Novelists Quotes - Page 22

• The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment.

  Matthew Specktor

  Impediments

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Radio is the medium that most closely approximates the experience of reading. As a novelist, I find it very exciting to be able to reach people who might not ever pick up one of my books, either because they can't afford it (as is often the case in Latin America), or because they just don't have the habit of reading novels.

  Daniel Alarcon

  Latin, Book, Reading

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Radio, or at least the kind of radio we're proposing to do, can cut through that. It can reach people who would otherwise never hear your work, and of course I find that very notion inspiring. Radio stories are powerful because the human voice is powerful. It has been and will continue to be the most basic element of storytelling. As a novelist (and I should note that working my novel is the first thing I do in the morning and the very last thing I do before I sleep), shifting into this new medium is entirely logical. It's still narrative, only with different tools.

  Daniel Alarcon

  Morning, Powerful, Sleep

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I always have done work on mythic relations since I started writing. I really want to be a novelist, or at least a writer of imaginative work... I do try to make my critical studies imaginative and try to write them in ways that are more like literature than philosophy, but I have disappointed myself because I am still so wedded to criticism.

  Marina Warner

  Philosophy, Writing, Criticism

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Teaching high school was my real training as a novelist: it got me out of my head, and (at least a little) out of books, and invested me in the lives of others and the world around me.

  Garth Greenwell

  Real, Book, Teaching

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!

  Alexander Chee

  Identity, I Realized

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Novelists who get shitty about screenwriting invariably can't do it, or they can't hack it in the world of what's really, in truth, very bold and very public enterprise.

  William Monahan

  World, Enterprise, Screenwriting

  Source: collider.com

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• If you write a screenplay that gets circulated, you have a bigger readership than any literary novelist. And it's an educated audience as well.

  William Monahan

  Writing, Bigger, Educated

  Source: collider.com

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• The novelist loses, every time. Politics is insidious, the modern conduct of war (from shoulder-launched rockets to drone strikes) is insidious. Someone presses a button in California and twenty people are incinerated at a wedding in Pakistan. The killer is spared the sight of the corpses.

  Teju Cole

  War, California, Sight

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The novelist can't successfully depict such horrifying reality. But she can, and must, try, to bear witness. There are many ways of doing this; the mode I prefer is indirect.

  Teju Cole

  Reality, Trying, Way

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• As a novelist you have just unlimited budget, total creative control. You really get to have your cake - all the cake - and then you can have a second cake if you wanted to.

  Naomi Novik

  Cake, Creative, Unlimited

  Source: www.wbur.org

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• I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.

  Steve Erickson

  Thinking, Vices, Vice Versa

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• There are so many other people involved in the making of a play or a television series or whatever... even if you're a novelist there's so much in just the marketing of a book, or even the time... the zeitgeist, the moment at which it comes out. There's a lot you can't control.

  Peter Morgan

  Book, Play, People

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• I think it's the source material. 27 Dresses was a famous book, and Devil Wears Prada was also a wonderful book, so it's coming out of the novelists who are really creating these wonderful female characters that we want to see on the big screen.

  Jerry Bruckheimer

  Book, Character, Thinking

  "Confessions of a Shopaholic". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, "Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry."

  Edward Hirsch

  Writing, Bookstores, Questions And Answers

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• I just read about John Le Carre, the great spy novelist. He had an absolutely miserable childhood. His mother deserted him when he was young. His father was a playboy and a drunk. He was shifted around to many different homes. He knew he was a writer when he was about nine, but he was dyslexic. So here was a person with an absolutely messed-up childhood and a symptom that prevented him from doing what he wanted to do most. Yet that very symptom was part of the calling. It forced him to go deeper.

  James Hillman

  Mother, Father, Home

  Source: scottlondon.com

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• I read a lot of graphic novels - some of my favorites graphic novelists or artists are Rebecca Kraatz, Gabrielle Bell, Graham Roumieu, Tom Gauld, and Renee French.

  Matthea Harvey

  Artist, Bells, Graphic Novels

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• Charlie Huston, who showran the first season [of Powers], is a novelist, and likes to internalize fiction as a novelist does.

  Brian Michael Bendis

  Doe, Fiction, Likes

  Source: www.hitfix.com

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• Since I was a kid. I had this series by Ballantine Books about the history of World Wars I and II. In my 20s, it was the Vietnam War literature of novelists like Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, and Tobias Wolff, and then nonfiction such as "A Bright Shining Lie" by Neil Sheehan and "The Best and Brightest" by David Halberstam . Those are the two best histories of Vietnam.

  George Packer

  Lying, War, Book

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• The novel is very much alive, indeed. In Toronto at the Sixth Annual International Festival of Authors (October 1985) I listened to novelists by the dozen.

  William Golding

  Toronto, Alive, Dozen

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• When you take a child who's hollering like hell, sit him on your knee, and say "once upon a time", you stop him hollering. As long as you go on telling him a story, he will listen. Novelists who neglect this fundamental effect do so at their peril. They become what is known as the experimental novelist, and an experimental novel is not really a novel at all.

  William Golding

  Children, Long, Once Upon A Time

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• I wrote four novels, but then I realized that the world didn't need me to be a novelist, but the world could use me as a nonfiction writer.

  David Quammen

  Needs, Use, World

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• I am a novelist at heart.

  Vera Nazarian

  Heart

  Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

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• A bonus, being a writer, is that the true-life source material is fabulously bizarre. There's so much corruption, violence and free-floating depravity that the well never runs dry, whether you're a novelist, a journalist, or both.

  Carl Hiaasen

  Running, True Life, Floating

  ""True-life Source Material Is Fabulously Bizarre" - Carl Hiaasen Answers Our Questions about "Razor Girl"". Interview with Adrian Liang, www.omnivoracious.com. September 08, 2016.

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• When I was fifteen I wrote seven hundred pages of an incredibly bad novel - it's a very funny book I still like a lot. Then, when I was nineteen I wrote a couple hundred pages of another novel, which wasn't very good either. I was still determined to be a writer. And since I was a writer, and here I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.

  Edward Albee

  Couple, Book, Writing

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.49, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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