Novelists Quotes - Page 26

• A couple years ago, the novelist Russell Banks told me he was reading the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. I asked why. He said, 'Because I've always wanted to and am tired of having my reading assigned.' I thought it was a marvelous declaration of independence.

  Richard Russo

  Couple, Reading, Tired

  "Russo: Novelist, fan of first books". Interview with Amy Sutherland, www.boston.com. October 9, 2011.

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• I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

  Jose Saramago

  Poetic, Playwright, Essayists

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• People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.

  Iris Murdoch

  Passion, Character, Thinking

  "Fictional character: Iris Murdoch". "Iris", www.imdb.com. 2001.

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• My only passions were books and music. As you might guess, I led a lonely life… Not that I knew what I wanted in life - I didn’t. I loved reading novels to distraction, but didn’t write well enough to be a novelist; being an editor or a critic was out, too, since my tastes ran to the extremes. Novels should be for pure personal enjoyment, I decided, not part of your work or study. That’s why I didn’t study literature

  Haruki Murakami

  Lonely, Book, Reading

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• He didn't want her; he wanted me. Well, you know how it is." Dalgliesh did know. This, after all, was the commonest, the most banal of personal tragedies. You loved someone. They didn't love you. Worse still, in defiance of their own best interests and to the destruction of your peace, they loved another. What would half the world's poets and novelists do without this universal tragicomedy?

  P. D. James

  Love You, Tragedy, Half

  P.D. James (2015). “P. D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh Mysteries: Cover Her Face, A Mind to Murder, Unnatural Causes, Shroud for a Nightingale, The Black Tower, and Death of an Expert Witness”, p.807, Simon and Schuster

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• It is true that novelists are shameless and obey no decent law, and they are not to be trusted on any account, but some Mysteries even they must honor.

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Law, Honor, Mystery

  Catherynne M. Valente (2014). “The Fairyland Series”, p.205, Macmillan

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• I envied women with signature hair-dos, signature perfumes, signature sign-offs. Novelists who tell Vogue Magazine: “I can’t live without my Smythson notebook, Pomegranate Noir cologne by Jo Malone and Frette sheets”. In the grip of madness, materialism begins to look like an admirable belief system.

  Emma Forrest

  Notebook, Hair, Vogue Magazine

  Emma Forrest (2012). “Your Voice in My Head”, p.30, A&C Black

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• When the Irish novelist John McGahern was a child, his sisters unlaced and removed one of his shoes while he was reading. He did not stir. They placed a straw hat on his head. No response. Only when they took away the wooden chair on which he was sitting did he, as he puts it, 'wake out of the book'.

  Anne Fadiman

  Children, Book, Reading

  Anne Fadiman (2011). “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader”, p.13, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.

  Richard Powers

  Mother, Children, Spring

  Richard Powers (2009). “Generosity: An Enhancement”, p.166, Macmillan

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• Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists called a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake.

  Stella Gibbons

  Emotional, Rich, Curious

  Stella Gibbons (1977). “Cold comfort farm”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• At any rate, that’s how I started running. Thirty three—that’s how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. That age may be a kind of crossroads in life. That was the age when I began my life as a runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist.

  Haruki Murakami

  Running, Jesus, Real

  Haruki Murakami (2011). “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”, p.47, Random House

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• I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.

  Stephen King

  Writing, Thinking, Bullshit

  Stephen King (2000). “On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft”, p.20, Simon and Schuster

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• I didn't start running because somebody asked me to become a runner. Just like I didn't become a novelist because someone asked me to. One day, out of the blue, I wanted to write a novel. And one day, out of the blue, I started to run-simply because I wanted to. I've always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I'm wrong, but I won't change.

  Haruki Murakami

  Running, Writing, Blue

  FaceBook post by Haruki Murakami from Aug 21, 2015

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• While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

  Billy Collins

  Typewriters, Poet, Banging

  FaceBook post by Billy Collins from May 31, 2013

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• Not all novelists are power-hungry madman. Some are power-hungry madwomen.

  Pseudonymous Bosch

  Hungry, Madmen, Power Hungry

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• He looks like a man.' 'How descriptive,' Susan said in a droll tone. 'Remind me never to advise you to seek work as a novelist.

  Julia Quinn

  Men, Looks, Tone

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• I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.

  Francois Mauriac

  Believe, Firsts, Poet

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• A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

  David Foster Wallace

  Writing, Airplane, Next

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• The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross. The priest, the rabbi, the imam, the swami, the philosophical novelist were traffic cops, at best. They might direct you through a busy intersection, but they wouldn't follow you home and park your car.

  Tom Robbins

  Philosophical, Home, Thinking

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• A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist-- ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

  Jonathan Carroll

  Running, Writing, Ideas

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• A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.

  Jane Smiley

  Reading, Writing, Two

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• We must take our sentences seriously, which means we must understand them philosophically, and the odd thing is that the few who do, who take them with utter sober seriousness, the utter sober seriousness of right-wing parsons and political saviors, the owners of Pomeranians, are the liars who want to be believed, the novelists and poets, who know that the creatures they imagine have no other being than the sounding syllables which the reader will speak into his own weary and distracted head. There are no magic words. To say the words is magical enough.

  William H. Gass

  Liars, Mean, Wings

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• How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another's heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known? Even if the world's rich and powerful were to put themselves in the shoes of the rest, how much would they really understand the wretched millions suffering around them? So it is when Orhan the novelist peers into the dark corners of his poet friend's difficult and painful life: How much can he really see?

  Orhan Pamuk

  Crush, Pain, Powerful

  Orhan Pamuk (2011). “Snow”, p.266, Faber & Faber

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• Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Writing, People, Thank God

  Kurt Vonnegut (1999). “Breakfast of Champions: Or, Goodbye Blue Monday!”, CNIB, 197

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• The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party.

  Goldwin Smith

  Sympathy, Party, Humanity

  Goldwin Smith (1881). “Lectures and Essays”, New York : Macmillan

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