Novelists Quotes - Page 39

• A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

  Joseph Conrad

  Artist, May, Human Experience

  Joseph Conrad “Heart of Darkness”, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Of Dickens' style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules... No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens.

  Anthony Trollope

  Style, Impossible, Speak

  Anthony Trollope (1978). “An Autobiography”, p.208, Univ of California Press

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• I was a novelist before I was a TV screenwriter. Actually, as a kid, I think I'd always wanted to be a writer, but never thought that I would be one.

  Ben Richards

  Kids, Thinking, Would Be

  "Ben Richards Exclusive Interview OUTCASTS". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. October 21, 2010.

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• I write about life as it exists within houses and on the streets. And there's nothing, hopefully, in any of my characterizations or in any of my plottings or in any of my valuations that doesn't ring true to life. I'm a novelist. I'm not a theoretician.

  Richard Grossman

  Writing, House, True Life

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• Salvation is an individual relationship with God. I've always considered myself to be a devotional poet, and I consider myself to be a devotional novelist.

  Richard Grossman

  Poet, Individual, Salvation

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• Since I'm a novelist I'm the opposite of you - I believe that what's most important is what cannot be measured. I'm not denying your way of thinking, but the greater part of people's lives consist of things that are unmeasurable, and trying to change all these to something measurable is realistically impossible.

  Haruki Murakami

  Believe, Thinking, Opposites

  FaceBook post by Haruki Murakami from Oct 01, 2015

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• Even when I was living below the poverty line as a novelist, I was still living better than 99.5% of the human population of the world. But in my little, soft realm of trying to amuse a few dozen middle-class people with my books and articles, I did struggle to survive in my own way.

  Jonathan Ames

  Struggle, Book, Class

  "Jonathan Ames: The X-rated Woody Allen". Interview with Paul Harris, www.theguardian.com. March 26, 2011.

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• I'm a natural novelist. I'm interested in the person and the group, and how they mesh. And one of the ways I don't want them to mesh is for the person to be subsumed into the group.

  Jane Smiley

  Groups, Want, Way

  Interview with Matthew Rothschild, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. December 4, 2007.

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• I tried to make guitars that were close to what my heroes played. That's the way it's done. My experience is that you have to do it like a musician. You have to learn the language before you can learn to be a novelist.

  Paul Reed Smith

  Hero, Guitar, Musician

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• Americans would have a right to go to war with the Iraqis if we could name one author from Iraq. It disturbs me that we're going to war with somebody we know absolutely nothing about. Name one Iraqi poet, one Iraqi woman activist, one Iraqi singer. Name one Iraqi novelist. You can't. And how can you go kill someone you don't know anything about?

  Jimmy Santiago Baca

  War, Names, Iraq

  Interview with Barbara Stahura, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. January 31, 2003.

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• We may, without offending any laws of good taste, require of an architect, as we do of a novelist, that he should be not only correct, but entertaining.

  John Ruskin

  Offending, Law, May

  John Ruskin (1854). “On the Nature of Gothic Architecture: And Herein of the True Functions of the Workman in Art ...”, p.15

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• The best moments involve a loss of control. It's a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often - completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages - I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do.

  Don DeLillo

  Loss, Thinking, Phrases

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• In high school, I wanted to be an actress. Until I got to college and took some creative writing courses. Then I decided I wanted to become a novelist.

  Meg Cabot

  Writing, School, College

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• Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting, provocative and important European novelist of my generation. Period. No one else comes close. He has written two or maybe three great books, and his latest, The Map and the Territory, is one of them.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Book, Two, Interesting

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• What terrorists gain, novelists lose.

  Don DeLillo

  Gains, Terrorist, Loses

  Don DeLillo (2016). “Mao II”, p.108, Pan Macmillan

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• Being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do.

  Don DeLillo

  Mind, Citizens, Compliment

  "Don DeLillo and the Novelist as Bad Citizen" by Jon Michaud, www.newyorker.com. November 17, 2011.

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• The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Punishment, Fever

  "A Connoisseur of Clouds, a Meteorologist of Whims: The Rumpus Interview with Paul Auster". Interview with Juliet Linderman, therumpus.net. November 16, 2009.

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• I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.

  John Irving

  Writing, Century, Old Fashioned

  Interview with Suzanne Herel, www.motherjones.com. May 1997.

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• The essay is a wonderful medium. I might mention that some writers who longed to be novelists were better as essayists: Sontag, Baldwin, Vidal, Mary McCarthy, Mailer.

  Phillip Lopate

  Might, Wonderful, Mary

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• I grew up as a reader as well as a movie-lover, so many of the novelists I admired - and so many of the great filmmakers I loved - were self-taught.

  Curtis Hanson

  Self, Taught, Lovers

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I have a wonderful editor who believes in fiction and poetry. She herself is a novelist and poet.

  Frederick Busch

  Believe, Editors, Fiction

  Source: www.identitytheory.com

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• First-book novelists and storywriters haven't yet failed and so it's easier to publish them - you can gamble on a success. Whereas someone who has written four books that are highly literary and demanding and require you as a reader. They may not be republished.

  Frederick Busch

  Book, Four, May

  Source: www.identitytheory.com

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• I'm not a philosopher. I am the next thing to a jock, which is a novelist.

  Frederick Busch

  Jocks, Next, Philosopher

  Source: www.identitytheory.com

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• I'm really influenced by Southern novelists, not many movie people. More like John Faulkner, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O'Connor, John Steinbeck, and people like that.

  Billy Bob Thornton

  People, Southern

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I follow the way people change. I follow the way people, who are very antagonized to one another become very close to one another and vice-versa. Sometimes I follow the way people who are intimately close to each other move apart. This is my business as a novelist. It is not about positions and ideas.

  Amos Oz

  Moving, Ideas, People

  "'Everybody comes from somewhere.' An Interview with Writer Amos Oz". Interview with Prashanth Ramakrishna, logger.believermag.com. October 20, 2016.

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