N Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with N. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Novel writing is World Building & Word Weaving (Neil Postman's terms).”
“Novel writing should never be confused with journalism. Unfortunately, in the case of Primary Colors, a fair number of journalists confused.”
“Novel writing wrecks homes.”
“Novel writing, to me, is all about language: choosing your words, finding the characters within the words and just really agonizing over every word. It's really crafting this whole piece from nothing.”
“NOVEL, n. A short story padded.”
Source: The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World
“Novel-writing can be a cold-blooded business. One uses whatever happens to be lying around in memory and employs it to suit one’s end….Then, again, during the months whilst one is writing about the past, a story is colored by what presently is happening to its writer. So, imperceptibly, the tone of voice changes, original intentions slip away. And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past.”
“Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That's the way I do it, anyway.”
“Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.”
“Novel-writing is a settling, lovely space. I call it self-indulgent - I feel mildly guilty about it.”
“Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.”
“Novelisation doesn't imply the truth. Readers are sophisticated enough to know that.”
“Novelist by day; screenwriter by night.”
“Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs.”
“Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever.”
“Novelists and the literary world play an important part in shaping languages. The Swahili they write influence the readers and their languages. The literary obstacle in Tanzania is not that people do not read, but that they don’t read because there are no interesting writers.”
“Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.”
“Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.”
“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.”
“Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual.”
Source: You've had your time: being the second part of the confessions of Anthony Burgess
“Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.”
Source: The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000
“Novelists congratulate themselves on their creation of this kind of “character” or that kind of “character,” and readers pretend to talk knowingly about “character,” but all it amounts to is that the writers are enjoying themselves writing lies and the readers are enjoying themselves reading lies. In fact, there is no such thing as character, something fixed and final. The real thing is something that novelists don’t know how to write about. Or, if they tried, the end result would never be a novel. Real people are strangely difficult to make sense out of. Even a god would have his hands full trying.”
Source: The Miner
“Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.”
Source: Moving Target
“Novelists don't normally write about what's going on; they write about what's not going on.”
Source: The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007
“Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.”
Source: The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000
“Novelists get spooked by a blank page, yet the unconscious mind can create amazing, creative dreams from scratch every night. It never has writer’s block. It’s never stuck when it comes to thrilling storytelling.”
Source: Transcendental Magic: The Rise of the New Magicians
“Novelists get to direct the perfect films. We get to cast every part. We dress the set exactly as we wish.”
“Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.”
“Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.”
“Novelists have to love humanity to write anything worthwhile. Poets have to love themselves.”
“Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.”
“Novelists may be able to seek advice from readers and editors, but in the end, it is up to them to get the book right.”
“Novelists never have to footnote.”
Source: Moo
“Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.”
Source: 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel
“Novelists,’ said Ivo, ‘are to the nineties what cooks were to the eighties, hairdressers to the seventies and pop-stars to the sixties… Merely, you know, an expression of the Zeitgeist, Nobody actually reads novels any more, but it’s a fashionable thing to be a novelist – as long as you don’t entertain people of course. I sometimes think,’ said Ivo, his eyes like industrial diamonds, ‘that my sole virtue is, I’m the only person in London who has no intention of writing any kind of novel, ever.”
Source: A Vicious Circle
“Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.”
Source: The Professor: Easyread Super Large 24pt Edition
“Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.”
“Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.”
“Novelists want to flood, poets want to distill.”
“Novelists when they write novels tend to take an almost godlike attitude toward their subject, pretending to a total comprehension of the story, a man's life, which they can therefore recount as God Himself might, nothing standing between them and the naked truth, the entire story meaningful in every detail. I am as little able to do this as the novelist is, even though my story is more important to me than any novelist's is to him - for this is my story; it is the story of a man, not of an invented, or possible, or idealized, or otherwise absent figure, but of a unique being of flesh and blood, Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and men - each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature - are therefore shot wholesale nowadays. If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.”
Source: Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend
“Novelists who get shitty about screenwriting invariably can't do it, or they can't hack it in the world of what's really, in truth, very bold and very public enterprise.”
“Novelists who treat violence and cruelty as something to be exploited for their effect, or to enjoy the pleasure of an evacuation, are carriers of a singularly unpleasant disease.”
Source: Parthian Words
“Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.”
“Novell has the necessary resources to be a much more profitable enterprise but it currently lacks the vision, strategy and execution to produce respectable returns.”
“Novels allow me to create a whole world.”
“Novels and stories are sometimes very complex staging grounds to say, in fact, very simple things. Things impossible to say otherwise because they are repeated in so many exploitative contexts - adverts and TV shows and political speeches.”
“Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.”
“Novels are a marathon, while comic scripts are a sprint.”
“Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.”
“Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself.”
“Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.”