Best novel & ifs Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 4

“If people only knew what lies at the heart of my novels! What a tumult of desires these carefully written pages conceal! I sometimes have a loathing for the furious cravings that give me no peace except when I am working.”

People Ifs Giving Heart Sometimes Lying Desire Novel Written Pages Give Me Craving Furious Loathing Tumult

Book:Diary, 1928-1957

Source: Diary, 1928-1957

“I do think a good story in a novel is fair game and there's nothing wrong with adapting that. It sometimes gets a bit facile where they think: "Let's get the next best-seller and see if we can turn it into a film."”

Ifs Thinking Sometimes Stories Film Turns Next Games Bits Novel Fairs Good Story Sellers Adapting Best Sellers Fair Game

Author:Colin Firth

“To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.”

Ifs Kind Two Certain Reading Novel Focus Week Devotion Concentration Two Weeks

Author:Philip Roth

“If you're doing a classic play, where if you do a Chekhov, you do the words as written. You can't do that with a novel; you have to do your version of the words as written.”

Ifs Play Novel Written Versions Classic Chekhov

Author:Sam Mendes

“Something we do know is that review coverage does go to male authors more than women authors. That's a fact. I think it's one of those examples of unconscious bias: If you hire a lot of male journalists, they're more likely to pick up the latest Ian McEwan novel than the latest A.S. Byatt novel.”

Ifs Thinking Knows Doe Facts Novel Example Picks Males Journalist Unconscious Reviews Bias Coverage

Author:Emma Donoghue

“I began my first novel when I was 15. It went through three drafts, of around 40,000 words each. If I find it, I'll burn it.”

Ifs Firsts Three Novel

Author:Charles Stross

“Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word.”

Ifs Writing Trying Reading Fiction Novel Written Style Figures Speech Recognition Prose Crap Writing Fiction Spoken Word

Author:Charles Stross

“If I wanted to be in movies, I'd have gone into scriptwriting: the fact that I write novels should be a big hint about what I prefer to do!”

Ifs Should Writing Facts Bigs Wanted Novel Gone Hints

Author:Charles Stross

“The novel is final form; it's the ultimate individual final form. Television and motion pictures never get there. You'd be fabulous to think that something you write is even going to be filmed. I give it the best shot of which I'm capable. But it's more a payday for me. And if I didn't have alimony and the full-time assistant.”

Ifs Thinking Giving Writing Form Individual Novel Television Capable Shots Ultimate Finals Fabulous Assistants Motion Pictures Best Shot Alimony Payday

Author:James Ellroy

“If you take a big epic novel and you shoot it, when you get to the editing room you notice that it has 2 million climaxes, which fill the whole 90 or 100 minutes. Then you realize you can't cut them out because if somebody is dying and you cut that out it seems like they just disappear from the film.”

Ifs Whole Bigs Seems Film Realizing Rooms Millions Novel Cutting Minutes Dying Disappear Epic Editing Climax

Author:Pirjo Honkasalo

“We don't really know how technology will affect narrative. That's the question. See, people used to say that the novel is going to die, but they would never say that movies will die with it, when in fact all forms depend on the narrative. I think if one of them fails, the others are going to fail as well. Maybe this will happen to both forms, and maybe movies will take a totally different direction with fiction.”

People Ifs Thinking Knows Wells Different Facts Happens Form Used Dies Fiction Technology Novel Know How Failing Depends Narrative Different Directions

Author:Don DeLillo

“I do think that in the near future, if it hasn't happened already, people will be able to use technology to design their own novels, perhaps with individuals themselves as the main character. In other words, everything is being individualized and narrowed.”

People Ifs Thinking Character Use Able Individual Technology Novel Happened Design Main Characters

Author:Don DeLillo

“The excitement of theatre is palpable but the frustrations, and the complete absence of a definitive evening - the play as text means practically nothing in a way - , there's no particular performance that is definitive in the way a novel is a solid object you hold in your hands and here it is. You can't say that about a play. If the novel gives us a sense of throbbing consciousness, theater is pure soul, beautiful and elusive.”

Ifs Way Giving Mean Soul Play Hands Beautiful Consciousness Novel Objects Particular Pure Performances Theater Theatre Absence Evening Excitement Frustration Elusive Pure Soul

Author:Don DeLillo

“If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe the challenge for the novelist is to stretch his art and his language, to the point where it can finally describe what's happening around him.”

Ifs Art Film Form Culture Language Challenges Novel Happenings Contemporary Novelists Essays Accommodate

Author:Don DeLillo

“That's how you write novels actually. You suddenly hit upon something and you realize this is the path you were meant to take. You'd be a fool if you didn't follow it. Perhaps it's like solving a difficult question in pure mathematics. There must be a moment when the solution is so simple and evident that you wonder why you hadn't come upon it before. When you do come upon it, you know it in the deepest part of your being. It carries its own logic.”

Ifs Knows Writing Moments Difficult Realizing Simple Wonder Novel Path Fool Pure Solutions Logic Mathematics Carrie Evident Difficult Questions

Author:Don DeLillo

“The thing I like so much about short stories is that there isn't as much of an investment of time so I'm free to experiment more. If it doesn't work out, I've only lost a week or two of work. If I screw up a novel I've lost at least a year's worth of work. But the nice thing is that those experiments with short stories can be carried over to novels when the experiments do work.”

