#novelist

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth’s ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar. ↗

— Brad Leithauser

#astronomy #chile #metaphor #novelists #telescope

What description of clouds and sunsets was to the old novelist, description of scientific apparatus and methods is to the modern Scientific Detective writer. ↗

— Hugo Gernsback

#clouds #description #detective #methods #modern

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo. ↗

— Nicholson Baker

#control #form #group #living #me

After I convinced them that I was a harmless novelist, I actually got them to give me a tour of the harem - which is usually off limits for tourists. ↗

— Dorothy Dunnett

#after #convinced #give #give me #got

The function of the novelist... is to comment upon life as he sees it. ↗

— Frank Norris

#function #life #novelist #sees #upon

Rich will be my life if I can keep my memories full and brimming, and record them on clear-eyed mornings while I set joyously to work setting pen to holy craft. ↗

— Roman Payne

#life #memories #novel-writing #novelist #payne

This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity stamina... close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That s the bloody price. I don t know maybe it's some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it's part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three or four year period. ↗

— Leon Uris

#conquest #loneliness #mitla-pass #novelist #writing

Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment. ↗

— Lynn Abbey

#balance #because #commitment #different #dull

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn. ↗

— Graham Greene

#away #careful #economy #housewife #like

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays. ↗

— Jose Saramago

#because #effect #essayist #essays #failed