Freudian Novel Quotes

The tree of possibilities: life as it reveals itself to a man arriving, astonished, at the threshold of his adult life: an abundant treetop canopy filled with bees singing. And he thinks he understands why she never showed him the letters: she wanted to hear the murmur of the tree by herself, without him, because he, Jean-Marc, represented the abolition of all possibilities, he was the reduction, (even though it was a happy reduction) of her life to a single possibility. ~ Milan Kundera

With its vastly complicated plot and its immense cast of characters swirling around the case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce that has been grinding away in the Court of Chancery for decades, 'Bleak House' is, for many readers, Dickens's greatest novel. ~ Robert Gottlieb

To be fair to them, they were only after something that walled them off from the past and from people in general, not something that offered any connection that might prove painful or human. Thet wanted stories, I came to realise, in which they were already imprisoned, not stories in which they appeared along with the storyteller, accomplices in escaping. ~ Richard Flanagan

Almost everybody considers himself capable of thinking and, to a certain degree, whether right or wrong, really does think. Very few, on the contrary, can fancy themselves poets or artists in words. But from the moment when thought won out over style, the mob invaded the novel. ~ Albert Camus

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is fantastic. It's volcanic and sexy and utterly unlike anything I've read before. It feels like the future in a dazzling way that has nothing to do with looking backward. It's been a long wait for a new novel from Mark Leyner, but worth it. Ten out of ten from me. ~ Douglas Coupland

When you are writing a novel, you aren't making it up. The story is already there. You just have to find it. ~ Thomas Harris

To derive pleasure from a novel is to enjoy the act of departing from words and transforming these things into images in our mind. ~ Orhan Pamuk

From the moment I start a new novel, life's just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there's still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied. ~ Emile Zola

[My wife] liked to collect old encyclopedias from second-hand bookstores, and at one point we had eight of them. When I wrote my first historical novel
back in 1980, before I was online
I used them often as a research tool. For instance, I learned that the Bastille was either 90 feet high or 100 feet or 120 feet. This led me to formulate Wilson's 22nd Law: 'Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.' ~ Robert Anton Wilson

[The Great Gatsby] is a tour de force of revision. So much so that critics, who rarely mention the edit of a book, commented on the quality of Gatsby's rewriting, not just its writing, in reviews. For H. L. Mencken, the novel had 'a careful and brilliant finish. ... There is evidence in every line of hard work and intelligent effort. ... The author wrote, tore up, rewrote, tore up again. There are pages so artfully contrived that one can no more imagine improvising them than one can imagine improvising a fugue.' ... Careful, sound, carefully written, hard effort, wrote and rewrote, artfully contrived not improvised, structure, discipline: all these terms refer, however obliquely, not to the initial act of inspiration, but to editing.
Organization and clarity do not dominate the writing process. At some point, though, a writer must pull coherence from confusion, illuminate what lives in shadow, shade what shines too brightly. Gatsby is the cat's meow case study of crossing what Michael Ondaatje calls 'that seemingly uncrossable gulf between an early draft of a book ... and a finished product' - in other words, editing. ~ Susan Bell

I was slightly thankful when Mom finally came out and unlocked the car. It was warm and toasty inside and it smelt like home. There was not the slightest smell of something that didn't belong home. ~ Erica Sehyun Song

The fact that you can go to the bathroom on an airplane is pretty novel. I bet nobody expected that a hundred years ago. Can you imagine two sailors looking over the front rails of their massive ocean liner in the early 1900s, one of them pointing way up in the clouds and whispering to the other, "One day a man will take a crap up there." No, me either. ~ Neil Pasricha

The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness. ~ Ross Macdonald

A brief short story may require only a few paragraphs after the climax. On the other hand, in his massive novel 'The World According to Garp,' John Irving's denouement consisted of 10 separate sections, each devoted to an individual character's fate and each almost a story in itself. ~ Nancy Kress

Olive Ann describes Sanna as 'a perfectionist and a worrier.' She is obsessed with the idea of finding happiness, and for her, as Olive ann wrote in her notes for the novel, 'happiness means being first with somebody, having perfect, loving children ... The theme of Sanna is disillusionment,' Olive Ann wrote. 'Her life is the pursuit of happiness and perfection, but she finds happiness and perfection impossible to obtain-her idea of happiness is constant joy, no changes. ~ Olive Ann Burns

If you're doing a classic play, where if you do a Chekhov, you do the words as written. You can't do that with a novel; you have to do your version of the words as written. ~ Sam Mendes

