Joseph Heller Quotes
I don't think the 'what' distinguishes a good novel from a bad one but rather the 'how.'
Joseph Heller
Quotes to Explore
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I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father.
Pat Conroy
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Maybe some people, when they sit down to write their great novel or make their great record or paint their great painting, they have it all planned out in their head. But for me, it's never worked that way.
Mike D
The Beastie Boys
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Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.
Flannery O'Connor
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When I write a novel, every word is mine. I welcome suggestions from my editor, but in the end, I make all the final decisions.
Louis Sachar
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In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.
Oscar Wilde
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I certainly wake up every morning and thank God that I'm not a novelist because the theater is tough, but novel writing is infinitely harder. Especially with the economics of serious fiction being what they are in America.
Tony Kushner
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Before I studied story, I was trying to write a novel, and it was terrible. It wasn't going anywhere, and I couldn't figure out what I was trying to do. It was really hard; much harder than I thought it was going to be. Now that I've studied story, I think I'd have a different approach and maybe I could actually get it done.
Donald Miller
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We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.
John Gardner
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History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.
Paul Auster
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All my novels are very much directly related to my inner life, even though I'm inventing characters, even though it's fiction, even though it's make-believe, it nevertheless is coming out of the deepest recesses of myself.
Paul Auster
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When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
Ernest Hemingway
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When I began to write seriously, 40 years ago now, my chosen form was the novel.
William Nicholson
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A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Information, defined intuitively and informally, might be something like 'uncertainty's antidote.' This turns out also to be the formal definition- the amount of information comes from the amount by which something reduces uncertainty...The higher the [information] entropy, the more information there is. It turns out to be a value capable of measuring a startling array of things- from the flip of a coin to a telephone call, to a Joyce novel, to a first date, to last words, to a Turing test...Entropy suggests that we gain the most insight on a question when we take it to the friend, colleague, or mentor of whose reaction and response we're least certain. And it suggests, perhaps, reversing the equation, that if we want to gain the most insight into a person, we should ask the question of qhose answer we're least certain... Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of course, and I don't quibble with them in the slightest. But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish.
Brian Christian
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My name has become a brand - it could be make-up, clothing, perfume.
Carine Roitfeld
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I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.
Ernest Hemingway
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I don't think the 'what' distinguishes a good novel from a bad one but rather the 'how.'
Joseph Heller
