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Novelists Quotes

Browse 1269 quotes about Novelists.

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Novelists Quotes

“The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.”

WritingProcessModernEffectsHigherDrawsPainterNovelistsAccomplishmentDisregardSubordinatesSimplificationUnlearn
Book:Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art
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“Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.”

StillsPoliticalTechnologyPowerDemocracyProgressEconomicCapitalismExpectedNovelistsConcentrationFlourishingEconomic PowerCentralization
Book:Complete Essays: 1956-1963, and supplement, 1920-1948
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“Usually when I drank too much, I could guess why I did so, the objective being to murder a state of consciousness that I didn't have the courage to sustain--a fear of heights, which sometimes during the carnival of the 1960s accompanied my attempts to transform the bourgeois journalist into an avant-garde novelist. The stepped-up ambition was a commonplace among the would-be William Faulkners of my generation; nearly always it resulted in commercial failure and literary embarrassment.”

SometimesStatesWould BeConsciousnessToo MuchGenerationsAmbitionMurderObjectivesJournalistNovelistsHeight1960sEmbarrassmentDrankCommonplaceBourgeoisMy GenerationAvant GardeStates Of ConsciousnessCarnivals
Author:Lewis H. Lapham
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“Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages - just don't catch him at breakfast. Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.”

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Book:Alan Bennett Plays 2: Kafka's Dick; Insurance Man; Old Country; Englishman Abroad; Question of Attribution
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“One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.”

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Author:Andre Gide
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“Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism.”

GivingEnergySocialNovelPoetAncientMythAccessNovelistsMuseMysticalHomosexualEroticStand AloneEmilyGreat PoetSubordination
Author:Camille Paglia
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“Well, people have been wondering what's going to happen to the novel for two hundred years; its death has been announced many times. You know, I think the novel keeps redefining the world we live in. What you should look for in a novel is a window nobody else is looking out of, that nobody else can look through. What you look for is a voice. You pick up a novel by someone such as Faulkner or Hemingway and you just read three pages and you know who wrote it. And that's what one should demand of a novelist.”

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Author:Mordecai Richler
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“The lucidity of the battle narratives, the vigor of the prose, the strong feeling for the men from generals to privates who did the fighting, are all controlled by a constant sense of how it happened and what it was all about. Foote has the novelist's feeling for character and situation, without losing the historian's scrupulous regard for recorded fact. The Civil War is likely to stand unequalled.”

MenWarCharacterFactsFeelingsFightingStrongSituationHappenedHe ManBattleLosingRegardConstantNarrativeNovelistsCivil WarProseControlledHistorianVigorStrong FeelingLucidity
Author:Walter Millis
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“Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre.”

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Author:Gail Godwin
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“What makes the Southern Poverty Law Center particularly odious is its habit of taking legitimate conservatives and jumbling them with genuine hate groups (the Klan, Aryan Nation, skinheads, etc.), to make it appear that there's a logical relationship between say opposing affirmative action and lynching, or demands for an end to government services for illegal aliens and attacks on dark-skinned immigrants. The late novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand called this 'the broad-brush smear.'”

EndsGovernmentActionLawHateNationsDarkPovertyGroupsHabitDemandLatePhilosopherGenuineAliensNovelistsEtcImmigrantsLogicalIllegalBroadsSouthernBrushesOpposingAffirmative ActionAffirmativeLynchingIllegal AliensDark SkinnedHate GroupsGovernment Service
Author:Don Feder
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“A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.”

CharacterDreamLyingHateSleepNovelists
Book:Anthony Trollope: The Chronicles of Barsetshire & The Palliser Novels (Unabridged): The Warden + The Barchester Towers + Doctor Thorne + Framley Parsonage + The Small House at Allington + The Last Chronicle of Barset + Can You Forgive Her? + The Prime Minister + Eustace Diamonds...
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“I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth's ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.”

WorldYearsLongEarthOrderAirSkyAverageDesertNovelistsDryFiftyValleysConstructionLong AgoPeersVentureOther WorldsPilgrimTelescopesAstronomersChilePristineRainfall
Author:Brad Leithauser
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“Today the crime novelist has one advantage denied to writers of 'straight' or 'literary' novels. Unlike them he can range over all levels of society, for crime can easily breach the barriers that exist in our stratified society. Because of these barriers the modern literary novel, unlike its 19th-century predecessors, is often confined to the horizontal, dealing only with one class. But crime runs through society from top to bottom, and so the crime novelist can present a fuller picture of the way we live now.”

WayBookRunningTodayLanguageLevelsClassNovelModernCenturyCrimeAdvantageBottomRangeNovelistsBarriersDeniedConfined19th CenturyPredecessorsBreachHorizontal
Book:Life & Letters: The Spectator Columns
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“The problems you have as a novelist tend to have to do with making a living and trying to find ways to supplement the income you get from writing novels. For a lot of writers, that involves teaching. In my case, so far, I've been able to get by working in Hollywood with this TV stuff I've been doing. And it's very important, because my wife is a writer, too, and we don't have health insurance through any employer.”

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Author:Michael Chabon
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“Novels are political not because writers carry party cards -- some do, I do not -- but because good fiction is about identifying with and understanding people who are not necessarily like us. By nature all good novels are political because identifying with the other is political. At the heart of the 'art of the novel' lies the human capacity to see the world through others' eyes. Compassion is the greatest strength of the novelist.”

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Author:Orhan Pamuk
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“Roth Unbound is filled with intelligent readings and smart judgments. Because of the author's sympathy and sharp mind, it offers real insight into the creative process itself, and into Philip Roth's high calling as a great American artist. The book is, in some ways, a radical rereading of Roth's life and his work. It is impossible, by the end, not to feel a tender admiration for Roth as a novelist and indeed for Claudia Roth Pierpont as an empathetic and brilliant critic.”

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Author:Colm Toibin
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“So long as a novelist works selfishly for the pleasure of creating character and situation corresponding to his own illusions, ideals and intuitions, he will always produce something worth while and natural. Directly he takes himself too seriously and begins for the alleged benefit of humanity an elaborate dissection of complexes, he evolves a book that is more ridiculous and tiresome than the most conventional cold cream girl novel of yesterday.”

LongBookCharacterHumanityGirlNaturalPleasureSituationNovelProduceColdBenefitsCreatingIllusionIdealsComplexesIntuitionRidiculousYesterdayEvolveNovelistsConventionalCreamCorrespondingTiresomeDissectionCreating Characters
Book:Willa Cather in person: interviews, speeches, and letters
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“a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.”

WantWritingMayBookStatesFeelingsFacesSpiritDesireImaginationBreakMonthsQuietIllusionDiscoveryMysteriousChiefsNovelistsUnconsciousShyPerpetualRegularityLethargyDartsSame Face
Book:Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
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“A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.”

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Author:Katherine Paterson
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