Novelists Quotes - Page 38

• 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

• It's so easy to get into the same routine. A novel every two years; perhaps, improving technique. But I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in doing something fundamentally important--and therefore, it needs time. And what I've been doing, really, is avoiding this pressure to get into the habit of one novel a year. This is what is expected of novelists. And I have never been really too much concerned with doing what is expected of novelists, or writers, or artists. I want to do what I believe is important.

  Chinua Achebe

  Believe, Writing, Artist

  6 Copy quote

• The thought of the novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters or even in their introspection but in the plight he has invented for his characters - in the juxtaposition of those characters and in the lifelike ramifications of the ensemble they make: their density, their substantiality, their lived existence actualized in all its nuanced particulars, is in fact his thought metabolized.

  Philip Roth

  Lying, Character, Density

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is well to start by distinguishing the few really great - the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.

  F. R. Leavis

  Art, Way, Awareness

  1948 The Great Tradition, ch.1.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism.

  Italo Svevo

  Pillars, Proust, Endure

  6 Copy quote

• I'm a novelist at heart. How's that? And that's how I make my living, is I write novels.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Writing, Heart, Novel

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.

  Willa Cather

  Writing, Accomplishment, Modern

  Willa Cather (1988). “Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art”, p.40, U of Nebraska Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Children make better readers than adults. They read as carefully as I write; adults read as a means of getting off to sleep. I get letters saying 'I have read your book seventeen times.' If you're an adult novelist and you get that letter, you should be afraid. You're being stalked. Kids always read them seventeen times!

  Daniel Pinkwater

  Children, Book, Mean

  6 Copy quote

• Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Lying, Prophet, Predictions

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.8, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Usually when I drank too much, I could guess why I did so, the objective being to murder a state of consciousness that I didn't have the courage to sustain--a fear of heights, which sometimes during the carnival of the 1960s accompanied my attempts to transform the bourgeois journalist into an avant-garde novelist. The stepped-up ambition was a commonplace among the would-be William Faulkners of my generation; nearly always it resulted in commercial failure and literary embarrassment.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Ambition, Height, Too Much

  "The war on drugs and alcohol is a war against human nature" by Lewis Lapham, www.theguardian.com. December 10, 2012.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages - just don't catch him at breakfast. Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.

  Alan Bennett

  Husband, Father, Artist

  Alan Bennett (2009). “Alan Bennett Plays 2: Kafka's Dick; Insurance Man; Old Country; Englishman Abroad; Question of Attribution”, p.18, Faber & Faber

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.

  Marcel Proust

  Proust, Century, Twentieth Century

  Marcel Proust (1999). “The captive & the fugitive”

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The most original novelist now writing in English.

  Ivy Compton-Burnett

  Writing, Originals

  7 Copy quote

• Slowly, after dozens of rejection slips and failures and false starts and postponed dreams - what Langston Hughes called dreams deferred - I stepped onto the hallowed ground of being a published novelist, and then 15 years later, I even started to make real money.

  Anne Lamott

  Dream, Real, Years

  Anne Lamott (2006). “Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith”, p.304, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism.

  Camille Paglia

  Giving, Erotic, Energy

  "Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinso". Book by Camille Paglia, 1990.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, [so] I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Years, Play

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.49, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.

  Don DeLillo

  Periods

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.115, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Well, people have been wondering what's going to happen to the novel for two hundred years; its death has been announced many times. You know, I think the novel keeps redefining the world we live in. What you should look for in a novel is a window nobody else is looking out of, that nobody else can look through. What you look for is a voice. You pick up a novel by someone such as Faulkner or Hemingway and you just read three pages and you know who wrote it. And that's what one should demand of a novelist.

  Mordecai Richler

  Thinking, Years, Two

  9 Copy quote

• There is an enormous pressure placed on gay novelists because they are the only spokespeople. The novelist's first obligation is to be true to his own vision, not to be some sort of common denominator or public relations man to all gay people.

  Edmund White

  Gay, Men, People

  Publishers Weekly, September 24, 1982.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Just as we bemoan the passing away of the Great Novel, a great novelist is likely to emerge, perhaps even from Denmark or Switzerland, to prove us wrong.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Passing Away, Switzerland, Denmark

  4 Copy quote

• The lucidity of the battle narratives, the vigor of the prose, the strong feeling for the men from generals to privates who did the fighting, are all controlled by a constant sense of how it happened and what it was all about. Foote has the novelist's feeling for character and situation, without losing the historian's scrupulous regard for recorded fact. The Civil War is likely to stand unequalled.

  Walter Millis

  Strong, War, Character

  5 Copy quote