Novel Quotes
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Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.
Steven Bochco
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The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people of his experience ... The only thing the writer can do is to recombine parts, suppress some characterisitics and emphasize others, put two or three people into one fictional character, and pray the real-life prototypes won't sue.
Wallace Stegner
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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
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An image often propels the novel, gets it started. For me, it's an image that has a lot of emotion connected to it.
Will Hobbs
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To tell you the truth, I'm not unhappy about it. I'm not even sure that I like the idea of adapting novels into films. It's very difficult to do, and it usually doesn't work. There are exceptions, but generally speaking, one feels disappointed with the result.
Paul Auster
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I've made seventeen or eighteen films now, only two of which have been original screenplays, all the others have been based on short stories or novels, and I find the long short story ideal for adaptation.
Satyajit Ray
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The ingredients that make a good poem often differ from those that make a good essay and from those that make a good novel.
Kathleen Rooney
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When I was young, I kept trying to read 'Moby-Dick', and I couldn't get that far into it. And I kept thinking, 'Well, man, if I can't read the great American novel, I could never be a writer.' And this bothered me a great deal.
Nick Tosches
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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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Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.
Ernest Hemingway
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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
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I always wanted to write. While I was on a long surf trip, supporting myself with various day jobs, I was working hard on a novel. My third novel, in fact.
William Finnegan
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The rise of the dramas in the thirteenth century, and the rise of the great novels in a later period, together with their frank glorification of love and the joys of life, may be called the Third Renaissance.
Hu Shih
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I pretended to be interested in their secret undertaking, but in fact I was very sorry about it. Although the two siblings had involved me by choosing me as their confidant, it was still an experience that I could enter only as witness: on that path Lila would do great things by herself, I was excluded. But above all, how, after our intense conversations about love and poetry, could she walk me to the door, as she was doing, far more absorbed in the atmosphere of excitement around a shoe?...What did I care about shoes. I still had, in my mind's eye, the most secret stages of that affair of violated trust, passion, poetry that became a book, and it was as if she and I had read a novel together, as if we had seen, there in the back of the shop and not in the parish hall on Sunday, a dramatic film.
Elena Ferrante
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If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don't they will feel betrayed.
Mordecai Richler
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I really feel the novel has certain conveniences about it and has something so fundamental about it you could almost say that as long as there is paper, there is going to be the novel.
William Golding
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It's an eclectic film and I think we served the novel really well. And we had a great cast who worked for free. Everyone read it and said, I'm in, from Nick Nolte to Albert Finney to Omar Epps to Barbara Hershey. We really had fun and shot it in a very short time. I think the subject matter is more topical today, more to the point, than it was 30 years ago, when it concerned the Vietnam War.
Bruce Willis
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A writer should bury his thoughts deep and convey them through the characters in his novel.
Guan Moye
