Novel Quotes - Page 17

• I feel that Pride and Prejudice is an incredibly well constructed novel on every level. The dialogue is great. The character development is great. The plotting is great. The pacing is great. The language is great.

  Curtis Sittenfeld

  Character, Pride, Prejudice

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• These little books I write, such as The End of Freedom, about the post-9/11 political climate in the United States, sell in the hundreds of thousands of copies. Whereas, I hear novels on marriage are not selling. This is perhaps not the judgment of God, but it is certainly that of history.

  Gore Vidal

  Book, Writing, Political

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The thing is, for me, as a fiction writer, I don't think there's a finer testament to our lives than this thing that's being spurned - the emotional intelligence, the ethics, the beauty. It's all there. It's all so fully contained in a novel that succeeds. But at the same time, I understand the impulse to put away childish things.

  Joshua Ferris

  Emotional, Thinking, Succeed

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I think comedy is so much easier to do on the page than it is in real life. When I'm writing, comedy is an easy way to win over the reader. You're automatically more disposed to keep reading, thinking maybe, "I'll get another laugh or two." I think it's a survival instinct in me. I mean, you don't want to lose these guys within five or ten pages. You want them to keep going. I think to some extent it's a desperate measure that I throw out there, because a novel isn't a complete waste of time if it made you laugh.

  Joshua Ferris

  Real, Reading, Mean

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The difference does not lie in the things that news does that novels do not do, but in the things that novels do that news cannot do. In other words, this basic technique of news - just one among many - is something a novel can use, but a novel can deploy a multitude of other techniques also. Novels are not bound by the rules of reportage. Far from it. They're predicated on delivering experience.

  Zia Haider Rahman

  Lying

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• By delivering experience, novels can alter the stance we adopt toward news - not much, I'm sure, but they can make it a little more difficult for us to consign "other people" to our tidy boxes. Widening our imaginative life might - it's not hard to imagine - also develop our ability to contemplate counterfactuals and our capacity to speculate about how things might differ from how they're being represented.

  Zia Haider Rahman

  People, Imagine, Difficult

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Somehow, in the novel format, I don't really like to do upfront, ideological discussion. In my heart, literature remains a poetic and ambiguous medium. On the other hand, I trained as a documentary filmmaker in film school, so my films very much reflect reality and socio-political problems. They're less subtle I would say.

  Xiaolu Guo

  Heart, School, Reality

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Listening to people discussing a novel can be very interesting, if you've read whatever novel is being discussed. No one, it seems, ever says, "This is a great book but I didn't like it." Taking a little time to think about why this might be has been very liberating.

  Zia Haider Rahman

  Book, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Novels need readers of a certain kind, people who are patient and enjoy immersing themselves in another perspective for uninterrupted stretches of time. Reading habits might well be changing. People who pay for novels might overlap significantly with those who engage in Twitter and Facebook.

  Zia Haider Rahman

  Reading, People, Perspective

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There was a period of a few months, however, when I had a dreadful physical pain. I had just started writing a particular section of the novel and was initially worried that it would affect my work. I was woken by awful nightmares; I saw several doctors, tests were performed, nothing came of them, and the medics were mystified.It was two days after I finished writing the section that the penny dropped. The pain had suddenly disappeared and so too had the nightmares. I'd got things muddled. The pain and the nightmares were both psychosomatic.

  Zia Haider Rahman

  Pain, Writing, Nightmare

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Writing fiction, for me, is a more indirect form of self-exploration than writing verse. When I'm working on a novel I'm moving characters around and I'm thinking about plot and there's a lot of other things going on at the level of structure and story. With a poem, a single idea or line or emotion can sometimes be enough - there's often a sense, in the best poems, of capturing a single instant. Perhaps poems differ from prose in the degree of solace they can offer - by speaking so personally, so directly, about shared experience. A few lines of poetry can provide comfort.

  Nick Laird

  Moving, Writing, Character

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• When I was a kid, I'd go to the African-American section in the bookstore, and I'd try and find African-American people I hadn't read before. So in that sense the category was useful to me. But it's not useful to me as I write. I don't sit down to write an African-American zombie story or an African-American story about elevators. I'm writing a story about elevators which happens to talk about race in different ways. Or I'm writing a zombie novel which doesn't have that much to do with being black in America. That novel is really about survival.

