#novelist

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist either." (Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988) ↗

— John Irving

#novelists #psychiatrists #science #sigmund-freud #science

Let's put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20. ↗

— Eric Carle

#i #i think #idea #least #novel

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets. ↗

— Christopher Morley

#bicycle #novelists #poets #should #surely

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

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

— Frank Norris

#function #life #novelist #sees #upon

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

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

Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time. ↗

— J. J. Abrams

#destruction #examining #fears #filmmakers #issues

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence. ↗

— Saul Bellow

#anesthetic #confidence #fallen #feeling #get

It's like a novelist writing far out things. If it makes a point and makes sense, then people like to read that. But if it's off in left field and goes over the edge, you lose it. The same with musical talent, I think. ↗

— Johnny Cash

#far #field #goes #i #i think