Quotes by Novelists - Page 2

All men are, at times, influenced by inexplicable sentiments. Ideas haunt them in spite of all their efforts to discard them. Prepossessions are entertained, for which their reason is unable to discover any adequate cause. The strength of a belief, when it is destitute of any rational foundation, seems, of itself, to furnish a new ground for credulity. We first admit a powerful persuasion, and then, from reflecting on the insufficiency of the ground on which it is built, instead of being prompted to dismiss it, we become more forcibly attached to it.
Charles Brockden Brown
i discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind, but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature.
Gabriel García Márquez
I really admired Cesar Chavez and Gandhi, but my form of activism would have to be the written word, not the empty stomach. My parents had brought my family t the United States because of the fear of empty stomachs.
Josefina López
Never place your punch at the beginning of a column nor at the end. Sneak it in where it's least expected. Fill a whole column with drivel, just to get in that one important line.
Ayn Rand
She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story - not necessarily what did happen or what had happened.
John Irving
The object of storytelling, like the object of magic, is not to explain or to resolve, but rather to create and to perform miracles of the imagination. To extend the boundaries of the mysterious. To push into the unknown in pursuit of still other unknowns. To reach into one's heart, down into that place where the stories are, bringing up the mystery of oneself.
Tim O'Brien
When will someone write from the point of view of a joke, that is to say theway God sees events from above?
Gustave Flaubert
The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The moment anyone tries to make poems or stories of ideas alone he is at the edge of absurdity; he can only harangue, never interest and persuade, because ideas in their conceptual state are simply not dramatic. They have to be put into the form of people and actions . . .
Wallace Stegner
How can I get up everyday knowing you had to kill yourself to make it stop hurting and I was here all the time and I never even saw it. And then you gave me this chance to make it better, convince you to stay alive and I couldn't do it. How can I live with myself after this, Jessie?
Marsha Norman
You always play it open, don’t you?” he asked.“I’ve never noticed you doing otherwise.”“I thought I was the only one who could afford to.
Ayn Rand
Mama:...you can keep trying. You can get brave and try some more. You don't have to give up.Jessie: I'm NOT giving up. This IS the other thing I'm trying. And I'm sure there are some other things that might work, but MIGHT work isn't good enough any more. I need something that WILL work. THIS will work. That's why I picked it.
Marsha Norman
Mama: But something might happen. Something that might change everything. Who knows what it might be, but it might be worth waiting for! (Jessie doesn't respond.) Try if for two more weeks.Jessie: No, MamaMama: i'll pay more attention to you. Tell the truth when you ask me. Let you have your say.Jessie: No, Mama. This is how I have my say. This is how I say what I thought about it ALL and I say No. To Dawson and Loretta and the Red Chinese and epilepsy and Ricky and Cicel and you. And me. And hope. I say No.,
Marsha Norman
Perhaps it was as well that she had been unconscious for four weeks. She had missed the aftermath, the SO-1 reports, the recriminations, Snood and Tamworth's funerals. She missed everything...except the blame. It was waiting for her when she awoke...
Jasper Fforde
That drew a laugh from Jessamy, but he said, after a moment: “You had better flay me. It was my fault—all my fault!”“I was wondering how long it would be before you contrived to convince yourself that you were to blame,” said Alverstoke caustically. “I haven’t the slightest wish to know how you arrived at such an addlebrained conclusion, so don’t put yourself to the trouble of telling me!
Georgette Heyer
When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war, You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going to it. You could blame the rain. You could blame the river. You could blame the field, the mud, the climate. You could blame the enemy. You could blame the mortar rounds. You could blame people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were bored by the daily body counts, who switched channels at the mention of politics. You could blame whole nations. You could blame God. You could blame the munitions makers or Karl Marx or a trick of fate of an old man in Omaha who forgot to vote.
Tim O'Brien
People who have monsters recognize each other. They know each other without even saying a word.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
He had found his monsters, and now was the time to leave them behind.
Tim Lebbon
Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.
Hilary Mantel
Couldn’t we camp down by the lakes?” Nynaeve asked, patting her face with her kerchief. “It must be cooler down by the water.”“Light,” Mat said, “I’d just like to stick my head in one of them. I might never take it out.”Just then something roiled the waters of the nearest lake, the dark water phosphorescing as a huge body rolled beneath the surface. Length on man-thick length sent ripples spreading, rolling on and on until at last a tail rose, waving a point like a wasp’s stinger for an instant in the twilight, at least five spans into the air. All along that length fat tentacles writhed like monstrous worms, as many as a centipede’s legs. It slid slowly beneath the surface and was gone, only the fading ripples to say it had ever been.Rand closed his mouth and exchanged a look with Perrin. Perrin’s yellow eyes were as disbelieving as he knew his own must be. Nothing that big could live in a lake that size. Those couldn’t have been hands on those tentacles. They couldn’t have been.“On second thought,” Mat said faintly, “I like it right here just fine.
