Quotes by Novelists - Page 130

Hello, I'm Shellie's new boyfriend and I'm out of my mind. If you so much as talk to her or even think her name, I'll cut you in ways that'll make you useless to a woman.
Frank Miller
The public wants work which flatters its illusions.
Gustave Flaubert
Strong words outlast the paper they are written upon.
Joseph Bruchac
I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.
May Sarton
A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.
Tim O'Brien
First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self when one does not lack wit and is familiar with all the niceties of language. Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everything, who has always foreseen everything, and who assumes a thousand forms in order to be right. The most honorable of men is he who thinks best and acts best, but the most powerful is he who is best able to talk and write
George Sand
You don’t make art out of good intentions.
Gustave Flaubert
I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.
W Somerset Maugham
For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.
May Sarton
Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living.
Gustave Flaubert
She doesn't quite chop his head off.She makes a Pez dispenser out of him.
Frank Miller
An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
Gustave Flaubert
DWIGHT:Stay smart. Stay cool. It's time to prove to you're friends that you're worth a damn. Sometimes that means dying. Sometimes it means killing a whole lot of people.
Frank Miller
Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.  Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
Theodore Dreiser
If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.
Françoise Sagan
Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
W Somerset Maugham
Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.
Carlos Fuentes
The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write about it.
Benjamin Disraeli
The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.
Tim O'Brien
I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.
Gustave Flaubert
Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.
Muriel Barbery
Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.
George R.R. Martin
A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.
George R.R. Martin
A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.
Anthony Trollope
You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road.
Richard Price
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W Somerset Maugham
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann
A story might help you get through your life, he said, but it doesn't literally keep you alive -- if anything, most often people who have power turn their story into a brick wall keeping out somebody else's truth, so that they can continue the life they believe themselves to be leading, trying somehow to preserve the idea that they're good people in their small lives, despite their involvement, however indirect, with bigger evils.
James Hannaham
Truth never dies.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
More bloodshed followed, as brother fought brother and religion battled religion in the age-old nonsense of settling whose method of worship was the holiest to our Creator, who, for all our murderous efforts, most likely despises the lot of us.
Steve Alten
Many things the gods achieve beyond our judgement,'" said the sorrowful girl. "'What we thought is not confirmed and what we thought not God contives.
John Irving
Вера в себя способна творить такие же чудеса, как вера в Господа Бога.
Honoré de Balzac
Prophet,' he said, 'Your doctrines I do not know; therefore if I accepted them, I would do it out of fear like a coward and a base man. Are you anxious that your faith be professed by cowards and base people?
Henryk Sienkiewicz
You just don't have faith!" Frank repeated."Well I hope I never get it! It's like being hit by a hammer in the head!
Kim Stanley Robinson
...he felt God the same way arthritic monks felt rain coming in their joints. He felt only a hint of him.
Sue Monk Kidd
I started having doubts right on top of my certainty.
David James Duncan
Tell me,' asked Stas, 'what is a wicked deed?' 'If anyone takes away Kali's cow,' he answered after a brief reflection, 'that then is a wicked deed.' 'Excellent!' exclaimed Stas, 'and what is a good one?' This time the answer came without any reflection: 'If Kali takes away the cow of somebody else, that is a good deed.' Stas was too young to perceive that similar views of evil and good deeds were enunciated in Europe not only by politicians but by whole nations.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
It is a part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means, be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of things, the meaning of our lives, or the absence of meaning. These are basic and extremely simple aspects of existence, but our limitations prevent us from responding in an unequivocal way and for that reason we generate an emotional response, as a defense mechanism. It's pure biology.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I said, "Where's all that delivering God's supposed to do?"He snorted. "You're right, the only deliverance is the one we get for ourselves. The Lord doesn't have any hands and feet but ours.""That doesn't say much for the Lord.""It doesn't say much for us, either.
Sue Monk Kidd
Religious people tend to encounter, among those who are not, a cemented certainty that belief in God is a crutch for the weak and the fearful...Now the belief in God may turn out at the last trump to be a mistake. Meantime, let us be quite clear, it is not merely the comfort of the simple--though it is that too, much to its glory--it is a formidable intellectual position with which most of the first-class minds of the human race, century in and century out, have concurred, each in his own way....speaking of crutches--Freud can be a crutch, Marx can be a crutch, rationalism can be a crutch, and atheism can be two canes and a pair of iron braces. We none of us have all the answers, nor are we likely to have. But in the country of the halt, the man who is surest he has no limp may be the worst-crippled.
