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Reading a Penelope Fitzgerald novel is like being taken for a ride in a peculiar kind of car. Everything is of top quality — the engine, the coachwork, and the interior all fill you with confidence. Then, after a mile or so, someone throws the steering-wheel out of the window.
Sebastian Faulks
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The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.
Italo Calvino
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A novel represents a compact between the writer and the reader, with the writer providing words out of which the reader creates a pleasurable experience.
Jonathan Franzen
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Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.
Eudora Welty
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But once an idea for a novel seizes a writer...well, it's like an inner fire that at first warms you and makes you feel good but then begins to eat you alive, burn you up from within. You can't just walk away from the fire; it keeps burning. The only way to put it out is to write the book.
Dean Koontz
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I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
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In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.
May Sarton
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Today many American corporations spend a great deal of money and time trying to increase the originality of their employees, hoping thereby to get a competitive edge in the marketplace. But such programs make no difference unless management also learns to recognize the valuable ideas among the many novel ones, and then finds ways of implementing them.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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I always remember how a novel written by John Braine in the 1950s about working-class life in England, which was called Room at the Top, which was translated into Swedish as The Attic!
John Banville
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We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.
Francis Crick
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I'll never write another novel on an electric typewriter. I'd rather use a sharp stick and a little pile of dogshit.
Tom Robbins
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Childhood lays itself out, like a novel, he suggests, complete with central observer, fixed characters, and linear plot. Later, life disperses itself into anecdotes. At twenty-one, it no longer strictly matters whether the author went first to Ireland and then to Spain, or Spain first. And after thirty, he could stitch the pages in backward for all we care.
Wilfrid Sheed
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A novel takes the courage of a marathon runner, and as long as you have to run, you might as well be a winning marathon runner. Serendipity and blind faith faith in yourself won't hurt a thing. All the bastards in the world will snicker and sneer because they haven't the talent to zip up their flies by themselves. To hell with them, particularly the critics. Stand in there, son, no matter how badly you are battered and hurt.
Leon Uris
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I have retired to Nemours to work upon a novel called The Age for Love, and it is on this subject that I wished to consult you, my dear master.
Paul Bourget
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I must know where you are, but I will not molest nor betray you till the time arrives. Go where you like, assume what disguise you choose, do what you please, except die or marry. I'll stand off and watch the play, but I must follow. I like the chase, it is exciting, novel and absorbing. I have tried and tried of other amusements, this satisfies me and I am in no haste to end it.
Louisa May Alcott
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I've made my best notes sitting outside cafes on busy streets, or in murky bars in foreign cities. I sorted out a big series of problems in the novel I'm just finishing while sitting drinking a long line of solitary beers in a bar in a small coastal town. The hangover was pretty brutal, but I'm not sure I'd have found the solutions any other way. Part of the job of being a writer is learning how your head works - when to push it, when to step back. This kind of self-management is actually far harder, I think, than learning how to write decent prose.
Michael Marshall Smith
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People who want to write either do it or they don't. At last I began to say that my most important talent - or habit - was persistence. Without it, I would have given up writing long before I finished my first novel. It's amazing what we can do if we simply refuse to give up.
Octavia Butler
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Out of an intuitive experience of the world comes a continuous flow of novel distinctions. Purely rational understanding, on the other hand, serves to confirm old mindsets, rigid categories. Artists, who live in the same world as the rest of us, steer clear of these mindsets to make us see things anew.
Ellen Langer
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I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality of the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humour.
E. M. Forster
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The facts of life are to the biographer what the text of a novel is to the critic.
Victoria Glendinning
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Flaubert wanted to write a novel
About nothing.
Howard Nemerov
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Writing a poem is like a short love affair, writing a short story like a long love affair, writing a novel like a marriage.
Amos Oz
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Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.
Flannery O'Connor
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It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
Annie Dillard
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Somewhere In Time is the story of a love which transcends time, What Dreams May Come is the story of a love which transcends death. … I feel that they represent the best writing I have done in the novel form.
Richard Matheson
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Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
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