"All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative."
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Novelists quotes
Novelists
488 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Novelists quotes (page 4 of 25)
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"The nation which once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor."
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"Great sorrow or great joy should bring intense hunger--not abstinence from food, as our novelists will have it."
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"The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect."
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"The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words."
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"Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works."
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"To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold."
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"I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always try to make the argument from the perspective of personal pleasure."
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"The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation."
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"Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it."
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"Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family."
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"All gods are better than their reputation."
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"There seems almost a general wish of descrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them."
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"Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts."
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"As a child I was an inveterate liar. As opposed to now, I am a Novelist."
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"A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience."
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"Before I became a suspense novelist, I wrote romantic suspense as Alicia Scott."
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"A woman filled with faith in the one she loves is the creation of a novelist's imagination."
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"People in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed."
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"To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?"
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