Novels Quotes - Page 6

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

Sometimes we need enemies more than we need friends. Mandy Walker

Creativity is a commodity and derives its value only in how energy is spent.

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

La vie ressemble plus souvent à un roman qu'un roman ne ressemble à la vie."

("Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.")

If the shining sun blinds the eye,it makes sense. But to be blinded by gold and silver!

I’ve only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a "serious" novel.

As it is I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I had never written Voss, which is going to be everybody's albatross.

Bedensel sevgi şiddetsiz düşünülemez.

I am very careful about who I choose to build memories with. Some of them might last a lifetime.

Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night.

Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel. Almost everything else was subjugated to this ruling passion, reading stories. As a consequence, I can barely add a column of double digits, I have not the slightest idea of how a plane flies, I can't draw any better than a five-year-old.

If every book was judged by its cover, very few would be read; education would be limited, and fewer movies would be made.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties."

(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)

Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code ... a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name."

(Discussion at Woodruff Auditorium in Lawrence, KS; October 7, 2005.)

[T]he success of every novel - if it's a novel of action - depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, "What are my big scenes?" and then get every drop of juice out of them."

(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)