Sarah Dessen Quotes
Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.
Quotes to Explore
-
We never had books at home, but my dad, seeing how keen I was to read, took me to Islington Library when I was about eight and we pulled out two - a Biggles and a science fiction novel. I never got the ace fighter pilot but fell in love with all things to do with the future and space. Isaac Asimov soon became my guiding star.
-
I wrote my first novel in eighth grade for a boy named Kenny on whom I had an unrequited crush and who sat behind me in social studies.
-
The novel is a seduction; a reader has to be seduced.
-
In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.
-
We had to work five back-to-back shows, forty-five minutes on, fifteen minutes off. That's just an awful lot of singing.
-
There's some awfully good things done today and some awful terrible things done today,
-
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.
-
The idea of what it is like to lose everything is awful.
-
Hello, Minister!" bellowed Percy, sending a neat jinx straight at Thicknesse, who dropped his wand and clawed at the front of his robes, apparently in awful discomfort. "Did I mention I'm resigning?
-
I have an awful lot to learn. My dream is to get better and better as I get older.
-
Turks continued their previous policy. They would not stop committing massive and most awful massacres that even Leng Timur would not dare to do.
-
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.
-
I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for 'The Namesake,' I felt that it had to be a novel - it couldn't work as a story.
-
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.
-
There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called "powerful" novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog.
-
An image often propels the novel, gets it started. For me, it's an image that has a lot of emotion connected to it.
-
When I was 30 or so - by that time I had become an assistant D.A. - I decided I would try to write a novel. To be clear: I did not decide to become a novelist. Honestly, it never crossed my mind that I could actually earn a living as a professional novelist.
-
Conversation should be pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, free without indecency, learned without conceitedness, novel without falsehood.
-
Your interviews or blog posts or whatever are less supplements to your novel than part of it. I'm not private, but I believe in literary form - I'll use my life as material for art (I don't know how not to do this) and I'll use art as a way of exploring that passage of life into art and vice versa, but that's not the same thing as thinking that any of the details of my life are interesting or relevant on their own.
-
I knew I'd have to go to work in real estate or something else or I could never finish my novel.
-
The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?
-
I'll write to you. A super-long letter, like in an old-fashioned novel.
-
Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.
