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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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.
Karl Ove Knausgard
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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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Jekyll and Hyde, in particular, is such an important novel in terms of suspense and setting a perfect scene for crime.
Alanna Knight
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Humility is not a weak and timid quality; it must be carefully distinguished from a groveling spirit.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin
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Plot involves fragmentary reality, and it might involve composite reality. Fragmentary reality is the view of the individual. Composite reality is the community or state view. Fragmentary reality is always set against composite reality. Virginia Woolf did this by creating fragmentary monologues and for a while this was all the rage in literature. She was a genius. In the hands of the merely talented it came off like gibberish.
Rita Mae Brown
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When the evening was over, Anne could not be amused…nor could she help fearing, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination.
Jane Austen
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I am the beast with a contorted grin, contracting down to illusion and dilating toward infinity, both growing and dying, delightfully suspended between hope for nothing and despair of everything, brought up among perfumes and poisons, consumed with love and hatred, killed by lights and shadows. My symbol is death of light and the flame of death. Sparks die in me only to be reborn as thunder and lightning. Darkness itself glows in me.
Emil Cioran
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I don't think the 'what' distinguishes a good novel from a bad one but rather the 'how.'
Joseph Heller
