Novel Quotes - Page 4

There were the usual exhortations to purity – think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form – exhortations poets don’t have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.

When I'm writing I don't want anyone else in the room - including myself.

Not writing is never an option. This is not words of advice. It's just literally never an option!

The moment I close my eyes, I see you and sleep vanishes. I’m awake the entire night, revisiting our
memories together. The night seems to stretch on forever.

Why are you behaving like this? You know how much I love you … and I
believe you love me as much, so why are you avoiding me?

I love you so much. Our love is eternal.

I know you would be watching over me all through this journey called life... whenever I look next to me, I feel like you are
here... and a part of you is within me in the form of this child... Love is like the wind... you may not see it... especially in the absence of the other... but you always feel it around...

She said, 'It is filled with all the words for how I want you.

Why certainly, words possess power.  They do!  But releasing their magic requires combining and arranging those words in the right order.

I have only met men like you in novels, men who lived their own idiosyncrasies.

You have to wait for your mind to catch up with whatever it is it’s working on; then you can write a novel.

I am, as it were, the created creating - a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day in and day out, word by word and line by line, constructing a fictitious autobiography for myself in these pages.

and all I could think was that I would like to spend every morning for the rest of my life waking up beside her

A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.

معظم البشر أعينهم مغلقة بغبار الخيبة إلى حدّ يمنعهم من رؤية الحقيقة

Why do we mortals wonder if it is through 'human chaos' or through 'divine perfection' when the world guides us to some magical event? In either case, is not the result the same? Is the result not 'divine perfection?

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something
(All The King's Men)

Schopenhauer wrote that to desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake. He was correct.

I have a question for you. When you were a little boy, is this the man you dreamed of becoming?

When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novel teaches us to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.