Novel Writing Quotes - Page 2

• The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.

  William Faulkner

  Dream, Writing, Artist

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• I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.

  Stephen King

  Writing, Character, Trying

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• Novel-writing can be a cold-blooded business. One uses whatever happens to be lying around in memory and employs it to suit one’s end….Then, again, during the months whilst one is writing about the past, a story is colored by what presently is happening to its writer. So, imperceptibly, the tone of voice changes, original intentions slip away. And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past.

  J. L. Carr

  Memories, Lying, Writing

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• Novel writing is the slowest art form in the world. It is not a sprint. It is not even a marathon. It is a series of marathons that stretch over and over across a continent.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Art, Writing, World

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• If you're a playwright, unless you're really lacking in get-up-and-go, you can always get your play up somewhere. You can't necessarily make a living doing it, but theater is about meeting an audience. Plays are not easier to write necessarily, they take less time to write. If you get them up, it's a much more rough-and-tumble kind of existence. I think it's, from my perspective, easier than novel writing.

  Tony Kushner

  Writing, Thinking, Play

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I certainly wake up every morning and thank God that I'm not a novelist because the theater is tough, but novel writing is infinitely harder. Especially with the economics of serious fiction being what they are in America.

  Tony Kushner

  Morning, Writing, America

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• A lot of novelists start late-Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.

  James M. Cain

  Writing, College, Typewriters

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• The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.

  Winifred Holtby

  Writing, Creation, Difficulty

  Winifred Holtby, Alice Holtby (1941). “Letters to a friend”

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• Novel writing is a kind of private pleasure, even if nothing comes of it in worldly terms.

  Barbara Pym

  Writing, Kind, Pleasure

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• NaNo[ National Novel Writing Month] is an awesome opportunity to stretch your writing muscles and gives you permission to write in a way you probably wouldn't do in a normal circumstance.

  Michelle J. Howard

  Writing, Opportunity, Giving

  Source: www.usatoday.com

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• A logic proof is: you get a starting point and an ending point, and you have to get there through all these different steps and tautologies. I approach novel writing that way. When I get to the end I have to go back and connect everything.

  Heidi Julavits

  Writing, Way, Steps

  "The Brilliant Complications Of Heidi Julavits". Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 28, 2012.

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• If I'm writing a novel, I'll probably get up in the morning, do email, perhaps blog, deal with emergencies, and then be off novel-writing around 1.00pm and stop around 6.00pm. And I'll be writing in longhand, a safe distance from my computer. If I'm not writing a novel, there is no schedule, and scripts and introductions and whatnot can find themselves being written at any time and on anything.

  Neil Gaiman

  Morning, Distance, Writing

  "Interview with Neil Gaiman". Writers and Artists Interview, www.writersandartists.co.uk.

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• Novel writing is solitary work.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Writing, Novel, Solitary

  Mohsin Hamid (2015). “Discontent and its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London”, p.59, Penguin

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• Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That's the way I do it, anyway.

  Joseph O'Neill

  Lying, Writing, Deception

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• Not getting bored of my own story and/or character is one of the main struggles I have had with novel writing, and I have put to bed big chunks of work that just didn't sustain my interest.

  Aimee Bender

  Struggle, Writing, Character

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• There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Writing, Literature, Tradition

  Interview with James Mustich, www.csmonitor.com. November 24, 2008.

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• I binge write. I think it's because I started seriously writing by participating in National Novel Writing Month, an online-based challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

  Erin Morgenstern

  Writing, Thinking, Challenges

  "Q&A with Erin Morgenstern: Author of The Night Circus". Interview With Jennifer Haupt, www.psychologytoday.com. August 20, 2012.

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• The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.

  Wilkie Collins

  Reading, Writing, Years

  Wilkie Collins (2014). “My Miscellanies”, p.60, The Floating Press

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• I love the sound of words, the feel of them, the flow of them. I love the challenge of finding just that perfect combination of words to describe a curl of the lip, a tilt of the chin, a change in the atmosphere. Done well, novel-writing can combine lyricism with practicality in a way that makes one think of grand tapestries, both functional and beautiful. Fifty years from now, I imagine I’ll still be questing after just that right combination of words.

  Lauren Willig

  Beautiful, Writing, Thinking

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• Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.

  C. S. Forester

  Writing, Novel, Knows

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• Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.

  Richard Power

  Writing, Novel, Stills

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• Novel writing is like heroin addiction; it takes everything you've got.

  James N. Frey

  Writing, Addiction, Heroin

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• Novel writing should never be confused with journalism. Unfortunately, in the case of Primary Colors, a fair number of journalists confused.

  Joe Klein

  Confused, Writing, Color

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• Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.

  Tom Perrotta

  Writing, Expression, Directors

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• Novel-writing is a settling, lovely space. I call it self-indulgent - I feel mildly guilty about it.

  Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  Writing, Self, Space

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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