Ifs Years Two Stories Lost Novel Nice Week Investment Work Out Experiments Short Story Screws Nice Things Screw Ups

Author:Charles de Lint

“I always tell people, if a young girl read "Beloved" as her first novel, she'd have to kill either herself or her mother, because in "Beloved" you have a mother killing their children. This is not something a child would accept very easily. And would never understand.”

People Ifs Firsts Children Young Mother Girl Accepting Novel Killing Beloved

Author:Walter Mosley

“You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of complicated state of mind. The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.”

Ifs Mind Kind Matter States Lying Novel Complicated Phrases State Of Mind Idle Discourse Transcendental Daisies Chatter Idle Chatter

Author:W. S. Gilbert

“What works in a story is very different than what works in cinema. For example, dialogue in books: If you translate it too faithfully, it sounds a little stilted, because we often don't speak the way we speak in novels. Oral language is much punchier, shorter sentences.”

Ifs Way Littles Book Different Stories Speak Language Sound Novel Example Sentences Dialogue Cinema Translate

Author:Yann Martel

“Just as art brings you to another place, so does religion - and to ask questions of factuality tends to reduce both. If you say you were inspired by a novel, that implies that your book is a work of fiction.”

Ifs Doe Art Book Asks Fiction Novel Inspired

Author:Yann Martel

“Madame Bovary is one my favorite novels. Emma Bovary will always be an enigma, but as the years pass, I feel that I understand her better. She has a violent nostalgia, almost an infantile nostalgia, to be understood by the men surrounding her. I like her relentless fight for independence, her rebellion against the mediocre, and her quest for the sublime, even if she burns her wigs in the process. I like that Flaubert never judges her morally for her self-destructiveness, for her desperate attempt to satisfy her wildest desires and appetites.”

“The combination of the growth of these digital technologies, the ability of the government to conjure up these secret interpretations, plus a very unusual and novel court make for this ever-expanding surveillance state. We so treasure our freedoms; we will regret it if our generation doesn't use this unique time to reform the surveillance laws and make it clear that security and liberty are not mutually exclusive. We can do both.”

“One can't found a novel theology on Nothing, and nothing is so secure a foundation as a contradiction. Look at the great successes of the past--they say their deities are the masters of all the universes, and yet that they require grandmothers to defend them, as if they were children frightened by poultry. Or that the authority that punishes no one while there exists a chance for reformation will punish everyone when there is no possibility anyone will become the better for it.”

Source: Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun'

“If you're a novelist, you have sort of themes that run throughout novels. You start a novel and you finish a novel. With record-making in the singer-songwriter world or whatever it is that I do, it's a little different because there is no specific arc that is necessarily, like it's not a concept record.”

Ifs World Littles Different Running Novel Records Concepts Singers Novelists Theme Songwriters Singer Songwriters Arcs

Author:Amos Lee

“Just look at the cinema itself: It's comprised of lots of movies about graphic novels, and if you're not 20 years old and wearing a cape and a mask and white, you're out of business. Today's cinema is a proliferation of comedies, which are in some ways creating caricature images. They're one-dimensional.”

Ifs Way Years Looks Today White Novel Comedy Creating Cinema Mask Graphic Caricatures Proliferation Capes Graphic Novels

Author:Danny Glover

“When I start writing novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry, rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don't do that, you can't write good characters.”

Ifs Writing Character Spirit Novel Prejudice Inquiry Good Character

Author:Ruth Ozeki

“If there is a connection between Harry Potter and my new novel, it's my interest in characters.”

Ifs Character Interest Novel Connections Harry Potter Potters

Author:J. K. Rowling

“Most of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do - really felt like I had to do if I was going to write another novel - was move towards something like sincerity.”

Ifs Writing Wanted Moving Felt Novel Position Irony Sincerity

Author:Ben Lerner

“Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.”

Ifs Writing Stories Fiction Novel Criticism Weak Experiments Short Story Lively

Author:Ben Lerner

“Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. "Ari" appears on the edge of this book a couple of times - but on the edge, she's never in it, even if she's a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.”

People Ifs Firsts Made Two Book Real Force Novel Couple Edges Scratches

Author:Ben Lerner

“Read non-fiction. History, biology, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology. Get a bodyguard and do fieldwork. Find your inner fish. Don't publish too soon. Not before you have read Thomas Mann in any case. Learn by copying, sentence by sentence some of the masters. Copy Coetzee's or Sebald's sentences and see what happens to your story. Consider creative non-fiction if you want to stay in South Africa. It might be the way to go. Never neglect back and hamstring exercises, otherwise you won't be able to write your novel. One needs one's buttocks to think.”

“My writing derived from the conviction I conceived during my college years: one should lead one's life as if one were the protagonist of an epic novel, with the outcome predetermined and chapter after chapter of edifying, traumatic, and exhilarating events to be suffered through. Since the end is known in advance, one must try to experience as much as possible in the brief time allotted. Writing is a way of ensuring that you pay enough attention along the way to understand what you see.”

