Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
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The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the grieves and shames of others.
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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.
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There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however na?ve that may have been, it was a good deal less na?ve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.
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I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, &, for them, my corpus is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history.
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A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
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Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.
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Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
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Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.
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According to my sister, the expert novelist Jackie Collins, most men stray. And sex doesn't mean anything to most men. But I wouldn't date a man who slept around. Absolutely not. I've divorced people for that.
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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
History
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A playwright must be his own audience. A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.
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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.
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The poet, the dramatist, the novelist are free to exercise their imagination as widely as they choose. But the historian may not be allowed so...
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For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
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The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern pa...
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They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.
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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.
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The novelist ... must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think ...
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