Quotes About Novelists

Absolute ideals and absolute grace: after learning that dual message from Russian novelists, I returned to Jesus and found that it suffuses his teaching throughout the Gospels and especially in the Sermon on the Mount.

Not all popular novelists are good, but all good novelists are, sooner or later, popular.

Noi chiamiamo grandi storici solo quelli che non soltanto hanno il pieno controllo della documentazione fattuale ottenuta mediante l'impiego dei migliori metodi critici disponibili, ma possiedono altresì la profonda penetrazione immaginativa che caratterizza i romanzieri di talento. Dopo tutto - lo ricordava molto tempo fa lo storico inglese G.M. Trevelyan - Clio era una musa.

Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time.

Novelists, it seems to me, are the very last people who should be asked to comment on the news of the day, and sooner or later, when they have been pilloried for their views, most of them recognise this.

It is a commonplace to say that novelists should be judged by their work rather than their private lives or their publicly expressed views. And writers, of course, subscribe enthusiastically to this idea.

Novelists would do well to remember that when the works of the scholar-historians create doubt in the researcher's mind, the researcher then turns to literature as a primary source for confirmation or correction. If the truth of a time, a people, a state is not available anywhere else, let it be in the novel. - from Twayne's US Authors Series: JOHN A WILLIAMS by Gilbert Muller

Kundera's novel [ The Unbearable Lightness of Being ] seems as relevant now as it did when it was first published. Relevance, however, is nothing compared with that sense of felt life which the truly great novelists communicate.

I always counsel aspiring novelists that passion is the most important quality for a writer to possess - technique can be taught, but that relentless desire to write has to come from within.

Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.

I watched Buford set things up and I decided that tending bar might be a pretty good way to spend one's life. Spanking down big foaming steins of beer to be encircled by the huge skeet-shooting hands of virile novelists. Rattling the cocktail shaker and doing a little samba step for the amusement of the ladies. To be an expert at something.

5. Disaster works (moves the story forward) by seeming to move the central Figure further back from his goal, leaving him in worse trouble than he was before the scene started. It may seem paradoxical to beginning novelists that scenes work best when they move the lead character further from his story goal – that the best narrative progress often appears to be backwards.

It's axiomatic among professional novelists that when things are going hideously for the lead character, the book is probably going along just wonderfully, thank you.

Mark Twain decía que movía estados y ciudades completos para que encajaran en su narración. Esa es la licencia que se les da a los novelistas o que ellos se toman por su cuenta.

Greene's writing—he was the first modern writer I liked. Before Greene, my heroes were all novelists from the nineteenth century. Living in the nineteenth century can expand your loneliness; as a writer, it's lonely living there.

Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.

Hence one meets in polite society few novelists, or poets, few of all those sublime creatures who speak of the things that are not to be mentioned.

You're the cleverest man I know, do you hear?" He corrected himself, and added: "You and Elstir.—You don't mind my bracketing him with you, I hope. You understand—punctiliousness. It's like this: I say it to you as one might have said to Balzac: 'You are the greatest novelist of the century—you and Stendhal.

as of discussing the nature of love with her novelists and philosophers. "Love?" she had once replied to a pushing lady who had asked her: "What are your views on love?"—"Love? I make it, constantly, but I never talk about it.

La noche, la duda y el miedo son poderosos hechiceros que han poblado el mundo de la ficción más que la mitad de los novelistas que han existido.

Great sorrow or great joy should bring intense hunger--not abstinence from food, as our novelists will have it.

What the podcast novelists do isnt all that different from what self-publishers do. We put the books out in different formats, but the goal is the same: build an audience and attract a publisher.

Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing of the thoughts of their characters.

In the past," a writer friend of Ethan's had recently said, over lots of beer, "everyone wanted to be novelists. And now they all want to be screenwriters. It's like screenplays are the same exact thing as novels, but easier to read and worth a lot more money.