  Colson Whitehead

  Writing, Kids, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I'm trying to keep it fresh for me. I'm just trying to not bore myself. And if I can do a detective novel, and if I can do a horror novel, then why do it again? To keep the work challenging I have to keep moving.

  Colson Whitehead

  Moving, Challenges, Trying

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I was a lot dumber when I was writing the novel. I felt like worse of a writer because I wrote many of the short stories in one sitting or over maybe three days, and they didn't change that much. There weren't many, many drafts. That made me feel semi-brilliant and part of a magical process. Writing the novel wasn't like that. I would come home every day from my office and say, "Well, I still really like the story, I just wish it was better written." At that point, I didn't realize I was writing a first draft. And the first draft was the hardest part.

  Miranda July

  Home, Writing, Office

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Writing a novel was like I had some Play-Doh to work with and could just keep working with it - doing a million drafts and things changing radically and characters appearing and disappearing and solving mysteries: Why is this thing here? Should I just take that away? And then realizing, no, that is there, in fact, because that is the key to this. I love that sort of detective work, keeping the faith alive until all the questions have been sleuthed out.

  Miranda July

  Writing, Character, Things Change

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When I decided to write a novel about Istanbul, I thought I should put the different faces of Istanbul into one book. I also put the characters in a cell, and it's three stories underground, rather than on the surface. The characters have one Istanbul, the other one is above ground. One is in dark, one is in light. That kind of contradiction - those opposite sides - creates a great energy in Istanbul.

  Burhan Sonmez

  Book, Character, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I've written some short stories about my personal experience, but it's not something you can use everywhere. Every novel, every work of fiction, needs its own food.

  Burhan Sonmez

  Short Story

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It's like, symbolic language, the way that people approach dense poetry... it always bugs me, because that approach suggests that it's like a mystery novel, and that if you can put together the clues, you can come up with one singular answer.

  Carey Mercer

  People, Together, Language

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• Some people think that Southern hip-hop doesn't have any depth. They think it's just noise, all about people having a good time in the club. And some of it doesn't have a lot of depth, it's true, but some does. I wanted to work against that stereotype. These are verses by Southern artists who are really wrestling with what it means to be here, young black men who are trying to figure out how to live in the South. So I wanted the epigraphs in my novels to reflect that.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Mean, Wrestling, Artist

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• As to the "traditional filler of twenty-first century realist fiction," maybe that is something I avoid. I don't relate to standard psychologizing in novels. I don't really believe that the backstory is the story you need. And I don't believe it's more like life to get it - the buildup of "character" through psychological and family history, the whole idea of "knowing what the character wants." People in real life so often do not know what they want. People trick themselves, lie to themselves, fool themselves. It's called survival, and self-mythology.

  Rachel Kushner

  Real, Lying, Believe

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think of myself as a narrative artist. I don't think of myself as a novelist or screenwriter or playwright. All of those modalities of processing and experiencing narrative are obviously very different, and I'm not sure that I prefer any one to the other. I think the novel gives you the opportunity to have a kind of interiority that you can't have in the theater, which is pure exteriority.

  Ayad Akhtar

  Artist, Opportunity, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I never feel a huge need for backstory in my novels or films. Quick sketches are often enough. When you encounter people in life - like a chance encounter at a bar or wherever you happen to be - you make these incredibly quick, quite intricate decisions about people based on very small amounts of coded information. We're good at that. Long descriptions prior to meeting someone or as you're getting to know them almost don't work.

  Alex Garland

  Long, People, Decision

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• There's one massive problem with coming from writing novels into screenplays that I've discovered over the years, which is that you've got too much facility on the page. In novels, you can persuade people of things that work that don't really work.

  Alex Garland

  Writing, People, Problem

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When parents want you to do really well academically, they want to avoid you getting into anything that would distract you - you know, rock and roll music, or really serious, long novels that you get so absorbed in, you forget to study.

  Jenova Chen

  Long, Parent, Serious

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• If there's one thing that can save the novel, it is to make it independent of cinema, to narrate in a way that cinema can never narrate, using to its benefit those particular characteristics which belong to writing.

  Agustin Fernandez Mallo

  Writing, Independent

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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