"In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays."
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Novelists quotes
Novelists
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Novelists quotes (page 2 of 25)
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"You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don't already believe it."
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"Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it."
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"Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives."
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"I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing."
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"We can sell our time, but we can't buy it back."
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"No matter how little a man has he will find that he will always settle for less."
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"An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced."
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"Dreams cannot be tamed. Dreamers cannot be ruled."
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"If you act like a victim, you are likely to be treated as one."
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"Great novelists are philosopher novelists - that is, the contrary of thesis-writers."
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"It is morally obscene to regard wealth as an anonymous, tribal product and to talk about 'redistributing' it."
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"With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence."
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"The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero."
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"Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out."
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"Really, the novelist has the best casting since he doesn't have to cope with the actors and all the rest. -Alfred Hitchcock"
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"I have been born more times than anybody except Krishna."
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"The historian records, but the novelist creates."
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"If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats."
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"The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting."
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