#novelist

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence? ↗

— Milan Kundera

#existence #explores #given #his #historic

The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#being #being forgotten #cease #dim #discoveries

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#built #certainties #comprehend #dead #novel

Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist. ↗

— George Saintsbury

#had #infinite #miss #novelist #ordinary

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed. ↗

— Dan Simmons

#art #art form #authors #believe #best

Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist. ↗

— Curtis Sittenfeld

#male #never #novelist #personally #were

The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention. ↗

— Curtis Sittenfeld

#any #assume #attention #book #day

When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant. ↗

— John Phillips Marquand

#dealing #double #eccentric #i #in the past

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

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