#nov

it is better to have red a great work of another culture in translation than never to have read it at all. ↗

— Henry Gratton Doyle

#don-quixote #great-novels-in-translation #the-art-of-translation #translation #translations

The book [Joyce's "Ulysses"] can just as well be read backwards, for it has no back and no front, no top and no bottom. Everything could easily have happened before, or might have happened afterwards. You can read any of the conversations just as pleasurably backwards, for you don't miss the point of the gags. Every sentence is a gag, but taken together they make no point. You can also stop in the middle of a sentence--the first half still makes sense enough to live by itself, or at least seems to. The whole work has the character of a worm cut in half, that can grow a new head or a new tail as required. ↗

— C.G. Jung

#joyce #ulysses #ulysses-novel #art

It [Joyce's "Ulysses"] plays on the reader's sympathies to his own undoing unless sleep kindly intervenes and puts a stop to this drain of energy. Arrived at page 135, after making several heroic efforts to get at the book, to "do it justice", as the phrase goes, I fell at last into profound slumber. ↗

— C.G. Jung

#joyce #ulysses #ulysses-novel #art

La vie ressemble plus souvent à un roman qu'un roman ne ressemble à la vie." ("Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.") ↗

— George Sand

#fiction #life #novels #realism #resemblance

All writers struggle at some point with the problem of balance between authority and involvement, seduction and revelation. Specifically, beginning writers wonder how much description to employ, and more advanced writers ask how much plot is too much or too little. And there is no better place to find answers than in the Victoria's Secret catalogue--or in any ad for lingerie--where the arts of seduction and revelation are so successfully practiced. After all, the secret of the effective lingerie ad is the secret of effective storytelling--to provide, moment by moment, the illusion of imminent expose, to give the viewer (read: reader) the uncanny sense that something fundamentally compelling is always just about to be revealed. Lingerie ads and storytelling balance the veiled and the unveiled, the seen and the unseen, the shown and the about-to-be-shown. In short, it is the art of the tease, the craft of selective 'coverage,' that, not just in lingerie but in storytelling, works to enthrall. ↗

— Julie Checkoway

#fiction-writing #novel-writing #on-fiction #art

Look for patterns, and then ask why those patterns exist. ↗

— Debra Kaye

#creative-thinking #future #innovation #business

A novel does not assert anything, a novel poses questions... The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#attitude

Possible is more a matter of attitude, A matter of decision, to choose Among the impossible possibilities, When one sound opportunity Becomes a possible solution. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#choices #decision #decisions #dejan-stojanovic #impossibility

I think that we are like stars. Something happens to burst us open; but when we burst open and think we are dying; we’re actually turning into a supernova. And then when we look at ourselves again, we see that we’re suddenly more beautiful than we ever were before! ↗

— C. JoyBell C.

#humanity #inspirational #inspirational-life #inspirational-quotes #inspiring

How often one reads a contemporary full-length novel and thinks quietly, mutinously, that it would have worked out better at half or a third the length. ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#contemporary #half #how #length #novel