#novel

My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I've taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, 'The Hornet's Nest,' I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now. ↗

— Jimmy Carter

#bit #cover #fact #few #good

I read novels but I also read the Bible. And study it, you know? And the more I learn, the more excited I get. ↗

— Johnny Cash

#bible #excited #get #i #know

Late night is no different than making a film, really, except that it's faster, and if you do a crap one, you can do a better one tomorrow. Writing a novel and doing stand-up - that stuff is very similar. ↗

— Craig Ferguson

#crap #different #doing #except #faster

I write novels and other things. ↗

— Jack L. Chalker

#i write #novels #other #things #write

Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American. ↗

— Leslie Fiedler

#american #austen #completely #cooper #english

My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author's story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, although he was never transformed into an insect, and although he never had a piece of food (an apple from his family's table!) lodged in his flesh and rotting there, devoted his whole life as a writer to describing his personal struggle with his family, with women, with moral law, with his Jewish heritage, with his Unconscious, with his sense of guilt, and with the modern world. Kafka's work, which grows out of the nighttime dreamworld in Kafka's brain, is *more* autobiographical than any realistic retelling of his daytime experiences at the office or with his family or with a prostitute could have been. What is fiction, after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming? The writer works to create a dream that is vivid and has meaning, so that the reader can then vividly dream it and experience meaning. And work like Kafka's, which seems to proceed directly from dream, is therefore an exceptionally pure form of autobiography. There's an important paradox here that I would like to stress: the greater the autobiographical content of a fiction writer's work, the *smaller* its superficial resemblance to the writer's actual life. The deeper the writer digs for meaning, the more the random particulars of the writer's life become *impediments* to deliberate dreaming. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#kafka #novel #writing #dreams

And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out. ↗

— Sandra Cisneros

#character #deeply #just #kind #life

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century. ↗

— Russell Baker

#century #comic #english #english literature #literature

It was only after five years in the army, when I was having to do a very boring job in a very boring place, that I thought: 'Why not try writing a novel?' partly out of youthful arrogance and partly because there had been a long line of writers in my mother's family. ↗

— Antony Beevor

#army #arrogance #because #been #boring

العيش في الغربة أشبه بعسرِ التنفس ↗

— Amélie Nothomb

#living #novel #weird #biography