"Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed."
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Novelists quotes
Novelists
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Novelists quotes (page 3 of 25)
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"The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging."
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"It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance."
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"If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist."
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"Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie."
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"The funniest things are the forbidden."
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"What description of clouds and sunsets was to the old novelist, description of scientific apparatus and methods is to the modern Scientific Detective writer."
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"The bad novelist constructs his characters; he directs them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them act; he hears their voices even before he knows them."
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"I am. I think. I will."
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"Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives."
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"Most contemporary novelists, especially the American and the French, are too subjective, mesmerized by private demons; theyre enraptured by their navels and confined by a view that ends with their own toes."
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"The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions - whenever asked - cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. Information will never replace illumination."
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"The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen."
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"Every novelist has a different purpose-and often several purposes which might even be contradictory."
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"To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun."
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"As a novelist, I suppose I can say that I'm highly articulate. But I know, as a person, in other ways, I'm not always articulate. I think we are all, from time to time, inarticulate, at some level, about some things."
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"For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?"
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"It is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder."
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"We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper."
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"I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life."
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