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Novelists Quotes

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Novelists Quotes

“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.”

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Book:You've had your time: being the second part of the confessions of Anthony Burgess
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“Through books you will meet poets and novelists whose creations will fire your imagination. You will meet the great thinkers who will share with you their philosophies, their concepts of the world, of humanity and of creation. You will learn about events that have shaped our history, of deeds both noble and ignoble. All of this knowledge is yours for the taking… Your library is a storehouse for mind and spirit. Use it well.”

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Author:Neil Armstrong
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“Whenever I become discouraged (which is on alternate Tuesdays, between three and four) I lift my spirits by remembering: The artists are on our side! I mean those poets and painters, singers and musicians, novelists and playwrights who speak to the world in a way that is impervious to assault because they wage the battle for justice in a sphere which is unreachable by the dullness of ordinary political discourse.”

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Book:The Historic Unfulfilled Promise
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“I wouldn't care to speculate about what it is in Westlake's psyche that makes him so good at writing about Parker, much less what it is that makes me like the Parker novels so much. Suffice it to say that Stark/Westlake is the cleanest of all noir novelists, a styleless stylist who gets to the point with stupendous economy, hustling you down the path of plot so briskly that you have to read his books a second time to appreciate the elegance and sober wit with which they are written.”

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Author:Terry Teachout
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“I feel if theres one little thing I could do, its to make people realize: We are not worthless because we inhabit a country which is seen by Western eyes as a primitive, fundamentalist country only. . .I mean, we are a rich mixture of all sorts of forces as well, and our lives are very much worth living.”

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Author:Bapsi Sidhwa
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“I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own. But where I can get prickly and combative is, if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.”

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Author:Ursula K. Le Guin
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“There is a great good in returning to a landscape that has had extraordinary meaning in one's life. It happens that we return to such places in our minds irresistibly. There are certain villages and towns, mountains and plains that, having seen them walked in them lived in them even for a day, we keep forever in the mind's eye. They become indispensable to our well-being; they define us, and we say, I am who I am because I have been there, or there.”

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Author:N. Scott Momaday
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“There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.”

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Author:Don DeLillo
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“And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers-perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.”

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Author:Rainer Maria Rilke
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“Dogs' lives are too short. Their only fault, really.”

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Author:Agnes Sligh Turnbull
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“Bitter criticism caused the sensitive Thomas Hardy, one of the finest novelists ever to enrich English literature, to give up forever the writing of fiction. Criticism drove Thomas Chatterton, the English poet, to suicide. . . . Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain - and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.”

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Book:How to win friends & influence people
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“Today we can say that at last the director writes the film. The image--its plastic composition and the way it is set in time, because it is founded on a much higher degree of realism--has at its disposal more means of manipulating reality and of modifying it from within. The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last the equal of the novelist”

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Author:Andre Bazin
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“The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn't there a difficulty of saying 'we'? You cannot speak for me. I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say 'I'; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.”

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Author:Adrienne Rich
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“You do not conceive a novel as easily as you conceive a child, nor even half as easily as you create nonfiction work. A journalist amasses facts, anecdotes and interviews with top brass. Enough of these add up to a book. A novelist demands quite different things. He has to find himself in his materials, to know for sure how he would feel and act and the events he writes about. In addition, he requires a catalyst — a person, idea, or emotion which coalesces his ingredients and makes them jell into a solid purpose.”

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Author:Zelda Popkin
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“Love. Children are loving, they dont gossip, they dont complain, theyre just open-hearted. Theyre ready for you. They dont judge. They dont see things by way of color. Theyre very child-like. Thats the problem with adults: they lose that child-like quality. And thats the level of inspiration thats so needed and is so important for creating and writing songs and for a sculptor, a poet or a novelist. Its that same kind of innocence, that same level of consciousness, that you create from. And kids have it. I feel it right away from animals and children and nature. Of course.”

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Author:Michael Jackson
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