Novelists Quotes - Page 37

• A novelist must know what his last chapter is going to say and one way or another work toward that last chapter. ... To me it is utterly basic, yet it seems like it's a great secret.

  Leon Uris

  Secret, Way, Lasts

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?

  Jonathan Franzen

  Energy, Culture, Crisis

  Jonathan Franzen (2007). “How to Be Alone: Essays”, p.65, Macmillan

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.

  Yann Martel

  Communication, Pages

  "Life of Pi author Yann Martel: 'Overall, I think it's a wonderful companion piece'". Interview with Mark Medley, nationalpost.com. November 21, 2012.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Writing a novel is a very hard thing to do because it covers so long a space of time, and if you get discouraged it is not a bad sign, but a good one. If you think you are not doing it well, you are thinking the way real novelists do. I never knew one who did not feel greatly discouraged at times, and some get desperate, and I have always found that to be a good symptom.

  Maxwell Perkins

  Real, Writing, Thinking

  28 Copy quote

• Two things a novelist can do with a hat: Talk through it or pull a rabbit from it.

  Peter S. Prescott

  Two, Rabbits, Bunnies

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• With a novelist's sense of drama and a historian's understanding of the social forces that shape our lives, Tom Gjelten has captured vividly -- through the chronicle of a powerful family's fortunes -- one of the great political dramas of our time.

  Ronald Steel

  Powerful, Drama, Political

  5 Copy quote

• Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Men, Originals

  "History as a System". Book by José Ortega y Gasset, 1962.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.

  E. M. Forster

  Character, Fighting, Artist

  E. M. Forster (1987). “Commonplace Book”, p.151, Stanford University Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Sometimes I think some of my fellow novelists who have not worked in television and film are very naive about this process. They get an offer and there's the dump truck full of money and they sign it, they cash the check and then they're not involved in the series. They may get invited to the premiere and they come out of the premiere looking like all of their children had just been gassed, with a stunned look on their face because everything has been changed.

  George R. R. Martin

  Children, Thinking, Looks

  YouTube Channel "Talks at Google"/"George R.R. Martin", www.youtube.com. August 06, 2011.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm a novelist who read a lot as a kid. When you grow up on books and then grow up to write books, famous authors are a lot more meaningful to you than TV and movie stars.

  Bill Vaughan

  Meaningful, Stars, Growing Up

  4 Copy quote

• When it [truth] emerges it often bears out the saying that 'truth is stranger than fiction.' A novelist has to appear plausible, and would hesitate to make use of such astounding contradictions as occur in history through some extraordinary accident or twist of psychology .

  Bill Vaughan

  Psychology, Twists, Fiction

  4 Copy quote

• There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.

  John Dos Passos

  Writing, Character, Autobiography

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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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”

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.

  John Dos Passos

  Character, Records, Phases

  "The Business of a Novelist". review of William Rollins's The Shadow Before, 1934.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Billy Bob Thornton

  Filmmaker

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think novelists perform many useful tasks for their fellow citizens, but one of the most valuable is this: to enable us to see ourselves as others see us.

  Doris Lessing

  Thinking, Tasks, Citizens

  Doris Lessing (2013). “Prisons We Choose to Live Inside”, p.7, Harper Collins

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?

  Randall Jarrell

  Mean, Moral, Imperfect

  Randall Jarrell (2010). “Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy”, p.8, University of Chicago Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Novelists are people who have discovered that they can dampen their neuroses by writing make-believe. We will keep on doing that no matter what, while offering loftier explanations.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Believe, Writing, Offering

  4 Copy quote

• Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Real, Study, Should

  Charlotte Bronte (2009). “The Professor: Easyread Super Large 24pt Edition”, p.87, ReadHowYouWant.com

  5 Copy quote

  Show source