Novelists Quotes - Page 28

• Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write.

  Michael Cunningham

  Book, Writing, Secret

  "Found in Translation". www.nytimes.com. October 2, 2010.

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• Both the historian and the novelist view history as the struggle of a tiny minority, able and determined to make judgments, which is up against a vast and densely packed majority of the blind, who are led by their instincts and unable to think for themselves.

  Lion Feuchtwanger

  Struggle, Thinking, Views

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• I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist

  Alice Hoffman

  Writing, Different, Film

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• I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime novelist who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.

  James Ellroy

  Crime Novels, Fiction, Masters

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• A whim, a passing mood, readily induces the novelist to move hearth and home elsewhere. He can always plead work as an excuse to get him out of the clutches of bothersome hosts.

  C. S. Forester

  Moving, Home, Host

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• Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.

  Fay Weldon

  Fall, Support, Chaos

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• I'm not a novelist, I'm a storyteller. There is no art in what I do, no mystique.

  Alistair Maclean

  Art, Storyteller, Mystique

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• Good girls like myself need subversion. Being solemn, I aspire to comedy. Being a novelist, I aspire to the musical. Being organized, I aspire to luminous chaos. Loving the power of grammar and the fine distinctions of language, I seek the part of the mind I didn't know was there, the part 'sheer,' 'no-manfathomed,' 'cliffs of fall.

  Janet Burroway

  Girl, Fall, Musical

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• I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think and novelists to see what I could get away with.

  Christopher Hampton

  Lying, Thinking, Deception

  "Dangerous Liaisons". www.imdb.com. 1988.

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• You tell me your favorite novelists and I'll tell you whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all.

  Stephen Vizinczey

  Vote, Your Favorite

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• I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

  Sarah Zettel

  Science, Stories, Fiction

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• I think of a designer as a processor of information — like a scriptwriter or a novelist.

  Freeman Thomas

  Thinking, Information, Designer

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• Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

  George Saintsbury

  Missing, Ordinary, Infinite

  George Saintsbury (2012). “The English Novel”, p.234, tredition

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• The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)

  Philip Wylie

  Book, League, May

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• I’ve had the pleasure of hearing The Novelists perform live.  They are gifted songwriters and talented musicians with strong lead voices. This is a band with lots of heart & soul.

  Daryl Stuermer

  Strong, Heart, Voice

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• A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.

  Mary McCarthy

  Elephants, Forget

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• All kinds of mysterious phenomena exist in this world, but answers to most of them have come with advances in scientific knowledge. Love is the sole holdout-nothing can explain it. A Chinese writer by the name of Ah Cheng wrote that love is just a chemical reaction, an unconventional point of view that seemed quite fresh at the time. But if love can be controlled and initiated by means of chemistry, then novelists would be out of a job. So while he may have had his finger on the truth, I'll remain a member of the loyal opposition.

  Mo Yan

  Jobs, Mean, Love Is

  Mo Yan (2013). “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out: A Novel”, p.597, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• ..there is need for a person to be generally educated. Otherwise you shrivel up much too soon. Whether this means reading the bible (I read the New Testament every few years) or reading the great 19th century novelists (the greatest and shrewdest judge of people and of society who ever lived), or classical philosophy (which I cannot read-it puts me to sleep immediately), or history (which is secondary). What matters is that the knowledge worker, by the time he or she reaches middle age, has developed and nourished a human being rather than a tax accountant or a hydraulic engineer.

  Peter Drucker

  Education, Business, Philosophy

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• I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.

  Leslie Fiedler

  People, Firefighter, Want

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• I’d like to be remembered as someone who used their ability as a novelist or as a dramatist to say the things he felt needed to be said about the society while being as entertaining as possible. Because if you don’t entertain, nobody’s listening.

  Budd Schulberg

  Listening, Used, Said

  "Budd Schulberg, 'On the Waterfront' Writer, Dies at 95" by Tim Weiner, www.nytimes.com. August 5, 2009.

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• Listening is crucial for any novelist. Stories & ideas abound. We too often talk about ourselves & block out the richness others may offer.

  Mark Rubinstein

  Block, Ideas, Listening

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• Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.

  Janet Malcolm

  Heart, Giving, Resistance

  Janet Malcolm (2013). “The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes”, p.70, Vintage

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• They (the novelists) became the voice of the citizen against the ubiquitous raison d'état, which reappeared endlessly to justify everything from unjust laws and the use of child labour to incompetent generalship and inhuman conditions on warships.
  The themes they popularized have gradually turned into the laws which, for all their flaws, have improved the state of man.

  John Ralston Saul

  Children, Men, Voice

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• The Novelist, afraid his ideas may be foolish, slyly puts them in the mouth of some other fool and reserves the right to disavow them.

  Diane Johnson

  Ideas, Mouths, May

  Diane Johnson (1982). “Terrorists and novelists”, Alfred A. Knopf

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• What a joy it is to read a book that shocks one into remembering just how high one's literary standards should be.... a tour de force by one of England's best novelists.... Atonement is a spectacular book; as good a novel - and more satisfying... - than anything McEwan has written....sublimely written narrative.... The Dunkirk passage is a stupendous piece of writing, a set piece that could easily stand on its own.

  Noah Richler

  Book, Writing, Joy

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