Herman Wouk
Your faith was strong, but you needed proof...
Leonard Cohen
if someone has just hurt you or broken your heart, if someone has just died, all the grace you need is there-waiting for you to receive it. As long as we are pulled inward-despair and self attention, we aren't free to reach for God's grace. If we mean to leave ourselves alone, we must keep a hand free.
Eugenia Price
When you aren't sincere you need to pretend, and by pretending you end up believing yourself; that's the basic principle of every faith.
Alberto Moravia
Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.
Gabriel García Márquez
He had not been able to see it in himself, but looking at Hungerford, he was able at least to speculate on the possibility that fear, raw, physical fear, had a kind of gift to give, too. Who but the terrified has heard his own heart pounding, listened to his own stertorous breathing, wishing that heart and lungs would be more quiet, and yet learning in their pulsation the lessons of rhythm and metrics? (Anagrams, p. 80)
David R. Slavitt
Le vin est la gaieté, dit-on ; comment cet océan de vin qui submerge la commune de Bercy n’égaye-t-il pas un peu ces navrants paysages ? Tout Bacchus est là ; Bacchus, chanté avec tant de constance par nos poètes ébriolants. Bacchus ne peut-il rasséréner ces horizons en deuil ? ou faut-il croire que Bacchus lui-même, ennemi de l’eau, est incommodé par le voisinage de la rivière ?
Paul Féval père
Tăcerea coboară-n spiraleRotunde şi-ovale,Ca nişte confeti de-aceeaşi culoare...
Ion Minulescu
Demander à la poésie du sentimentalisme ... ce n'est pas ça. Des mots rayonnants, des mots de lumière ... avec un rythme et une musique, voilà ce que c'est, la poésie.
Théophile Gautier
For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.
William H. Gass
I walk through the old yellow sunlightto get to my kitchen tablethe poem about melying there with the booksin which I am listedamong the dead and future Dylans
Leonard Cohen
You ask my love completest,As strong next year as now,The devil take you, sweetest,Ere I make aught such vow.Life is a masque that changes,A fig for constancy!No love at all were better,Than love which is not free.
Ernest Dowson
... Up telephone poles, Which rear, half out of leavageAs though they would shriekLike things smothered by their ownGreen, mindless, unkillable ghosts.In Georgia, the legend saysThat you must close your windowsAt night to keep it out of the houseThe glass is tinged with green, even so,As the tendrils crawl over the fields.The night the Kudzu hasYour pasture, you sleep like the dead.Silence has grown orientalAnd you cannot step upon the ground...ALL: Kudzu by James Dickey
James Dickey
Wild creatures' eyes, the colonel said,Are innocent and fathomlessAnd when I look at them I seeThat they are not aware of meAnd oh I find and oh I blessA comfort in this emptinessThey only see me when they wantTo pounce upon me at the hunt;But in the tame varietyThere couches an anxietyAs if they yearned, yet knew not whatThey yearned for, nor they yearned for not.And so my dog would look at meAnd it was pitiful to seeSuch love and such dependency.The human heart is not at easeWith animals that look like these.
Stevie Smith
At last everything was satisfactorily arranged, and I could not help admiring the setting: these mingled touches betrayed on a small scale the inspiration of a poet, the research of a scientist, the good taste of an artist, the gourmet’s fondness for good food, and the love of flowers, which concealed in their delicate shadows a hint of the love of women
August Strindberg
In summer the empire of insects spreads.
Adam Zagajewski
Good morning, daddy!Ain't you heardThe boogie-woogie rumbleOf a dream deferred?Listen closely:You'll hear their feetBeating out and beating out a -You thinkIt's a happy beat?Listen to it closely:Ain't you heardsomething underneathlike a -What did I say?Sure,I'm happy!Take it away!Dream BoogieHey, pop!Re-bop!Mop!Y-e-a-h!
Langston Hughes
Once upon a time, son, they used to laugh with their hearts and laugh with their eyes; but now they only laugh with their teeth, while their ice-block-cold eyes search behind my shadow. There was a time indeed they used to shake hands with their hearts; but that’s gone, son. Now they shake hands without hearts while their left hands search my empty pockets.
Gabriel Okara