Novelists Quotes - Page 29

• I think of a designer as a processor of information — like a scriptwriter or a novelist.

  Freeman Thomas

  Thinking, Information, Designer

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• There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.

  A. S. Byatt

  School, Writing, Artist

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• Whether you're an unpublished novelist or a sixteen-time New York Times bestselling author, you can always improve your craft. You can always become a better writer.

  Robert Dugoni

  New York, Writing, Crafts

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• Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

  George Saintsbury

  Missing, Ordinary, Infinite

  George Saintsbury (2012). “The English Novel”, p.234, tredition

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• The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)

  Philip Wylie

  Book, League, May

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• I’ve had the pleasure of hearing The Novelists perform live.  They are gifted songwriters and talented musicians with strong lead voices. This is a band with lots of heart & soul.

  Daryl Stuermer

  Strong, Heart, Voice

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• Some Pulitzer winners - novelists - have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn't been my experience.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Success, Winner, Prize

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• A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.

  Mary McCarthy

  Elephants, Forget

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• All kinds of mysterious phenomena exist in this world, but answers to most of them have come with advances in scientific knowledge. Love is the sole holdout-nothing can explain it. A Chinese writer by the name of Ah Cheng wrote that love is just a chemical reaction, an unconventional point of view that seemed quite fresh at the time. But if love can be controlled and initiated by means of chemistry, then novelists would be out of a job. So while he may have had his finger on the truth, I'll remain a member of the loyal opposition.

  Mo Yan

  Jobs, Mean, Love Is

  Mo Yan (2013). “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out: A Novel”, p.597, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• ..there is need for a person to be generally educated. Otherwise you shrivel up much too soon. Whether this means reading the bible (I read the New Testament every few years) or reading the great 19th century novelists (the greatest and shrewdest judge of people and of society who ever lived), or classical philosophy (which I cannot read-it puts me to sleep immediately), or history (which is secondary). What matters is that the knowledge worker, by the time he or she reaches middle age, has developed and nourished a human being rather than a tax accountant or a hydraulic engineer.

  Peter Drucker

  Education, Business, Philosophy

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• I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.

  Leslie Fiedler

  People, Firefighter, Want

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• We tend to overestimate what we can do in a short period, and underestimate what we can do over a long period, provided we work slowly and consistently. Anthony Trollope, the nineteenth-century writer who managed to be a prolific novelist while also revolutionizing the British postal system, observed, “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.” Over the long run, the unglamorous habit of frequency fosters both productivity and creativity.

  Gretchen Rubin

  Running, Creativity, Daily Tasks

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• I’d like to be remembered as someone who used their ability as a novelist or as a dramatist to say the things he felt needed to be said about the society while being as entertaining as possible. Because if you don’t entertain, nobody’s listening.

  Budd Schulberg

  Listening, Used, Said

  "Budd Schulberg, 'On the Waterfront' Writer, Dies at 95" by Tim Weiner, www.nytimes.com. August 5, 2009.

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• Listening is crucial for any novelist. Stories & ideas abound. We too often talk about ourselves & block out the richness others may offer.

  Mark Rubinstein

  Block, Ideas, Listening

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• Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.

  Janet Malcolm

  Heart, Giving, Resistance

  Janet Malcolm (2013). “The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes”, p.70, Vintage

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• They (the novelists) became the voice of the citizen against the ubiquitous raison d'état, which reappeared endlessly to justify everything from unjust laws and the use of child labour to incompetent generalship and inhuman conditions on warships.
  The themes they popularized have gradually turned into the laws which, for all their flaws, have improved the state of man.

  John Ralston Saul

  Children, Men, Voice

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• The Novelist, afraid his ideas may be foolish, slyly puts them in the mouth of some other fool and reserves the right to disavow them.

  Diane Johnson

  Ideas, Mouths, May

  Diane Johnson (1982). “Terrorists and novelists”, Alfred A. Knopf

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• What a joy it is to read a book that shocks one into remembering just how high one's literary standards should be.... a tour de force by one of England's best novelists.... Atonement is a spectacular book; as good a novel - and more satisfying... - than anything McEwan has written....sublimely written narrative.... The Dunkirk passage is a stupendous piece of writing, a set piece that could easily stand on its own.

  Noah Richler

  Book, Writing, Joy

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• The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them.

  Anais Nin

  Writing, Alcohol, Live In The Moment

  "Woman As Writer" by Jeannette L. Webber and Joan Grumman, (p. 42), 1978.

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• By the respectable terms of the modern literary profession, novelists do not preach. And, in fact, there has probably not been a less respectable novelist among the irrefutably enduring writers of our time than Ayn Rand: philosopher queen of the best-seller lists in the forties and fifties, cult phenomenon and nationally declared threat to public morality in the sixties, guru to the Libertarians and to White House economic policy in the seventies, and a continuing exemplar or Wilde's tragic observation that more than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

  Claudia Roth

  Queens, White, House

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• The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.

  John Dos Passos

  Book, Writing, Reality

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

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• It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Artist, Years, May

  Evelyn Waugh (1958). “The world of Evelyn Waugh”

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• I'm more influenced by novelists than I am by filmmakers.

  Billy Bob Thornton

  Filmmaker

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Great novelists are philosopher novelists - that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.

  Albert Camus

  Writing, Philosopher, Argument

  "Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus)". Book by Albert Camus (Chapter 1: An Absurd Reasoning), 1955.

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• Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither Age nor Custom could do anything (as they said, their voices rising) with the American novelist Gertrude Johnson.

  Randall Jarrell

  Voice, Age, Gertrude

  Randall Jarrell (2010). “Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy”, p.9, University of Chicago Press

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