#novelists

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

Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad. ↗

— W. Somerset Maugham

#easier #generally #good #heroes #novelists

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

I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists. ↗

— Philip Roth

#assure #cannot #discretion #easier #i

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

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

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

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