Best novel & writing Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 2

“In my view the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels, direct films and put on plays tend to read too many novels, watch too many films and go to too many plays.”

People Writing Play Facts Film Results Views Watches Novel Creative Direct Creative Work Artificiality

Author:Will Self

“You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.”

Knows Writing I Can Novel Imagine Writing Poetry

Author:Vikram Seth

“It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.”

Thinking Men Way Writing Believe Has Beens Stories I Believe Novel Written Theory Female Males Absurd Masculine Could Have Been Jane Austen

Author:Robert Silverberg

“The funny thing about me is I'm kind of schizophrenic, because after four or five nights in a row of going out to parties, I just have to be alone. I hate people and feel like they're keeping me from what I really want to do, like write a fabulous novel, which I probably never will.”

People Want Feels Writing Kind Night Hate Party Novel Five Four I Hate Going Out Fabulous Funny Things Hate People Schizophrenic I Hate People

Author:Bob Colacello

“In the time it takes American literary titan William H. Gass to write a novel, other artists have been born, completed their life's work and died. That may be an exaggeration, but only a slight one.”

Writing May Has Beens Artist Born Novel Died Exaggeration Titans

Author:Tony D'Souza

“The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are purely imaginary.”

Writing Character Fiction Novel Imaginary

Author:Franklin P. Adams

“I was in Los Angeles making 'Dead Again' and the producer, Lindsay Doran , asked me if I'd be interested in adapting this book, .. Austen is my favorite author and I thought, 'Well, of course, I'd be very interested, but I don't know how. I don't know where to start, A, writing a screenplay and B, sort of adapting it from a great novel.”

Ifs Knows Writing Wells Book Courses Novel Know How My Favorite Producers Los Angeles Screenplays Adaptability Adapting Austen Great Novels

Author:Emma Thompson

“Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.”

Ifs Writing Bigs Funny Literature Novel Fate Serious Battle Awards Doomed Award Winning Winning Awards

Author:Neil Gaiman

“Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.”

Ifs Writing Today Effort Novel Prose Concentrating Efforts Wasted

Author:Neil Gaiman

“I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.”

Thinking Writing Kind Two Book Order Views Novel Point Of View Novelists Suspects

Author:Neil Gaiman

“Writing a novel is like building a wall brick by brick; only amateurs believe in inspiration.”

Writing Believe Inspiration Novel Building Wall Construction Bricks

Author:Frank Yerby

“Eragon started as me but ended up evolving into his very own character, .. Even as he has gone through his coming- of- age story, the process of writing and publishing these novels has been my own coming- of- age story. There are parallels between my own experience and Eragon's, but fortunately, I don't have people charging at me with swords.”

People Writing Has Beens Character Stories Age Process My Own Novel Gone Evolve Coming Of Age Publishing Parallels Charging Eragon

Author:Christopher Paolini

“Good God! This man should be writing dime novels.”

Men Should Writing Novel Aviation Dimes Good God Air Power Airpower

Author:Josephus Daniels

“Writing a novel is a very hard thing to do because it covers so long a space of time, and if you get discouraged it is not a bad sign, but a good one. If you think you are not doing it well, you are thinking the way real novelists do. I never knew one who did not feel greatly discouraged at times, and some get desperate, and I have always found that to be a good symptom.”

Ifs Thinking Way Feels Writing Wells Long Real Hard Found Space Novel Novelists Things To Do Desperate Symptoms Discouraged Hard Things

Author:Maxwell Perkins

“The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.”

World Writing Real Character Novel Genre Sufficient Lasting Lasting Love

Author:Ruth Park

“. . . you [film critics] always overstress the value of images. You judge films in the first place by their visual impact instead of looking for content. This is a great disservice to the cinema. It is like judging a novel only by the quality of its prose. I was guilty of the same sin when I first started writing for the cinema. . . . Now I feel that only the literary mind can help the movies out of that cul de sac into which they have been driven by mere technicians and artificers.”

Feels Writing Mind Firsts Has Beens Helping Film Values Sin Quality Novel Judging Impact Mere Critics Driven Guilty Crafts Cinema Visuals Prose Technicians Disservice Film Critics

Author:Orson Welles

“As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel, 'The Lifeboat,' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling.”

Writing Stills Wanted Beautiful Night House Lost Company Novel Wonderful Storytelling Combination Editors Publish One Night Manuscripts Debut Beautiful Writing Charlotte Lifeboats

Author:Karen Thompson Walker

“I try to write things that can't be made into movies. My novels have thwarted many attempts to film them and I think that was true of the essay, too. If you'd actually tried to be true to the essay, it would have been, perhaps, boring. So taking that narrow little cast of characters and expanding it out, that was what was exciting about the project for me.”

