Novel Quotes - Page 12

• I don't read novels that are looking to convince me of anything. I believe that literature needs to be a machine of illusions.

  Sergio Chejfec

  Believe, Literature, Illusion

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character. Then again, there is a huge gap between me as a person and what I do in the novel.

  Rachel Kushner

  Book, Character, Misconception

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The novel is a big space, and a lot can happen. Just think about the parts of your life. How do we account for our own contradictions? The only way to understand them is to let them exist, as truths that indicate something about character. People are built of elements that don't fit together - and the conflict of that is their essential drive.

  Rachel Kushner

  Character, Thinking, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off.

  Neil Gaiman

  Country, Writing, Weekend

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• To journalists my move from comics to films to best-selling novels was resembling those little evolutionary maps too much, where you see the fish, and then it can walk, and then it's an ape and then it gets up on its hind legs and finally it is a man. I didn't like that. I didn't like the fact that there was something rather amphibious about me - at least in their heads - back when I was writing comics. So I like continuing to write comics, if only because it points out that I haven't just started to walk upright or left the water.

  Neil Gaiman

  Moving, Writing, Men

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• I looked at the world of books and just went, Oh my gosh, if I'm writing novels, I'm on the same shelves as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Petronius - whereas with comics, they've only been doing them for a hundred years, and there's stuff that nobody's done before. I think I'll go off and do some of the stuff no one's ever done before.

  Neil Gaiman

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• You come out of the gate, you've got something new, you're subversive, nobody's ever done it before. But by your fifth novel and your fourth literary prize and your house in the country, can you really claim to be subversive?

  Daniel Mendelsohn

  Country, House, Done

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I would argue, for perspective's sake, that the arc of a really literary work is precisely that it both intensely reflects, and simultaneously transcends the conditions of its making. I would say that is the difference between literature and other kinds of writing. That is what the literary is - it ultimately doesn't matter what his circumstances were. And the thing that you were just saying about being sympathetic to Brontë and the fact that she could only write what she wrote when she wrote it... that's true. But look at that novel, which means so much to so many people.

  Daniel Mendelsohn

  Writing, Mean, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• We are living in an era of such interesting new forms, and certainly narrative non-fiction has emerged as a major form. People who are great writers don't have to write novels anymore.

  Daniel Mendelsohn

  Writing, People, Interesting

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Comics seldom move me the way I would be moved by a novel or movie. I say this as someone who would rather read comics than watch movies, listen to music, anything. But it's not an operatic medium. I hear other people talk about being moved to tears by comics. I can't imagine that.

  Daniel Clowes

  Moving, People, Tears

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I've never been that person who thought that because I've written one novel, I should write another and another. It's only when there was another novel to write that I was going to write another.

  Arundhati Roy

  Writing

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• Reading a novel is just a much more involving and intimate experience than the act of watching a film. I mean, you literally get inside of a novelist's head, and you invest many hours to do so.

  Jay McInerney

  Reading, Mean, Film

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Art is not politics. The glory of the novel is that in its essence, it is a democratic form, because it treats individuals as worthy of scrutiny. That alone is a kind of political act. A good novel about a tea party of rich women can be just as galvanizing and important to the soul as War and Peace, so I think it's not really the job of artists to do anything. They can have their opinions as private citizens, but they must continue making their art.

  Paul Auster

  Art, War, Thinking

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• I am a toggler. I always have three or four projects going, short stories alongside novels and essays. When one project is terrible, there's somewhere else hopeful to look.

  Samantha Hunt

  Hopeful, Terrible, Short Story

  Source: therumpus.net

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• My father thought a novel was a broken short story. There's something to that. Many of my favorite novels are novellas. The authors of brief things must reckon with the precision of language.

  Samantha Hunt

  Father, Broken, Language

  Source: therumpus.net

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• In writing I found a way to make silence and to be silent. The short story has a lot more silence than the novel and that is its success.

  Samantha Hunt

  Writing, Silence, Silent

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I've felt pressure to produce long fiction for as long as I've been writing fiction. There's just an incredible bias in the publishing industry toward novels and away from short stories. They're seen as D.O.A. in the marketplace, which seems nuts to me, given that various collections done smashingly and deservedly well in economic terms.

  Steve Almond

  Writing, Long, Done

  Source: www.popmatters.com

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• Much as I love stories, I think I'll only be satisfied with myself as a writer if I'm able to produce a novel that feels publishable. The books that truly take me away - for weeks at a time - are all novels.

  Steve Almond

  Book, Thinking, Love Story

  Source: www.popmatters.com

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• I want to view my own efforts to write a novel as a function of my own artistic aspirations rather than a good career move. And I need to learn how to commit to characters for a longer time, to confront the limits of my own capacities for attention and compassion. That's what a writing career does, in the best instance: it allows you to keep after what you can't do.

  Steve Almond

  Moving, Writing, Character

  Source: www.popmatters.com

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• In a way, I think that the movie Fight Club [1999] did a weird, negative thing to boxing, culturally. I mean, it is sort of similar to what has happened to the novel. For however many good novels are written, the novel itself has completely lost its place.

  James Toback

  Mean, Fighting, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I'm asked all the time, "Doesn't it feel great to finish the novel?" And the answer to that is, "No." It's sort of a loss to stop a 10-year project, which is an imaginary project in the sense that it's a work of my imagination. The people who I've lived with for 10 years in my imagination are now sort of defunct. To lose them is rather a mournful process - it's not a relief.

  Bob Shacochis

  Loss, People, Imagination

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• In a way, I feel that we're always connected, maybe you and me, we've been connected - not only now, but before. That's why we've crossed paths. And this manifests beautifully for me in fables, old television, novels in Thailand, but now we try to ignore these themes and stories. That's why now when we make "ghost" films, they have a certain stock quality to their effects, a certain formula, and I miss how it used to be.

  Apichatpong Weerasethakul

  Missing, Trying, Quality

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• In a general sense, to convert any short story, novel, play, or opera into a movie, you have to re-rig it. Even though they're all narratives over time, they're very different forms.

  Alexander Payne

  Different, Short Story

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• The better a novel is, in literary terms, the more you can't be faithful. The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many bad novels can become good movies.

  Alexander Payne

  Faithful, Good Movie, Literature

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I get letters from adults saying that they love the books because they are more in-depth with characterization than the comics. The luxury of writing a whole novel is you can really explore who the characters are.

  Lisa Yee

  Book, Writing, Character

  Source: www.hbook.com

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