Quotes About Novelists

Those Latin American and Eastern European novelists aren't any help here. They live inside the mansion of female desire as if it is their right. Their own desire is a nice healthy dog on a string, ready to eat, fuck, fetch, piss on the bushes.

When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels.

The fundamental difficulty that most novelists face when they are trying to adapt their own book into a screenplay is realizing that a screenplay is a completely different way of storytelling, and it has limitations.

This Vladimir Brusiloff to whom I have referred was the famous Russian novelist. . . . Vladimir specialized in gray studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, when the moujik decided to commit suicide. . . . Cuthbert was an optimist at heart, and it seemed to him that, at the rate at which the inhabitants of that interesting country were murdering one another, the supply of Russian novelists must eventually give out.

No novelists any good except me. Sovietski -- yah! Nastikoff -- bah! I spit me of zem all. No novelists anywhere any good except me. P. G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad. Not good, but not bad. No novelists any good except me.

From the beginning I've searched out those writers unafraid to stir up the emotions, who entrust me with their darkest passions, their most indestructible yearnings, and their most soul-killing doubts. I trust the great novelists to teach me how to live, how to feel, how to love and hate. I trust them to show me the dangers I will encounter on the road as I stagger on my own troubled passage through the complicated life of books that try to teach me how to die.

Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.

Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody. Values are very strange, they change so quickly I can't keep track of them.

If I remember correctly writers usually find some excuse for their books, although why one should excuse oneself for having such a quiet and peaceful occupation I really don't know. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.

For novelists, sharply drawn moral conflicts are often useful, and even human and personal disasters can be seen as material.

Literary novelists who have a strong handle on plot are often characterized as good vacation reads because they manage to transport you elsewhere, away from the petty facts of ordinary life.

I'm inspired by playwrights, novelists, poets: The value of language has been a lifelong passion of mine. I enjoy it. I'm good at it.

For novelists have the privilege of knowing everything.

Stories full of metaphors are by writers who play the language like a mandolin for our entertainment, novelists

Working in Moscow from 1933 until 1945, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács (1885–1971) developed a theory of "Critical Realism" with respect to literature. Lukács admired narrative novelists such as Cervantes (1547–1616), Balzac (1799–1850), Dickens (1812–70), Gorky (1868–1936), Tolstoy (1828–1910) and Thomas Mann (1875–1955).

Novelists get to say plenty in their massive tomes; rock singers only get four-minute songs with two verses and a chorus' worth of lyrics, and so there's a real pleasure in accessing the intelligence behind the music, even if it doesn't qualify as 'great literature.'

We sometimes forget that human invention can also be a subject of human invention: that might seem a modern notion, or a postmodern one, but novelists have taken time - sometimes time out from their realist fixations - to source and satirise the speech and power we rely on.

It may be time for serious literary novelists to take back some of the subject matter we abandoned to hack novelists and the movies.

If you need proof of how the oral relates to the written, consider that many great novelists, including Joyce and Hemingway, never submitted a piece of work without reading it aloud.

They know a million tricks, those novelists. Take Doctor Goebbels; that's how he started out, writing fiction. Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the novelist knows humanity, how worthless they are, ruled by their testicles, swayed by cowardice, selling out every cause because of their greed - all he's got to do is thump on the drum, and there's his response. And he's laughing, of course, behind his hand at the effect he gets.

Cambiando de postura en el sillín, Adam pensó que la forma en que su humilde vida seguía los moldes de la literatura tenía algo como de metempsicosis. ¿O quizá -se preguntó, hurgándose la nariz- era consecuencia de estudiar tan detenidamente las estructuras de las frases de los novelistas ingleses? Uno se había resignado a no tener ya un lenguaje privado, pero se aferraba melancólicamente a la ilusión de poseer los hechos de su vida.

The forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists. There is little sense, in that version of the story, that women writers of those eras were doing much worth remembering.

I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.