Novelists Quotes - Page 37

• I am not a psychological novelist, and I try very hard not to allow the reader to see the plight or circumstances of the characters as individual psychological plights. That's my preference; still, a lot of people do read my novels as psychological studies, and they're right to read them that way too, if that's what they mean to them.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Character, Mean, People

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• To be honest, I want readers to be wrung out. As a novelist, I don't have a political agenda or specific philosophy; I'm trying to create a gut-wrenching, intimate, memorable experience.

  Jillian Medoff

  Philosophy, Memorable, Political

  Source: bookmagnet.wordpress.com

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• For me the journey of making a film is a journey of discovery as to what that film is. I mean what I do is what other artists do, painters, novelists, people that make music, poets, sculptors, you name it. It's about starting out and working with the material and discovering through making, working with the material the artifact.

  Mike Leigh

  Mean, Artist, Journey

  "Big Think Interview With Mike Leigh". Interview with Max Miller, bigthink.com. October 7, 2010.

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• The lesson you have to learn as novelist is how to be collaborative, and how to say, "I don't get to dictate this."

  Tom Perrotta

  Lessons

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• A novelist is someone who sits around the house all day in his underwear, trying not to smoke.

  Scott Spencer

  House, Trying, Underwear

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• I couldn't have been a novelist without being a mother. It gives you a unique witness point of the growth of a personality. It was a kind of biological component for me that had to come first. My children gave this other window on the world.

  Carol Shields

  Mother, Children, Unique

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• My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

  Philip Levine

  Temperament

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• I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

  Richard Powers

  Technology, Thinking, Tasks

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• It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

  Elizabeth George

  Jobs, Reader

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• Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.

  Kate Atkinson

  What If, Bigs, Big Things

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• I want to be a popular novelist who's also serious, or a serious novelist who's also very accessible.

  Douglas Kennedy

  Want, Serious

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• All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

  Graham Greene

  Memories, Imagination, Journalism

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• So much of a novelist's writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them.

  Graham Greene

  Writing, Lasts, Firsts

  Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

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• I try very hard to be fair, and I look for ironies. In a way, I live on ironies as a novelist.

  Robert Stone

  Trying, Way, Looks

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I do have a very strong sense that most of the terrible things in life happen suddenly and unpredictably, and certainly can sweep you off in different directions, and that is always of interest to a novelist.

  Ian Mcewan

  Strong, Things In Life, Different

  Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

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• I couldn't think about novels at all. It seemed the only writing that was appropriate to that horrendous event was journalism, reportage. And, in fact, I think the profession rose quite honorably to the task. Novelists require a slower turnover, I mean, in time.

  Ian Mcewan

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

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• I'm really aware that in fiction, women are pretty much equal. There's a lot of very successful women novelists. Not so much [for women writers working] in film.

  Emma Donoghue

  Successful, Fiction, Film

  "Room" Author/Screenwriter Emma Donoghue on Her "Deeply Feminist" Film and Industry Sexism". Interview with Laura Berger, www.indiewire.com. October 16, 2015.

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• Playing with different genres and perspectives and ways of telling stories is one of the perks of being a novelist, but at the same time, I want precision. And in order to be precise about stuff, you have to get personal. Symbolism is very boring.

  Linn Ullmann

  Symbolism, Order, Perspective

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• I was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.

  Christopher McQuarrie

  Writing, Years, Wanted

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

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• The Treatise of the Three Impostors is a book that enjoyed centuries of notorious nonexistence until (as Voltaire would say) it became necessary to invent it. Georges Minois writes with empathy, erudition, and a novelist's sense of buildup and timing, weaving in the parallel story of Europe's courageous freethinkers. In the face of today's social and even legal pressures against criticizing religion, it is good to see an honorable French tradition asserting itself.

  Joscelyn Godwin

  Book, Writing, Europe

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• As a novelist, your impulse is toward multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple perceptions, multiple nuances, the ambiguity in human communication. Fiction really is the ultimate home for that sense of ambiguity.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Communication, Home, Voice

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

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• I feel the responsibility of the novelist is to create a very complex world populated by very complex individuals and to deepen that as much as possible. I don't think the responsibility of the reporter or journalist is fundamentally different.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Responsibility, Thinking, Different

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

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• I found it really disturbing to see a novelist writing a diatribe about Islam and Muslim radical extremists, blurring the distinction between the two.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Writing, Two, Islam

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

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• I grew up around poets and novelists and my dad wrote poems about everything - from a cat sleeping in a window to a car wreck he passed on the highway. I learned not to censor myself: that was one of things I learned in my apprenticeship, my creative-writing apprenticeship with my dad.

  Lucinda Williams

  Dad, Sleep, Cat

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

  Peter Morgan

  Degrees, Historian

  Source: deadline.com

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