Novel Quotes - Page 9

• Often it's the latest novel that I've written that is my favourite. I'd been dreaming it for so long, living and breathing its story so that when it finally arrives as a newly published book, smelling wonderful and fresh out of the box, there is nothing like it.

  Michael Morpurgo

  Dream, Book, Breathing

  Source: www.altblackpool.co.uk

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• Talk about burning books and burning bushes, I think that reading an effective novel can be like being immersed in fire and emerging as something a little different.

  Suhayl Saadi

  Book, Reading, Thinking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• If you read many contemporary literary novels today, you may notice that regardless of the subject matter there's a 'sameness' about them, the way in which thoughts are expressed and ideas, conveyed, the sometimes dogmatic application of what are, at best, useful maxims such as, 'less is more', the narrative techniques utilised, even the same, irritating, stylistic devices scattered like pepper all over the pages.

  Suhayl Saadi

  Ideas, Technique, May

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Personally, I like the social novel. I like writing that gets in and under the hood and looks about - at what's going on. But I don't say to any writer that that's absolutely what they should do.

  Colum McCann

  Writing, Looks, Social

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Every aspect of the novel is - or should be - an arrow pointed towards its ultimate meaning, or a multiplicity of possible meanings. But I also value the readers' autonomy, their right to both read and misread.

  C.E. Morgan

  Arrows, Should, Aspect

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• From the beginning, I've stressed that home is something internal, invisible, portable, especially for those of us with roots in many physical places; we have to root ourselves in our passions, our values and our deepest friends. My home, I've always felt, lies in the songs and novels that I love, in the wife and mother that I'm never far away from, in the monastery to which I've been returning for 25 years.

  Pico Iyer

  Mother, Song, Lying

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• The novel is never really in the first draft. The novel really happens in the revisions.

  Tama Janowitz

  Revision, Firsts, Happens

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I think people assume that women write about the domestic sphere. Women write about relationships and family. Men do, too, but then it's the Great American Novel.

  Molly Ringwald

  Writing, Men, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Movies are explorations; they take you on a path, and I think it's always better if it's a path that you don't know, that takes twists and turns that you can't predict. That's what's entertaining about movies. That's what's entertaining about novels.

  Olivier Assayas

  Thinking, Twists, Path

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• A picture story just doesn't run like a film. It doesn't have 24 frames per second. It doesn't deal with this illusion of movement. It's more like if you did an illuminated novel. I think both of those things should be running at full blast, not less of both so it becomes an easier thing. I think it should be twice as dense. That's just what interests me.

  Ben Katchor

  Running, Thinking, Stories

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Really interesting novels, they always are so demanding of you on some level that you don't fall asleep.

  Ben Katchor

  Fall, Interesting, Levels

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I love to tell stories. I love to tell stories the way I tell them, not the way anybody else tells them. I am all the time writing a novel.

  Carmen Boullosa

  Writing, Stories, Way

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• In Catholicism, you learn to worship a superior god that creates, who organizes and creates. And when you do novels, you have this illusion that you are following the model of the creator, that you are playing the creator who has to organize that. It is a vice and a sin, and I like to sin. I'm a vicious person.

  Carmen Boullosa

  Vices, Worship, Sin

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think overtly political novels - those that never transcend or contest their author's conscious intentions and prejudices - are problematic. This is not just true of the innumerable unread books in the socialist realist tradition, but also of novels that carry the burden of conservative ideologies, like Guerrillas, Naipaul's worst book, where the author's disgust for a certain kind of black activist and white liberal is overpowering.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Book, Thinking, White

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Once you get past the grand normative claims made in the West for literature, especially the novel, in the post-Christian era - that it is a secular substitute for religion, hallmark of modern civilization, a priori liberal and cosmopolitan, with authors appearing to implicitly embody such pious ideals - you encounter a less agreeable reality: parochialism, blinkered views, even racial prejudices of the kind the bourgeoisie have held everywhere.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Christian, Past, Reality

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• No self-respecting feminist could argue with the claim that the novel is more likely to accept existing power structures than not. But there's a vast difference, surely, between Dickens saying Indians should be exterminated and a Dave Eggers writing eloquently about the NSA, but not being as outspoken on American military power abroad.

  Kamila Shamsie

  Military, Writing, Self

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• In the end, of course, all novelists will be judged by their novels, but let's not forget that we will also need new ways of assessing the latter. There are people who will continue to write nineteenth-century novels in the early twenty-first, and even win major prizes for them, but that's not very interesting, intellectually or emotionally.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Writing, Winning, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• In reggae I have a model of artistic excellence and possibility that is challenging and inspiring. The poem remains a demanding thing - an object to be understood and shaped into my own sense of self, the same is true of the play, the novel, the short story. Yet, for some reason, I approach these existing genres with the kind of confidence that the reggae artist approaches any song floating around out there.

  Kwame Dawes

  Song, Artist, Self

  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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• I don't want to name names because they'd be mad at me if I did, but people who are significant novelists can't get published by real publishers at this point, or have to go through two years of trying after writing a novel that's taken them five or six years and simply can't get the thing in print. Or it gets in print and it doesn't get reviewed in the New York Times Book Review and disappears without a trace. I mean, it's terrifying. I don't know how anybody can stand it. It's such an enormous amount of work and the economics of it are really quite brutal.

  Tony Kushner

  New York, Real, Book

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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 think that when you're writing plays, and I think it's also true with novels, it helps to have an ear for the music of language, for what we call poetry, for the sound effects and the way that the sound can produce sensual feeling at odds with or consonant with the content of the work. Your work is also gorgeous writing. It's very unfortunate when you open a novel that everybody's loving and it's just, you know, an excruciatingly bad sentence.

  Tony Kushner

  Writing, Thinking, Odds

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I've been thinking a lot about why it was so important to me to do The Idiot as a novel, and not a memoir. One reason is the great love of novels that I keep droning on about. I've always loved reading novels. I've wanted to write novels since I was little. I started my first novel when I was seven.I don't have the same connection to memoir or nonfiction or essays. Writing nonfiction makes me feel a little bit as if I'm producing a product I don't consume - it's a really alienating feeling.

  Elif Batuman

  Reading, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• The novel tradition is the closest thing I have to a religion, and being a part of that tradition means a lot to me. I don't really see - I never have seen - why I should have to forfeit that feeling, or hope, of belonging, just because the stories I want to tell are close to my own experience.

  Elif Batuman

  Mean, Feelings, Tradition

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• Writing fiction lets you be a little more emotional and unguarded, a little freer. Writing fictional characters is also really different from writing about real people. In nonfiction, you can only say so much about the people you interact with. After all, they're actual people, their version of their story trumps yours. In a novel, you can build a character, using certain parts or impressions of someone you know, and guessing or inventing others, without having to worry that your guesses or memories or inventions are wrong.

  Elif Batuman

  Memories, Real, Character

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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