T Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with T. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.”
Source: The Wapshot Chronicle
“The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings. Where we can describe, step by step, minute by minute, our not altogether unpleasant struggle to put ourselves into a viable and devout relationship to our beloved and mistaken world.”
“The novel should be understood as a structure built to accommodate the greatest possible amount of cool stuff.”
Source: The Paths of the Dead: Book One of the Viscount of Adrilankha
“The novel should tell the truth, as I see the truth, or as the novelist persuades me to see it. And one more demand: I expect the novelist to aspire to improve the world. ... As a novelist, I want to be more than one more dog barking at the other dogs barking at me. Not out of any foolish hope that one novelist, or all virtuous novelists in chorus, can make much of a difference for good, except in the long run, but out of the need to prevent the human world from relaxing into something worse. To maintain the tension between truth and falsity, beauty and ugliness, good and evil. ... I believe the highest duty of the serious novelist is, whatever the means or technique, to be a critic of his society, to hold society to its own ideals, or if these ideals are unworthy, to suggest better ideals.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“The novel since its origins has been the privatization of history... the history of private life ... and in that sense every novel is an historical novel.”
“The novel tradition is the closest thing I have to a religion, and being a part of that tradition means a lot to me. I don't really see - I never have seen - why I should have to forfeit that feeling, or hope, of belonging, just because the stories I want to tell are close to my own experience.”
“The novel was born with the Modern Era, which made man, to quote Heidegger, the "only real subject," the ground for everything. It is largely through the novel that man as an individual was established on the European scene. Away from the novel, in our real lives, we know very little about our parents as they were before our birth; we have only fragmentary knowledge of the people close to us: we see them come and go and scarcely have they vanished than their place is taken over by others: they form a long line of replaceable beings. Only the novel separates out an individual, trains a light on his biography, his ideas, his feelings, makes him irreplaceable: makes him the center of everything.”
Source: Encounter
“The novel will never die, but it will keep changing and evolving and taking different shapes.”
“The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.”
“The novel's not organized like a screenplay. If you shot the novel, you'd have a twelve-hour movie.”
“The novel's not the best form for disposing ideas, though that's one thing it can do. It likely is the best form, though, for conveying the experience of us each being alone, trapped in our skulls with only these bodies and this imperfect instrument of language to convey our state and to find meaning and connection.”
“The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.”
“The novel, in its best form, I regard as one of the most powerful engines of civilization ever invented.”
Source: Essays from the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews
“The novel...creates a bemusing effect. The short story, on the other hand wakes the reader up. Not only that, it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.”
“The novelist ... must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all.”
Source: Advertisements for Myself
“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.”
Source: Things Fall Apart: Authoritative Text, Contexts and Criticism
“The novelist can't successfully depict such horrifying reality. But she can, and must, try, to bear witness. There are many ways of doing this; the mode I prefer is indirect.”
“The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that is a story that he was interested.”
“The novelist does not long to see the
lion eat grass. He realizes that one and
the same God created the wolf and the
lamb, then smiled, “seeing that his
work was good.””
“The novelist Evelyn Waugh noticed at the time that Evans and his collaborators blended contemporary styles into antique ones: they had “tempered their zeal for accurate reconstruction with a somewhat inappropriate predilection for covers of Vogue.”
Source: The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins
“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?”
Source: How to Be Alone: Essays
“The novelist helps us to see things we might not notice otherwise.”
“The novelist is condemned to wander all his life. Homeless and blind like Oedipus he wanders until death. And so let us protect the novelist and adore him, with pity, honor, and love.”
“The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment.”
“The novelist is more a marathon runner than long-distance runner and the kind of courage it takes working in such isolation cannot be underestimated. I really respect my fellow writers on this front.”
“The novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and look. If what he sees is not highly edifying, he is still required to look. Then he is required to reproduce, with words, what he sees.”
Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“The novelist is the person who spends a lot of his or her day thinking about the human drama and emotional complexity.”
“The novelist loses, every time. Politics is insidious, the modern conduct of war (from shoulder-launched rockets to drone strikes) is insidious. Someone presses a button in California and twenty people are incinerated at a wedding in Pakistan. The killer is spared the sight of the corpses.”
“The novelist must be his own most harsh critic and also his own most loving admirer and about both he must say nothing.”
“The novelist must discover the potential, the gold mine, of man’s soul, must extract the gold and then fashion as magnificent a crown as his ability and vision permit.”
Source: The Romantic Manifesto
“The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party.”
Source: Lectures and Essays
“The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)”
“The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall, while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to that state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid, and of a more lasting impression than those which come to us in sleep; why, then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which, only, we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the keenest, the most intense of which would never have been revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops our perception of them.”
Source: Swann’s Way
“The novelist’s perception of motive and character is equally suited to the penetration of human deceit. I am determined never to apologise for my talents in either.”
Source: Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas
“The novelist screws up his courage in order to invest another two or three years in another attempt to float a boat of original design upon an invented ocean.”
Source: Tugman's Passage
“The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.”
“The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.”
“The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.”
Source: On Writing
“The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.”
“The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.”
Source: Collected Impressions
“The Novelist, afraid his ideas may be foolish, slyly puts them in the mouth of some other fool and reserves the right to disavow them.”
Source: Terrorists and novelists
“The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.”
“The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shallcome later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently.”
“The novelistic attribute of my work is very much like the Russian way of creating novels. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky - their work has so many gaps. But for the reader, you cannot erase those gaps because they are important. They contextualize the whole struggle. My cinema is like that.”
“The novelists of the nineteeth century had all the luck. They had a huge and easily pleased public and the world they surveyed had every appearance of permanence.”
Source: Anger in the Sky: A Novel
“The novella is at once the most elegant and demanding form: a writer must balance the looseness of a novel with the concision of a short story, a feat that only the bravest and most talented of us can manage. In Brazil, Jesse Lee Kercheval proves, yet again, that she is exactly the right writer for the job. A wild American picaresque, Brazil snaps along briskly, yet feels full-fleshed, and brims with a sly wit and grace.”
“The novels have done so well because the drawings are abstract, black-and-white. This adds to the universality of the story. "Persepolis" also has dreamlike moments, and the drawings help maintain cohesion and consistency.”
“The novels I love, the ones I remember, the ones I re-read, have an empathetic human quality, or 'emotional truth'. This quality is difficult to fully define, but I always recognise it when I see it: it is different from honesty and more resilient than fact, something that exists not in the kind of fiction that explains but in the kind that shows.”
“The novels take longer to write than the picture book texts, and they do take a different sort of concentration. However, a very short, simple story that works well is just as exciting to me as any longer and more complex book.”
“The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.”