Novel Quotes - Page 18

• It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.

  Piers Anthony

  Writing, Would Be, Fiction

  7 Copy quote

• The structure of my novels has nothing to do with the narrative mode of cinema. My novels would be very difficult to film without ruining them completely. I think this is the area where writers need to place ourselves: from a position of absolute modernity and contemporaneity, creating a culture of objects which cinema cannot.

  Agustin Fernandez Mallo

  Thinking, Culture, Film

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think like almost everything in evolution, the old forms persist. New forms come along - not always, of course; there are species and whole lineages that go extinct - but basically novels and plays, and so on, will continue to exist. Jokes, as the lowest-cost form of narrative, will certainly continue to exist. They're a bit like microbes in the biological world. They're low-cost and they're everywhere. They're the most successful form of life, even though they're not the ones we think about most.

  Brian Boyd

  Successful, Thinking, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are. No matter how hard I try to do otherwise, the books always wind up being "a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society."

  Ann Patchett

  Book, Thinking, Trying

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think about material that could work in the novel or story as I'm writing. I see if I can get there through what's happening with the character. But it's by inclination. It's not "At this moment this will happen." Usually with my characters you can't tell what has induced them to do anything. That's because, from my understanding of reality - which is always subjective - everything is overdetermined.

  Lynne Tillman

  Writing, Character, Reality

  Interview with James Yeh, believermag.com. January 1, 2018.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• As someone once said, covers to a novel are like bars to a cage. You can watch the tiger, the Komodo dragon, and admire it - its heart, its severity. Even when they carry out an ugly act, it's still fascinating.

  Martin Amis

  Heart, Ugly, Admire

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Steven Pinker says, the invention of printing and the widespread appearance of fiction -
  this taught empathy. If you read a novel, you're in someone else's head, in three, five different people's heads. Suddenly, the principle of "Don't do anything to anyone that you wouldn't want done to you" becomes real in people's minds. That's a fantastic achievement if fiction is indeed partly responsible for it. That's a great thing to be a part of. In the end, then, I don't know if writers have legislated, but they have civilized.

  Martin Amis

  Real, Achievement, Empathy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• I was working on a satirical novel about a charismatic preacher who takes over a small Indiana town. Then I remembered Jim Jones was from Indiana and Googled him. I learned that the FBI had recently released all the documents that agents collected from Jonestown after the massacre - over 50,000 pieces of paper and almost 1,000 audio tapes. I started reading the files and couldn't tear myself away; I find "true" stories inherently more powerful than fiction.

  Julia Scheeres

  Powerful, Reading, Tears

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I make up stories that take place in real space with real people. If I could convert this into a technique for experimental novels, I might really be onto something.

  John Darnielle

  Real, People

  Source: pitchfork.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I left university I was sure that I was going to be a painter. Then I had a crisis, a revelation. I saw Dolce Vita and my mind was blown by it, by the synthesis. I realised I wanted to be a filmmaker and started making films. I was writing screenplays and couldn't get money because my work was so uncommercial. I got married and started writing fiction. What was wonderful is that it gave me my freedom because no-one can tell me I can't work. Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.

  Rebecca Miller

  Writing, Discipline, Mind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• One of the things that's good for me is that I can go from one art form to another. Because I think if I had to write another novel now I would really not be good in my head anymore. It's too much. The frustration is so intense of knowing that this structure is right around the corner. Writing is a particular kind of frustration.

  Rebecca Miller

  Art, Writing, Frustration

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I had a series of terrible jobs, whatever would allow me to write for four hours during the day. During that time I wrote three novels - all of which were extraordinarily poor. I decided after that to go and get my MFA.

  Lauren Groff

  Writing, Hours, Poor

  4 Copy quote

• I've always relied on producing more material than I need. With each of my published novels I've written around four times the amount of material that's ended up in the book.

  Lauren Groff

  Book

  4 Copy quote

• It's more like I write multiple first drafts, handwritten. So with my first novel, I wrote whole drafts from different points of view. There are different versions of that novel in a drawer on loose-leaf sheets. I won't even look at the first draft while I'm writing the second, and I won't look at the second before writing the third.

  Lauren Groff

  Writing, Different, Point Of View

  4 Copy quote

• There are many people who get beat up, who suffer, who are victimized, and then they sit down to write and they write crap. How many of these graphic novels over the years are from really talented people? Most of them actually, if you look at them, are self-pitying confessionals about "poor me".

  Jules Feiffer

  Writing, People, Suffering

  5 Copy quote

• There are story-room sessions where you think about the big picture, like a novel, but once you have certain things in place, you have to treat each episode like an hour of TV, and think that maybe this will be the only episode that anyone will ever watch. You want to have some sort of beginning, middle, and end to the episode, even if you have storylines that are carrying over. You still want it to feel like a cohesive hour of entertainment. And you can't think about both at the same time.

  Shawn Ryan

  Thinking, Over You, Hours

  4 Copy quote

• I often ask myself: "What would Theodore Roosevelt do?" One can never know, of course. The ultimate contribution of consequential leaders is often their capacity to reframe issues in novel ways. That said, his leadership engaged, at a foundational level, whether the American "national character" would accept decline and mediocrity, or would go all-in for leadership and excellence. Amid the myriad of otherwise disconnected issues before us, that choice is emerging yet again.

  James M Strock

  Character, Choices, Leader

  4 Copy quote

• Whereas if you're a reader, you can enter other people's minds, you can be in direct contact with people who may have lived hundreds or thousands of years ago. You can know what's like to be old if you're young or young if you're old. You can know what it's like to live in a completely different culture and really enter somebody else's mind. There's no amount of historical information that can give you access to the consciousness of a person from another culture or from the past in the way that reading really good novel from that place or time can.

  Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Reading, Past, Giving

  4 Copy quote

• You want to make entertainment sometimes, and sometimes you want to make art, because I think the way we understand ourselves as human beings is through art, and the way we process emotions - I know I do - is through recognizing experiences on screen, or in novels, or in paintings.

  Rosamund Pike

  Art, Thinking, Emotion

  8 Copy quote

• Inspiration is everywhere - film, television, newspapers, novels, overheard conversations, whatever you can tap into. It's out there, and I've been at this long enough to know that it won't always just come to me; sometimes I have to go get it.

  Kasey Anderson

  Inspiration, Long, Sometimes

  4 Copy quote

• In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending. So for much of the period in which I'm writing, I'm waiting to understand what's going to happen next, and how and where it's going to happen. In some cases, fairly early in the process, I do know how a book will end. But most of the time, not at all, and in this particular case, many questions are still unanswered, even though I've been working for months.

  Don DeLillo

  Book, Writing, Waiting

  "Living in dangerous times". Interview with Kevin Nance, articles.chicagotribune.com. October 12, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There's no lack of writers writing novels in America, about America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that huge number of people writing here when there are so few people writing about somewhere else.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Somewhere Else, Numbers

  4 Copy quote

• The novels I love, the ones I remember, the ones I re-read, have an empathetic human quality, or 'emotional truth'. This quality is difficult to fully define, but I always recognise it when I see it: it is different from honesty and more resilient than fact, something that exists not in the kind of fiction that explains but in the kind that shows.

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  Honesty, Emotional, Quality

  53 Copy quote

• I find interesting characters or lessons that resonate with people and sometimes I write about them in the sports pages, sometimes I write them in a column, sometimes in a novel, sometimes a play or sometimes in nonfiction. But at the core I always say to myself, 'Is there a story here? Is this something people want to read?'

  Mitch Albom

  Sports, Writing, Character

  6 Copy quote

• I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

  Fred Allen

  Funny, Writing, Years

  19 Copy quote