“I think you will agree that I am alive in every part of this book; turn back twenty, thirty, one hundred pages - I am back there. That is why I hate the story; characters are not snakes that they must shed their skins on every page - there can only be one action: what a man is. When you have understood this, you will be through with novels.” ThinkingMenWritingBookCharacterStoriesActionHateTurnsNovelAlivePagesUnderstoodHundredSkinsI HateTwentiesAgreeThirtyShedSnakesI Am Alive Author:Kenneth Patchen
“In the usual way I submitted manuscripts to publishers. This was not so much a feeling that I should be published as a wish to escape the feared and hated drudgery of "normal" work. In my twenties some of my work for children was published by Macmillan. However, I was twenty-seven before my adult novel, The Birthgrave, was taken by DAW Books in the USA. This enabled me finally to stop doing stupid and soul-killing jobs, and start working day and night as a professional writer. It felt like a rescue from damnation, and still does.” WayShouldChildrenDoeStillsBookSoulFeelingsJobsNightWishFeltNovelTakenStupidNormalAdultsTwentiesSevenKillingHatedUsaUsualRescuePublishersDay And NightManuscriptsDamnationDrudgery Author:Tanith Lee
“The age of the book is not over. No way... But maybe the age of some books is over. People say to me sometimes 'Steve, are you ever going to write a straight novel, a serious novel' and by that they mean a novel about college professors who are having impotence problems or something like that. And I have to say those things just don't interest me. Why? I don't know. But it took me about twenty years to get over that question, and not be kind of ashamed about what I do, of the books I write.” PeopleKnowsWayWritingYearsKindMeanBookSometimesProblemAgeInterestNovelCollegeSeriousTwentiesAshamedBe KindProfessorsGet OverImpotenceCollege Professors Author:Stephen King
“I've told youngsters not to write their autobiographical novel at the age of twenty-one; to save it for the time when they're fifty-one or sixty-one. They should write other novels first, to learn their craft; they shouldn't cut their teeth on the valuable material of childhood because they'll never have better material, ever, to work with.” ShouldWritingFirstsAgeNovelCuttingChildhoodMaterialsTwentiesValuableTeethCraftsFiftySixtyAutobiographyTwenty OneYoungsters Author:Laura Z. Hobson
“The movies are fun, but I'm a novelist. In many ways, screenwriting is much easier than writing novels. I find screenplays twenty times easier to write than a novel.” WayWritingFunNovelEasierTwentiesNovelistsScreenplaysScreenwriting Author:Nicholas Sparks
“No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.” IfsKnowsYearsFirstsPersonsRealCharacterCasesNovelExperienceTwentiesContraryReal Life Book:Pictures and conversations Source: Pictures and conversations
“If you had told me twenty years ago that I would write a novel set in Russia, much less two, I simply wouldn't have believed you. I had no familiarity with Russia or its history, but part of what drives me as a reader, and more and more as a writer, is curiosity, the desire to explore unfamiliar terrain and inhabit alternate lives.” IfsWritingYearsTwoDesireNovelReaderYears AgoTwentiesCuriosityRussiaFamiliarityUnfamiliarTerrain Author:Debra Dean
“In '94, I started writing a novel about an enormous terrorist act that destroyed the United States. The novel takes place twenty years after this destruction, with all the stuff that we're dealing with now - a dirty war, the disappeared, the concept of terrorism. Anyway, 9/11 happened some years into the process, and I was like, OK, I don't have a novel.” WritingYearsWarStatesStuffProcessUnitedUnited StatesNovelHappenedConceptsDestructionTwentiesTerrorismTerroristEnormousDestroyedDirty Author:Junot Diaz
“I'm working on different fields. One of my next books Insha'Allah will be a novel because it's important to explore the heart and imagination, the spiritual side. I've been working for twenty five years in the legal field and now I'm reaching what I want, which is an Islamic applied ethics and I'm also dealing with Muslims in the West.” WantYearsHeartImportantBookDifferentSpiritualNextSidesImaginationNovelFiveFieldsEthicsTwentiesWestIslamicFive YearsReachingTwenty Five Author:Tariq Ramadan
“I've read some of Kurt Vonnegut letters from when he was young. He was a prisoner of war, and even when he was in his early twenties, there were things mentioned that showed up in his novels. One of the sweetest things in those letters was him wanting to be a writer but doubting himself, not having confidence in himself.” WarYoungNovelDoubtLettersTwentiesPrisonerSweetestPrisoner Of War Author:Susan Sarandon
“When I was fifteen I wrote seven hundred pages of an incredibly bad novel - it's a very funny book I still like a lot. Then, when I was nineteen I wrote a couple hundred pages of another novel, which wasn't very good either. I was still determined to be a writer. And since I was a writer, and here I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.” WritingTryingYearsLittlesStillsBookPlaySeemsNovelPoetCouplePagesHundredTwentiesSevenVery GoodDeterminedNineNovelistsFifteenNine YearsNineteenFunny Book Book:Conversations with Edward Albee Source: Conversations with Edward Albee
“In Among the White Moon Faces, I wrote about my desire to be a writer as rooted in my obsessive hours of reading English novels and poetry. It was that spur, that desire, that pushed me to set aside love and marriage in my early twenties.” FacesDesireReadingHoursWhiteNovelMoonTwentiesRootedObsessiveSpursLove And Marriage Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim
“Because I think of novels as collaborative enterprises between the writer and the reader, all of my novels so far have ending with endings that maybe point in more than one direction, and that seems important to me because it seems important to me that after you've invested twenty or thirty hours of your imaginative life into this narrative that you have some stake in how it ends.” ThinkingImportantEndsSeemsHoursNovelReaderTwentiesNarrativeThirtyEnterpriseStakesImaginativeOne Direction Author:Emily Barton
“In the end, of course, all novelists will be judged by their novels, but let's not forget that we will also need new ways of assessing the latter. There are people who will continue to write nineteenth-century novels in the early twenty-first, and even win major prizes for them, but that's not very interesting, intellectually or emotionally.” PeopleWayNeedsWritingFirstsEndsCoursesWinningForgetInterestingNovelCenturyMajorsTwentiesNovelistsLatterPrizeJudgedNew WaysVery InterestingNineteenth CenturyAssessing Author:Pankaj Mishra
“It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel.” WritingBookNovelTwentiesSellingSymphonyWrestlerAlligatorsBanjos Author:Karen Russell
“From the essay "Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again" 1. Journalists sometimes make things up. 2. Journalists sometimes get things wrong. 3. Almost all books that are published as memoirs were initially written as novels, and then the agent/editor said, This might work better as a memoir. 6. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.” PeopleMenSaidBookSometimesMightNovelFiveWrittenCapacityTwentiesPressesMemoirAgentsJournalistEditorsShockingEssaysTwenty FiveFreedom Of The Press Author:Nora Ephron
“Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also - if this isn't too grand a word - our tragedy.” IfsLittlesDoeDifferentSometimesCharacterStoriesCoursesAttitudeWonderOpinionNovelHabitTragedyTwentiesStuckThirtyDecorationEccentricityNew Habits Author:Julian Barnes
“There are twenty-four characters in this book named Max. Let there be an end to this silly business of authors never giving their own names to characters in their novels. False modesty, faugh!” GivingBookEndsCharacterNamesNovelFourTwentiesSillyModestyMaxFalse Modesty Book:The Zebra Derby: A Novel Source: The Zebra Derby: A Novel