Robert Jordan
Only monsters could slay monsters.
Imraan Coovadia
One of my roommates, Rafael, he's an expert on monsters. Not that he talks about them. I can just tell. People who have monsters recognize each other. They know each other without even saying a word.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
A surfeit of information often hides an untruth,” he said, with annoying clarity.
Jasper Fforde
Her tiny and organized handwriting reminded me of the tidiness of her desk, as if she'd wanted to find in words the peace and safety that life hadn't wanted to grant her.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
How strange it (the earthquake) must all have seemed to them, here where they lived so safely always! They thought such a dreadful thing could happen to others, but not to them. That is the way!
William Dean Howells
In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.
William H. Gass
A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
Gustave Flaubert
The capacity for unclouded enjoyment, she thought, does not belong to irresponsible fools; an inviolate peace of spirit is not the achievement of a drifter; to be able to laugh like that is the end result of the most profound, most solemn thinking.
Ayn Rand
She was dark-haired, fierce; she wore two drop earrings made of crystal; her face was a pure oval tickled with dimples; her skin was golden; and her laugh was like a fire in the night. But on her face you could also read the concentration of a soul whose life is entirely inward, and a mischievous gravity which acquires a silver patina with age.
Muriel Barbery
You don’t have to speak at all—I know what you’d say…- Laura
Wilkie Collins
…my books are derived from city images, and the city of my dreams or nightmares is Mexico City. (The Art of Fiction, No. 68. The Paris Review, No. 82, Winter 1981.)
Carlos Fuentes
Youth! youth! how buoyant are thy hopes they turn Like marigolds toward the sunny side.
Jean Ingelow
I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more - the feeling that I could last forever outlast the sea the earth and all men.
Joseph Conrad
Please never despise the translator. He's the mailman of human civilization.
Alexander Pushkin
I like prefaces. I read them. Sometimes I do not read any further.
Malcolm Lowry
The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance the farther there is to go and the more there is to say the less time there is to say it.
Gabrielle Roy
Journalism allows it's readers to witness history. Fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.
John Hersey
Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing - for life itself is a writer's love until death.
Edna Ferber
Get black on white.
Guy de Maupassant
Writing when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.
Laurence Sterne
I think with my right hand.
Edmund Wilson
There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.
Robert Graves
Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.
Georges Simenon
Memoirs: the backstairs of history.
George Meredith
Make'em laugh make 'em cry make 'em wait.
Charles Reade
Adversity is like the period of the rain ... cold comfortless unfriendly to man and to animal yet from that season have their birth the flower the fruit the date the rose and the pomegranate.
Sir Walter Scott
Excellence costs a great deal.
May Sarton
Our worst misfortunes never happen and most miseries lie in anticipation.
Honoré de Balzac
Worry is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.
Arthur Somers Roche
Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness.
Arnold Bennett
Worries are the most stubborn habits in the world. Even after a poor man has won a huge lottery prize he will still for months wake up in the night with a start worrying about food and rent.
Vicki Baum
Worry is a god invisible but omnipotent. It steals the bloom from the cheek and lightness from the pulse it takes away the appetite and turns the hair gray.
Benjamin Disraeli
This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.
Laurence Sterne
This world is all a fleeting show For man's illusion given The smiles of joy the tears of woe Deceitful shine deceitful flow - There's nothing true but Heaven.
George Moore
The world goes up and the world goes down And the sunshine follows the rain And yesterday's sneer and yesterday's frown Can never come over again Sweet wife. No never come over again.
Charles Kingsley
The world is God's world after all.
Charles Kingsley
Believe everything you hear said of the world nothing is too impossibly bad.
Honoré de Balzac
After fifty years of living it occurs to me that the most significant thing that people do is go to work whether it is to go to work on their novel or at the assembly plant or fixing somebody's teeth.
Thomas McGuane
No thoroughly occupied man was ever yet very miserable.
Letitia Landon
Man's usual routine is to work and to dream and work and dream.
Raymond Queneau
Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man's life the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source the precondition of his productive work - pride is the result.
Ayn Rand