Ifs Thinking Writing Trying Littles Has Beens Made Character Film Novel Projects Exciting Casts Boring Being True Essays Expanding

Author:Jonathan Franzen

“The strange thing about writing is that it's so easy to write a novel. It is really easy. But it's getting there to the point where it's easy that's hard. The hard part is to get there.”

Writing Hard Easy Novel Strange Strange Things

Author:Karl Ove Knausgard

“Most of the complexity of the stories has developed as the stories came along (and may be a product of the principle that "nothing is what it seems"). I did start with some essential ambiguousness in the aliens' motivation and the questions this raises in human minds, which I consider to have been disregarded in Contact (novel and film). That, in part, may be what has delayed the writing of the fifth and sixth novelettes in the series.”

Writing Mind Humans May Has Beens Stories Seems Film Motivation Principles Novel Products Essentials Raises Series Contact Aliens Complexity Human Mind Fifth Ambiguity Delayed Disregarded

Author:James Gunn

“This novel has it all--mystery, psychological insight, emotional truth, and--most important--characters whose lives matter. You'll fall in love with these families. Solti writes with such passion it is inescapable, lyrical, and profoundly moving. The Forgetting Tree goes on my top ten list.”

Writing Important Matter Character Moving Fall Passion Forget Novel Mystery Tree Emotional Goes On Ten Falling In Love Insight Lists Psychological Lyrical

Author:Jonis Agee

“Music's always part of my writing. I think all art is interconnected. You can't create or experience one without its influences bleeding into another. In my writing, music's mostly something that feeds my inspiration and mood while I'm writing, but it's also taught me how to score scenes and even novels. The rise and fall of the storyline echoes the flow of a good piece of music.”

Thinking Writing Art Inspiration Fall Novel Pieces Influence Taught Scene Art Is Flow Mood Score Echoes Bleeding Interconnected Writing Music Rise And Fall Storyline

Author:Charles de Lint

“I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets.”

Writing Play Stories Careers Novel Written Narrative Prose Length Verses Couplets

Author:Charles de Lint

“I write on a computer, but I've run the complete gambit. When I was very young, I wrote with a ballpoint pen in school notebooks. Then I got pretentious and started writing with a dip pen on parchment (I wrote at least a novel-length poem that way). Moved on to a fountain pen. Then a typewriter, then an electric self-correct. Then someone gave me a word processor and I was amazed at being able to fit ten pages on one of those floppy discs.”

“There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.”

Writing Character Novel Novelists Autobiography

Book:John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

Source: John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.”

Men Writing Play Hands Given Novel Grace Genius Criticism Critics Second Hand

Book:Language and Silence

Source: Language and Silence

“While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them. And there was a period when I read many of them. I absorbed the form, and I liked it, it was a good one, mostly the hard-boiled school, you know, Chandler, Hammett, and their heirs. That was the direction that interested me most.”

Knows Writing Hard School Form Reading Novel Periods Detectives Heirs Writing Poems

Author:Paul Auster

“Natural writers will often try to force themselves into a form - novel, story, screenplay, or poem - that is not necessarily the appropriate form for the way they see the world... if, in fact, they are writing from the artist's impulse, which is a deep, inchoate vision of some sort of order behind the apparent chaos of life on planet earth, they'll be driven then to express that vision in the creation of the object - the art object.”

Ifs World Way Writing Trying Art Facts Stories Earth Form Artist Order Force Natural Behinds Vision Novel Creation Objects Planets Chaos Driven Impulse Appropriate Screenplays Planet Earth

Author:Robert Olen Butler

“Writing a novel is like knocking on a door that will never open. You are so desperate to get in, you will say or do anything. You feel: please take my novel.”

Feels Writing Novel Doors Please Desperate Knocking

Author:Samantha Shannon

“When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.”

Needs Writing Romance Certain Wish Felt Novel Fashion Materials Claims Assuming Entitled Latitude

Author:Nathaniel Hawthorne

“It's so easy to get into the same routine. A novel every two years; perhaps, improving technique. But I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in doing something fundamentally important--and therefore, it needs time. And what I've been doing, really, is avoiding this pressure to get into the habit of one novel a year. This is what is expected of novelists. And I have never been really too much concerned with doing what is expected of novelists, or writers, or artists. I want to do what I believe is important.”

“If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?”

Ifs Writing Country Community Novel Citizens Illiterate

Book:Hopes and impediments: selected essays

Source: Hopes and impediments: selected essays

“Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, where Orwell failed.”

Writing Years Has Beens Facts President Novel Pieces Wickedness Accused Crude Prophetic Futuristic Satirist Anti-american President Reagan

Book:Conversations with Philip Roth

Source: Conversations with Philip Roth

“The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life.”

