Novel Quotes
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Put simply the novel stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. There is no other medium in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character. That is the service a novel renders.
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The job of the novel is to be true to the confusion, but not so confusing that you turn the reader off.
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Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history.
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Continuous present is all we have, and stream of consciousness - which in a novel is arguably just as artificial as the stilted dialogue that you get in most conventional novels. They're all stratagems to try to get closer to the texture of lived life.
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The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt. Precisely because we keep questioning everything, especially our own premises, we are always ready to improve our knowledge. Therefore a good scientist is never ‘certain’. Lack of certainty is precisely what makes conclusions more reliable than the conclusions of those who are certain: because the good scientist will be ready to shift to a different point of view if better elements of evidence, or novel arguments emerge. Therefore certainty is not only something of no use, but is in fact damaging, if we value reliability.
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There're no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels, and then I read them again, and it's the best thing.
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Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.
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I'll write to you. A super-long letter, like in an old-fashioned novel.
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I don't talk about my books while I'm writing them: not even my husband knows what a novel's about until it's done.
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I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.
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When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.
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A novel that features real people is complicated, but in the end, that extra challenge is all for the good.
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At the emergence of the modern novel with Rabelais and Cervantes, all kinds of things were possible in a long-form prose work. Within a couple of hundred years, most of those possibilities were abandoned in favor of a text that efficiently transmitted sentiments.
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It was a great place to write a novel about book burning, in the library basement.
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I'm grateful for the likes of Kundera, Murnane, Markson, Berger, and, in his recent work, Coetzee. But no matter how celebrated they are, critics still consider them askance. Elizabeth Costello, for example, is a great novel, but it got quite a critical panning when it was published. The complaint was that it was simply a book of speeches, without the machinery of conventional fiction. Markson's books are compilations of facts and alleged facts, very artfully.
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There are jobs that can be done equally well by men or by women and that finally you can't see a difference. But from the moment that you involve yourself fully in writing a novel, for example, or an essay, then you are involved as a woman, in the same way that you can't deny your nationality - you are French, you are a man, you are a woman... all this passes into the writing.
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In all my stories and novels, no one ever escapes Louisiana. Maybe that is because my soul never left Louisiana, although my body did go to California.
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If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.
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I think predictability is built into any good novel in some way - you begin reading Anna Karenina and you know pretty much what's going to happen at the end. But that doesn't mean you know what's going to happen in the middle. For me, it's that sense of what happens in the middle that's important.
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It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel.
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If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
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When I write a novel I put into play all the information inside me. It might be Japanese information or it might be Western; I don't draw a distinction between the two.
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I can't imagine how American readers will react to a novel, but if the story is appealing it doesn't matter much if you don't catch all the detail. I'm not too familiar with the geography of nineteenth century London, for instance, but I still enjoy reading Dickens.
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It's been a while since I've written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, 'Okay, now I'm going to write something for us old folks.' I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.
