#novelist

In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#european-novelists #literary-tradition #literature-in-translation #art

Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer? ↗

— Roman Payne

#books #escape #flame #heroic #heroism

Everyone assumes that novelists are smarter and more interesting. They're generally smarter and more interesting, but they're often very short. So it kind of cancels all the smart and interesting stuff out. ↗

— Liev Schreiber

#everyone #generally #interesting #interesting stuff #kind

I don't like to read novels where the novelist tells me what to think about the situation and the characters. I prefer to discover for myself. ↗

— Frederick Wiseman

#characters #discover #i #like #me

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

I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face. ↗

— Caleb Carr

#face #fiction #fiction writer #grew #had

I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist. ↗

— Leslie Fiedler

#critic #fireman #i #life #met

One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like. ↗

— Leslie Fiedler

#come #him #i #like #mccarthy

I was going to be a great woman novelist. Then the war came along and I think it's hard for young people today, don't you, to realize that when World War II happened we were dying to go and help our country. ↗

— Julia Child

#came #country #dying #go #going

So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked. ↗

— Lee Child

#another #answer #become #book #desperation