#novelist

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. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#among #bullet #clean #embedded #fiction

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything. ↗

— Raymond Queneau

#context #everything #historical #important #interest

Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad. ↗

— W. Somerset Maugham

#easier #generally #good #heroes #novelists

Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child. ↗

— Barbara Kingsolver

#answering #back #being #call #child

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence? ↗

— Milan Kundera

#existence #explores #given #his #historic

The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#being #being forgotten #cease #dim #discoveries

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#built #certainties #comprehend #dead #novel

You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves. ↗

— Pat Conroy

#novelist #write #writer #experience

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do. ↗

— Quentin Tarantino

#any #complete #complete freedom #fit #freedom

I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#believe #experience #fringes #funny #funny way