Novelists Quotes - Page 31

• To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.

  Zadie Smith

  Keys, Fluidity, Problem

  "Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays". Book by Zadie Smith, 2009.

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• The Novelist As Teacher”: “I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them.

  Chinua Achebe

  Teacher, Past, Night

  Chinua Achebe (2009). “Things Fall Apart: Authoritative Text, Contexts and Criticism”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

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• As a successful romantic novelist - one of my publishers is Mills & Boon - I create the sort of male heroes that no woman could fail to adore and few real men could hope to emulate.

  P. C. Cast

  Real, Hero, Successful

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• Novelists want to flood, poets want to distill.

  J. D. McClatchy

  Want, Poet, Flood

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• I cling to the basic set of tenets laid out in Tom Wolfe's 'New Journalism' - to get out there like the great French novelists of the 19th century and study life. I am a Tom Wolfe fan of the first order.

  Peter York

  Study Life, Order, Fans

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• When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels.

  Peter York

  Running, Real, Reading

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• Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.

  Philippa Gregory

  Thinking, People, Radical

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• There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.

  A. S. Byatt

  School, Writing, Artist

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• Whether you're an unpublished novelist or a sixteen-time New York Times bestselling author, you can always improve your craft. You can always become a better writer.

  Robert Dugoni

  New York, Writing, Crafts

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• The novelist is the person who spends a lot of his or her day thinking about the human drama and emotional complexity.

  Thane Rosenbaum

  Drama, Emotional, Thinking

  "The 'Ready for Her Close-Up" Transcript" by Dahlia Lithwick, www.slate.com. May 26, 2015.

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• Great sorrow or great joy should bring intense hunger--not abstinence from food, as our novelists will have it.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Joy, Sorrow, Hunger

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Illustrated)”, p.1744, Delphi Classics

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• Today there are a lot of novelists who seem to be writing to be reviewed, not read.

  Pete Hamill

  Writing, Today, Seems

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• What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it.

  Norman Mailer

  Athlete, Competition, Study

  "Mailer Tells a Lot. Not All, but a Lot.; His Longest Love Affair Is With the U.S." by Bernard Weinraub, www.nytimes.com. October 4, 2000.

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• A novelist must know what his last chapter is going to say and one way or another work toward that last chapter. ... To me it is utterly basic, yet it seems like it's a great secret.

  Leon Uris

  Secret, Way, Lasts

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• Some Pulitzer winners - novelists - have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn't been my experience.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Success, Winner, Prize

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• The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?

  Jonathan Franzen

  Energy, Culture, Crisis

  Jonathan Franzen (2007). “How to Be Alone: Essays”, p.65, Macmillan

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• A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.

  Yann Martel

  Communication, Pages

  "Life of Pi author Yann Martel: 'Overall, I think it's a wonderful companion piece'". Interview with Mark Medley, nationalpost.com. November 21, 2012.

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• Writing a novel is a very hard thing to do because it covers so long a space of time, and if you get discouraged it is not a bad sign, but a good one. If you think you are not doing it well, you are thinking the way real novelists do. I never knew one who did not feel greatly discouraged at times, and some get desperate, and I have always found that to be a good symptom.

  Maxwell Perkins

  Real, Writing, Thinking

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• Two things a novelist can do with a hat: Talk through it or pull a rabbit from it.

  Peter S. Prescott

  Two, Rabbits, Bunnies

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• We tend to overestimate what we can do in a short period, and underestimate what we can do over a long period, provided we work slowly and consistently. Anthony Trollope, the nineteenth-century writer who managed to be a prolific novelist while also revolutionizing the British postal system, observed, “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.” Over the long run, the unglamorous habit of frequency fosters both productivity and creativity.

  Gretchen Rubin

  Running, Creativity, Daily Tasks

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• With a novelist's sense of drama and a historian's understanding of the social forces that shape our lives, Tom Gjelten has captured vividly -- through the chronicle of a powerful family's fortunes -- one of the great political dramas of our time.

  Ronald Steel

  Powerful, Drama, Political

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• Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Men, Originals

  "History as a System". Book by José Ortega y Gasset, 1962.

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• But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.

  E. M. Forster

  Character, Fighting, Artist

  E. M. Forster (1987). “Commonplace Book”, p.151, Stanford University Press

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• The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them.

  Anais Nin

  Writing, Alcohol, Live In The Moment

  "Woman As Writer" by Jeannette L. Webber and Joan Grumman, (p. 42), 1978.

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• Sometimes I think some of my fellow novelists who have not worked in television and film are very naive about this process. They get an offer and there's the dump truck full of money and they sign it, they cash the check and then they're not involved in the series. They may get invited to the premiere and they come out of the premiere looking like all of their children had just been gassed, with a stunned look on their face because everything has been changed.

  George R. R. Martin

  Children, Thinking, Looks

  YouTube Channel "Talks at Google"/"George R.R. Martin", www.youtube.com. August 06, 2011.

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