Novelists Quotes - Page 23

• The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

  John Banville

  Resilient, Novel

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• If you want to understand human beings, there are plenty of people to go to besides psychologists.... Most of these people are incapable of communicating their knowledge, but those who can communicate it are novelists. They are good novelists precisely because they are good psychologists.

  Anthony Standen

  Communication, Science, People

  Anthony Standen (1950). “Science is a sacred cow”

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• I think, if you want to grow a novelist, for that person to have a lot of boring time trying to entertain themselves is very important.

  Ann Patchett

  Thinking, Important, Trying

  "Novelist Ann Patchett on how independent bookstores build community". "PBS Newshour", www.pbs.org. September 13, 2016.

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• In terms of style, I think the memoirist should have a novelist's skill and all the elements of a novelist's toolbox. When I read a memoir, I want to really, deeply experience what the author experienced. I want to see the characters and hear the way they speak and understand how they think. And so in that way, writing a memoir feels similar to writing a novel.

  Danielle Trussoni

  Character, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I couldn't be a novelist for instance. It feels like a very lonely endeavor. I don't know that I could survive the solitude of that.

  Brit Marling

  Lonely, Solitude, Endeavor

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Obviously cheap sentimentality isn't something any good novelist wants to traffic in, but I think it's a problem if you consider it to be the most egregious of all creative sins. I think it's a problem if you consider it the thing to be avoided at all cost. I think it's a problem of you're not willing to risk the consequences of that kind of emotionalism under any circumstances. Then you wind up in the cul-de-sac of irony.

  Steve Erickson

  Thinking, Wind, Creative

  Source: therumpus.net

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• My job as the novelist is to present the whole case, then the reader gets to render her verdict.

  Joshua Mohr

  Jobs, Cases, Reader

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• When a novelist manages to describe or evoke something you thought or felt, without realizing that other people also found themselves in the same situation and had the same feelings, it creates that same solidarity. Maybe it's better to think of humor not as a tool to express the solidarity, but a kind of by-product. Maybe the realization "I'm not on my own on this one" is always, or often, funny.

  Elif Batuman

  Thinking, People, Feelings

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• At the meeting you behaves exactly as Marathi novelists of the last century tell is husbands do in sari shops.

  Sachin Kundalkar

  Husband, Sari, Lasts

  Sachin Kundalkar (2016). “Cobalt Blue: A Novel”, p.24, New Press, The

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• Art is created to make us, to make our passage through the world better, fruitful - and I would say that every story in the end, if it is good, tells us something. This is actually what I meant when I said a novelist is a teacher. Which is why I am constantly dealing with "didactic". Now a teacher in the sense I use it is not somebody who has the profession of standing in front of children, with a piece of chalk in his hand scribbling on the blackboard. That is not the teacher I have in mind. The teacher I have in mind is something less tangible.

  Chinua Achebe

  Teacher, Art, Children

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

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• A man I know who writes and aspires to be a novelist does very little reading, and he's not that successful. But I think it's because he's like the kid who wants to be a ballplayer and never goes to the ballpark or tries to hit a ball. So I'd say reading is the most important thing that I do, besides the actual writing. I'm always asking as I read, "How did the writer do this? Why do I suddenly have tears in my eyes? Why am I crying?"

  Robert Cormier

  Reading, Writing, Kids

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• I'm not a reader of young adult fiction for the simple reason that these novelists are writing for adolescents, so they are not writing for me.

  Robert Cormier

  Writing, Simple, Fiction

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• I feel like the reason I ended up becoming a playwright is because I never choose the right word. As a kid, my fantasy profession was to be a novelist. But the thing about writing prose - and maybe great prose writers don't feel this way - but I always felt it was about choosing words. I was always like, "I have to choose the perfect word." And then it would kill me, and I would choose the wrong word or I would choose too many perfect words - I wrote really purple prose.

  Annie Baker

  Writing, Kids, Purple

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.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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• Dickens didn't have access to any other epistemologies other than those prevailing in Britain. But a novelist today cannot plausibly claim ignorance of his society's manifold connections with the wider world, the fact that prosperity and security at home, for instance, often depend on extensive violence and exploitation abroad.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Home, Ignorance, Connections

  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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• Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time.

  J. J. Abrams

  Issues, Long, Stories

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.

  Martin Amis

  Curves, Careers, Usual

  Martin Amis (2001). “The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000”, Vintage

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• Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.

  Margaret Atwood

  Once Upon A Time, Century, Form

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• I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.

  Margaret Atwood

  Believe, Expression, Literature

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• Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.

  Russell Baker

  Literature, Trios, Sparkle

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• Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

  John Banville

  Philosopher, Wonderful, Hard

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• With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

  Saul Bellow

  Hands, Feelings, Accepting

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• And when I'd be reporting in Israel, Palestinians would say, the Jews they're not like us, and the Jews would say the same things about the Palestinians, they don't want what we want. And I never bought it as a reporter and I don't buy it as a novelist. I think, you know, the sound of somebody crying for their lost child sounds the same.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Children, Thinking, Israel

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