Ben Lerner Quotes
I don’t want what we’re doing to just end up as notes for a novel.
Ben Lerner
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.
Gary Kemp
Spandau Ballet
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.
Kate Christensen
Notes are tricky in an audition, because I find, more often than not, my instinct is right.
Lance Reddick
I don't have my novel outlined, and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.
Flannery O'Connor
I love bookstores and booksellers. In my novel 'Dirty Martini,' I thanked over 3,000 booksellers by name in the back matter.
J. A. Konrath
The novel is a seduction; a reader has to be seduced.
T. C. Boyle
Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The waiters' eyes sparkled and their pencils flew as she proceeded to eviscerate my wallet – paté, Whitstable oysters, a sole, and a favorite salad of the Nizam of Hyderabad made of shredded five-pound notes.
S. J. Perelman
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
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
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
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
I learn a great deal by merely observing you, and letting you talk as long as you please, and taking note of what you do not say.
T. S. Eliot
There are few punishments too severe for a popular novel writer.
S. S. Van Dine
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.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
Paul Auster
There's a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog - and that was Eric also, what a little monster he was! - in a novel, even if I took it directly from life, it would be fiction.
Paul Auster
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
It's such a risk to write a novel that it's easy to become conservative - you're spending what would be, for me, a couple of years of my life on a single idea. Which is maybe one of the reasons I write stories - if it doesn't work, you've only lost a month.
Ethan Canin
A fossil is so powerful. It's moving. This is my ancestor. The naturalist is moved by the fossil... not the cross.
Gregory Walter Graffin
Bad Religion
Then I felt as if my thoughts were cut off in the middle, absorbing and yet defective, with an urgent need for verification, for development, yet without conviction, without faith in themselves.
Elena Ferrante
... the estranged self, hidden with its inexhaustible potential, lies undiscovered by many people who die without even knowing that it exists.
Kazuo Chiba
I don’t want what we’re doing to just end up as notes for a novel.
Ben Lerner
