#novelist

I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it. ↗

— Chaim Potok

#chip #create #figure #find #following

A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow. ↗

— J. B. Priestley

#books #fellow #finds #his #i

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything. ↗

— Raymond Queneau

#context #everything #historical #important #interest

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

You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves. ↗

— Pat Conroy

#novelist #write #writer #experience

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do. ↗

— Quentin Tarantino

#any #complete #complete freedom #fit #freedom

Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days. ↗

— Eric Brown

#conscious #conscious thought #days #few #find

Always seek for balance in your life: If you stayed long in the darkness, walk long in the light; if you talked too much, stay silent for a good while; if you climbed the high mountains, hike long on the plains! Balance everything! ↗

— Mehmet Murat ildan

#life

The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel, it represented a diptych about the aftermath of Irish independence. I simply hadn't known that – and I loved the grandeur of the word "diptych". I went around quite snooty for a few days, thinking: "I wrote a diptych." [Colm Tóibín, Novelist – Portrait of the Artist, The Guardian, 19 February 2013] ↗

— Colm Tóibín

#conceit #critique #diptychs #grandeur #novelists

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist. ↗

— Norman Mailer

#enough #hands #his #journalist #lawyer