Writing Vision Novel Impulse Momentary Unified Vision Of Life

Book:The Wild Garden: Or, Speaking of Writing

Source: The Wild Garden: Or, Speaking of Writing

“I'm not particularly inventive. If you left me in а room and told me to write a novel, I wouldn't be able to do it. But if you gave me two years in a public library around the corner, I could. It all comes from sort of mixing the true and the invented. I'm not a fabulist. I'm more of a reporter.”

Ifs Writing Years Two Able Left Rooms Novel Library Corners Two Years Reporters Mixing Around The Corner Public Library You Left Me

Author:Elizabeth Gilbert

“In the end, for me, the sole single goal is to write the best novel that I can. Whether or not it gets made or gets purchased.”

Writing Made I Can Ends Goal Novel Sole Best Novel

Author:Nicholas Sparks

“I'm a novelist at heart. How's that? And that's how I make my living, is I write novels.”

Writing Heart Novel Novelists

Author:Nicholas Sparks

“There is a fine line I have to walk throughout the writing process in a novel. It is this line between drama and melodrama, and it is this line between evoking genuine emotional power and being manipulative.”

Writing Process Lines Walks Novel Emotional Fine Drama Genuine Writing Process Fine Lines Melodrama Manipulative Emotional Power

Author:Nicholas Sparks

“I began writing 'Matterhorn' in 1975 and for more than 30 years I kept working on my novel in my spare time, unable to get an agent or publisher to even read the manuscript.”

Writing Years Novel Agents Spares Publishers Manuscripts Spare Time Matterhorn

Author:Karl Marlantes

“Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter.”

People Should Writing Long Book Enough Seems Half Novel Pages Impression Good Enough Editing Not Good Enough

Author:Fran Lebowitz

“I don't assume, because I can write screenplays, that I know how to write a novel. It's a very different world. There's a craft involved in storytelling, and it's a different kind of craft. But yes, someday I will do that. It just might be awhile.”

Knows World Writing Kind I Can Different Might Novel Know How Involved Assuming Storytelling Crafts Someday Different Kinds Because I Can Screenplays Different Worlds

Author:Melissa Rosenberg

“Freud believed that our dreams sometimes recapitulate a speech, a comment we've heard or something that we've read. I always had compositions in my dreams. They would be a joke, a piece of a novel, a witticism or a piece of dialogue from a play, and I would dream them. I would actually express them line by line in the dream. Sometimes after waking up I would remember a snatch or two and write them down. There's something in me that just wants to create dialogue.”

Want Writing Two Sometimes Play Dream Would Be Remember Lines Novel Pieces Heard Speech Jokes Wake Up Dialogue Comment Waking Composition Our Dreams

Author:David Mamet

“I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.”

Writing Novel Lists Shopping

Author:William Gibson

“Dreiser wanted to write the next great American novel, and his desperation pervades [ Sister Carrie ] like an unsavory pit stain.”

Writing Wanted Next Novel Carrie Desperation Pits Stains Great American

Author:Theodore Dreiser

“Well, when I was a young writer the people we read were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And to begin with, I was a bit of a copycat writer and very derivative and tried to write a novel using their voices, really.... I keep it out of print.”

People Writing Wells Young Bits Voice Novel Print Derivatives Young Writers Copycats Celine

Author:Mordecai Richler

“There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.”

Ifs Thinking Writing Character Stories Song Novel Written Extraordinary Whales Great Novels Melville

Author:Michael Stipe

“I write short stories. They may appear big in size, but when you consider it, they're four or five novels in one... In return for picking up one of my books, I'm trying to give them value for their money... the goal of writing any book is to create the illusion that what you are reading is reality and you're part of it.”

Giving Writing Trying May Book Stories Bigs Reality Values Reading Goal Novel Five Four Return Illusion Size Short Story

Author:James Clavell

“When you write a novel, there’s a level at which you are much more revealing about who you are because you’re less self-conscious about how you’re presenting yourself. You are accidentally leaving your DNA all over everything in a novel because it’s all coming from you.”

Writing Self Levels Novel Conscious Who You Are Leaving Dna Revealing Self Conscious Presenting Presenting Yourself

Author:Elizabeth Gilbert

“My novels are in the literature section as opposed to the romance section of bookstores because they're not romance novels. If I tried to have them published as romances, they'd be rejected. I write dramatic fiction; a further sub-genre would classify them as love stories.”

Ifs Writing Stories Romance Literature Fiction Novel Love Story Genre Dramatic Rejected Sections Bookstores Romance Novel

Author:Nicholas Sparks

“If I tried to write long-hand, I suppose I'd never finish a novel. I edit too much as I write - the paper would be "white-out" and sharpie marks. Writing with a computer works for me, so I stick with it.”

Ifs Writing Long Hands Would Be White Novel Too Much Paper Computer Mark Sticks Edits

Author:Nicholas Sparks

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