Flesh

  Vladimir Nabokov (2012). “Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited”, p.206, Penguin UK

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• Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Literature, Losing, Kind

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.29, Macmillan

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• To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Character, Personality, True Life

  "A Reader’s Guide to the Recent Novels of Joyce Carol Oates". Interview, celestialtimepiece.com.

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• Love. Children are loving, they dont gossip, they dont complain, theyre just open-hearted. Theyre ready for you. They dont judge. They dont see things by way of color. Theyre very child-like. Thats the problem with adults: they lose that child-like quality. And thats the level of inspiration thats so needed and is so important for creating and writing songs and for a sculptor, a poet or a novelist. Its that same kind of innocence, that same level of consciousness, that you create from. And kids have it. I feel it right away from animals and children and nature. Of course.

  Michael Jackson

  Song, Children, Inspiration

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• The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party.

  Goldwin Smith

  Sympathy, Party, Humanity

  Goldwin Smith (1881). “Lectures and Essays”, New York : Macmillan

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