Ifs Way Should Writing Trying Years Ends Enough Pay Attention Known Novel Events College Conviction Outcomes Chapters Epic Exhilarating Protagonists Predetermined Year One College Years

Author:Jeffrey Tayler

“I've always been really impressed with some of the longer graphic novels and thought it would be really amazing if one day I could try something like that.”

Ifs Trying Would Be Novel One Day Impressed Graphic Really Amazing Graphic Novels

Author:Adrian Tomine

“You can't have a novel without real, believable people, and once you get into either too theoretical a novel or too philosophical a novel, you get into the dangers that the French novel has discovered in the past 50 or 60 years. And you get into a sort of aridity. No, you have to have real, identifiable people to whom the reader reacts in a way as if they were real people.”

People Ifs Way Years Real Past Novel Danger Reader Philosophical Theoretical Believable

Author:Julian Barnes

“If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.”

Ifs Trying Walks Novel Get Up Nails

Author:D. H. Lawrence

“If you want to write a novel, it's the Divine mind wanting to express.”

Ifs Want Writing Mind Novel Divine

Author:Julia Cameron

“I have more self-doubt than any writer I've ever known.... The positive aspect of self-doubt - if you can channel it into useful activity instead of being paralyzed by it - is that by the time you reach the end of a novel, you know precisely why you made every decision in the narrative, the multiple purposes of every metaphor and image.”

Ifs Knows Made Ends Self Purpose Decision Known Novel Doubt Activity Aspect Metaphor Narrative Multiple Paralyzed Self-doubt

Author:Dean Koontz

“I am delighted if people find that kind of sustenance in novels, but perhaps it's because they don't read the Scripture that they are comparing it to, which would perhaps provide deeper sustenance than many contemporary novels.”

People Ifs Kind Novel Deeper Scripture Contemporary Compare Delighted Sustenance

Author:Marilynne Robinson

“You can't sort of write the novel as if you're taking dictation from heaven.”

Ifs Writing Heaven Novel Dictation

Author:Martin Amis

“I look at the film without any music or sound. I try to grasp the story from the screenplay. I try to write to the novel or book if there is one. I try to create music that's honest and true to my heart for the story.”

Ifs Writing Trying Looks Heart Book Stories Film Sound Novel Honest My Heart Screenplays

Author:Howard Shore

“I'm very excited about some of the novels that I have adapted. I think they're equally as powerful, if not more. Going After Cacciato (by Tim O'Brien) is something I'm very passionate about.”

Ifs Thinking Powerful Novel Passionate Excited Adapted Tim O Brien

Author:Gabe Polsky

“The rules seem to be these: If you have written a successful novel, everyone invites you to write short stories. If you have written some good short stories, everyone wants you to write a novel. But nobody wants anything until you have already proved yourself by being published somewhere else.”

Ifs Want Writing Stories Seems Novel Successful Written Short Story Invites Somewhere Else

Author:James A. Michener

“I think the success of every novel - if it's a novel of action - depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, 'Which are my big scenes?' and then get every drop of juice out of them. The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through?”

Ifs Thinking Way Giving Writing Firsts Play Character Stories Bigs Action Actors Found Names Strong Term Walks Principles Novel Goes On Depends Scene Spots Plenty Things To Do Twists Juice

Author:P. G. Wodehouse

“The act of migration puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and selfhood and culture and belief. So if this is a novel about migration it must be that act of putting in question. It must perform the crisis it describes.”

Ifs Culture Individual Belief Novel Groups Identity Crisis Migration

Author:Salman Rushdie

“I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel. Everything I did is on the record and, if you want to hear it, just listen to the record.”

People Ifs Want Needs Feels Writing Would Be Night Reading Dark Novel Records Affection Every Night Just Listen

Author:Tom Lehrer

“Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if "X" happened? That's how you start.”

Ifs Novel Happened What If

Author:Tom Clancy

“If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft”

Ifs Writing Stories Perfect Novel Five Office Pages Crafts Short Story

Author:Ben Okri

“My springboard is always the script. Even if the script is taken from a novel, I often haven't read the novel...”

Ifs Novel Taken Havens Scripts Springboards

Author:John Hurt

“Almost any tale of our doings is comic. We are bottomlessly comic to each other. Even the most adored and beloved person is comic to his lover. The novel is a comic form. Language is a comic form, and makes jokes in its sleep. God, if He existed, would laugh at His creation. Yet it is also the case that life is horrible, without metaphysical sense, wrecked by chance, pain and the close prospect of death. Out of this is born irony, our dangerous and necessary tool.”

Ifs Persons Pain Form Life Is Language Born Chance Sleep Cases Novel Laughing Dangerous Creation Lovers Jokes Tools Horrible Tales Comic Irony Beloved Metaphysical Doings Beloved Person

Book:The Black Prince

Source: The Black Prince

“I wouldn't have filmed The Color Purple if the book had been a big fat novel. The reason I read it is because it is thin.”

Ifs Book Reason Bigs Novel Color Fats Purple

Author:Steven Spielberg

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