Novelists Quotes - Page 32

• I'm a novelist who read a lot as a kid. When you grow up on books and then grow up to write books, famous authors are a lot more meaningful to you than TV and movie stars.

  Bill Vaughan

  Meaningful, Stars, Growing Up

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• When it [truth] emerges it often bears out the saying that 'truth is stranger than fiction.' A novelist has to appear plausible, and would hesitate to make use of such astounding contradictions as occur in history through some extraordinary accident or twist of psychology .

  Bill Vaughan

  Psychology, Twists, Fiction

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• There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.

  John Dos Passos

  Writing, Character, Autobiography

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

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• The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.

  John Dos Passos

  Book, Writing, Reality

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

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• The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.

  John Dos Passos

  Character, Records, Phases

  "The Business of a Novelist". review of William Rollins's The Shadow Before, 1934.

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• It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Artist, Years, May

  Evelyn Waugh (1958). “The world of Evelyn Waugh”

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• I'm more influenced by novelists than I am by filmmakers.

  Billy Bob Thornton

  Filmmaker

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Great novelists are philosopher novelists - that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.

  Albert Camus

  Writing, Philosopher, Argument

  "Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus)". Book by Albert Camus (Chapter 1: An Absurd Reasoning), 1955.

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• I think novelists perform many useful tasks for their fellow citizens, but one of the most valuable is this: to enable us to see ourselves as others see us.

  Doris Lessing

  Thinking, Tasks, Citizens

  Doris Lessing (2013). “Prisons We Choose to Live Inside”, p.7, Harper Collins

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• Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither Age nor Custom could do anything (as they said, their voices rising) with the American novelist Gertrude Johnson.

  Randall Jarrell

  Voice, Age, Gertrude

  Randall Jarrell (2010). “Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy”, p.9, University of Chicago Press

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• How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?

  Randall Jarrell

  Mean, Moral, Imperfect

  Randall Jarrell (2010). “Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy”, p.8, University of Chicago Press

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• Novelists are people who have discovered that they can dampen their neuroses by writing make-believe. We will keep on doing that no matter what, while offering loftier explanations.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Believe, Writing, Offering

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• Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Real, Study, Should

  Charlotte Bronte (2009). “The Professor: Easyread Super Large 24pt Edition”, p.87, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• It's so easy to get into the same routine. A novel every two years; perhaps, improving technique. But I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in doing something fundamentally important--and therefore, it needs time. And what I've been doing, really, is avoiding this pressure to get into the habit of one novel a year. This is what is expected of novelists. And I have never been really too much concerned with doing what is expected of novelists, or writers, or artists. I want to do what I believe is important.

  Chinua Achebe

  Believe, Writing, Artist

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• The thought of the novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters or even in their introspection but in the plight he has invented for his characters - in the juxtaposition of those characters and in the lifelike ramifications of the ensemble they make: their density, their substantiality, their lived existence actualized in all its nuanced particulars, is in fact his thought metabolized.

  Philip Roth

  Lying, Character, Density

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

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• It is well to start by distinguishing the few really great - the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.

  F. R. Leavis

  Art, Way, Awareness

  1948 The Great Tradition, ch.1.

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• A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism.

  Italo Svevo

  Pillars, Proust, Endure

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• I'm a novelist at heart. How's that? And that's how I make my living, is I write novels.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Writing, Heart, Novel

  Source: collider.com

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• The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.

  Willa Cather

  Writing, Accomplishment, Modern

  Willa Cather (1988). “Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art”, p.40, U of Nebraska Press

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• Children make better readers than adults. They read as carefully as I write; adults read as a means of getting off to sleep. I get letters saying 'I have read your book seventeen times.' If you're an adult novelist and you get that letter, you should be afraid. You're being stalked. Kids always read them seventeen times!

  Daniel Pinkwater

  Children, Book, Mean

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• Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Lying, Prophet, Predictions

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.8, Penguin

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• Usually when I drank too much, I could guess why I did so, the objective being to murder a state of consciousness that I didn't have the courage to sustain--a fear of heights, which sometimes during the carnival of the 1960s accompanied my attempts to transform the bourgeois journalist into an avant-garde novelist. The stepped-up ambition was a commonplace among the would-be William Faulkners of my generation; nearly always it resulted in commercial failure and literary embarrassment.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Ambition, Height, Too Much

  "The war on drugs and alcohol is a war against human nature" by Lewis Lapham, www.theguardian.com. December 10, 2012.

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• Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages - just don't catch him at breakfast. Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.

  Alan Bennett

  Husband, Father, Artist

  Alan Bennett (2009). “Alan Bennett Plays 2: Kafka's Dick; Insurance Man; Old Country; Englishman Abroad; Question of Attribution”, p.18, Faber & Faber

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• Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.

  Marcel Proust

  Proust, Century, Twentieth Century

  Marcel Proust (1999). “The captive & the fugitive”

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• The most original novelist now writing in English.

  Ivy Compton-Burnett

  Writing, Originals

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