Novel Quotes
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As far as the novel is concerned in my own country, I think it's in a pretty healthy state.
William Golding
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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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For me a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.
Paul Auster
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I like that we don't have to come out the first 10 minutes and score, you know, with joke, joke, joke. We can open it in a more novel way and keep playing different pranks as we go through the thing.
Bruce Vilanch
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If you're a playwright, unless you're really lacking in get-up-and-go, you can always get your play up somewhere. You can't necessarily make a living doing it, but theater is about meeting an audience. Plays are not easier to write necessarily, they take less time to write. If you get them up, it's a much more rough-and-tumble kind of existence. I think it's, from my perspective, easier than novel writing.
Tony Kushner
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A short story is confined to one mood, to which everything in the story pertains. Characters, setting, time, events, are all subject to the mood. And you can try more ephemeral, more fleeting things in a story - you can work more by suggestion - than in a novel. Less is resolved, more is suggested, perhaps.
Eudora Welty
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You write a novel by inventing a world and inventing the rules that govern that world. Then you break the rules when you want to.
Joshua Cohen
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The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.
Paul Auster
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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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My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.
Will Self
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To write a novel is fundamentally an act of impudence. To comb one's hair is also an act of impudence, especially when it's done to try to cover a scar running across the top of one's forehead. But combing one's hair is an act of minor impudence, whereas writing is a more serious affair. We mask reality, we hide our fears, we reinvent things that have been said, and above all, the people who said them. Writing a novel implies a certain perversity. It's not something one can do with a tortoiseshell comb. It is perhaps for that reason that they take away my pen at night. Not, as they pretend, to prevent me from accidentally stabbing myself in the throat with it- but to prevent me from killing anyone else.
Paco Ignacio Taibo II
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After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.
Paul Auster
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Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
Oscar Wilde
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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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Whether it's a letter, song lyrics, part of a novel, or instructions on how to fix a kitchen sink, it's writing. You keep your craft honed, you acquire the discipline to finish things. You turn into a self-taskmaster.
Jimmy Buffett
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Somebody said, 'Hey, there is a lull in your career. Why don't you write books about your [dyslexia]?' We are currently writing our 34th novel.
Henry Winkler