A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock ~ William James

It is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

When I finally got tired of arguing with her and decided to write a novel as if I was some kind of formulaic, genre writing drone, just to prove to her how awful it would be, I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files. ~ Jim Butcher

Works of art are not so much finished as abandoned. Perhaps poems can be perfect. A short-short story might even be perfectible, as effective and enjoyable for one reader as the next. But novels and other book-length narratives are great rambling things that always contain some flaws. For works of any length, there comes a point when your continued tinkering won't improve the whole, but will just trade one set of problems for another. ~ Bruce Holland Rogers

Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when they failed to find a suitable existing puppet. The modern novel should be largely a work of reference. Most authors spend their time saying what has been said before – usually said much better. A wealth of references to existing works would acquaint the reader instantaneously with the nature of each character, would obviate tiresome explanations and would effectively preclude mountebanks, upstarts, thimble-riggers and persons of inferior education from an understanding of contemporary literature. ~ Flann O'Brien

Don't go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the novel and not as something tacked onto it. ~ Azar Nafisi

My springboard is always the script. Even if the script is taken from a novel, I often haven't read the novel ... ~ John Hurt

One of the West's singular migrations
from the Azores to California's Great Central Valley
is given faces and voices in Anthony Barcellos's new novel, Land of Milk and Money. Along with its triumphs, the Francisco family embodies the challenges to an immigrant family in a new land, including the often ignored difficulties posed by success and the loss of the old culture. A must read ... ~ Gerald Haslam

I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, "Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry." ~ Edward Hirsch

One easy mistake to make with the first novel is to expand the short story. Some things are better as a story; you cannot dilute things into a novel. I think the first hundred pages of a novel are very important. That's where you set things up: the world, the characters. Once you've set that up, it'll be much easier. ~ Yiyun Li

In a novel, I think you have a contract with the reader to make the character representative - of a moment in history, a social class ... for instance, I wanted to make the boy in 'A Boy's Own Story' more like other gay men of my generation in their youth and not like me. ~ Edmund White

Writing my novel 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943. ~ Richard Flanagan

I think, on both sides of the camera or the novel: Distraction. I'm obsessed with: Can I get this actress or my third act to work? I'm distracted. I'm interested in that so I don't sit home and think, "Gee, life is meaningless. We're all going to die. The universe is pulling apart at breakneck speed." ~ Woody Allen

He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

I give people 'If You Came Softly' when they demand proof that novels for teens can be as good as the best novels for adults. ~ Justine Larbalestier

In general, when a novel manipulates its material to conform to the pieties of the day, or alternatively to attack those pieties for no other reason than the visibility such an attack will generate, when its literary tropes are all too familiar, its clever prose reminiscent of other clever prose, then the compass needle is slipping away from true north ... When, on the other hand, the author renounces some easy twist, some expected payoff, to take us into territory we didn't expect but that nevertheless fits with the drift of the story, then the novel gains force and conviction. And when he or she does it again, telling quite a different story that is nevertheless driven by the same urgent tensions, then we are likely moving into the zone of authenticity. ~ Tim Parks

I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box. ~ Ellen Goodman

To be shockingly original with your first novel, you don't have to discover a new technique: Simply write about people as they are and not as the predominantly liberal and humanist literary establishment believes that they ought to be. ~ John Braine

This novel is for everyone who has ever studied any monstrosity of history, with the serene satisfaction of being horrified while knowing exactly what was going to happen, rather like studying a dragon anatomized upon a table, and then turning around to find the dragon's present-day relations standing close by, alive and ready to bite. ~ Jo Walton

Awoke to find three vultures sitting on the fence. Realizing they were a portent of impending death I shot them. ~ Bridget Allison

A novel, even a social realist one, can't simply be a comprehensive rendering of what is. A novel requires a special angle or approach, whether in structure or language or theme, to justify itself. ~ Chang-rae Lee

There must have been some mistake. It took me a while to get a flight here, so I can see why you would have appointed a community lawyer to fill in." "Community lawyer!" Damon's face grew red with indignation. "I'm one of the most renowned lawyers among American Moroi." "Renowned, community." Abe shrugged and leaned back on his heals. "I don't judge. No pun intended."
Mead, Richelle (2010-05-18). Spirit Bound: A Vampire Academy Novel (p. 475). Penguin Young Readers Group. Kindle Edition. ~ Richelle Mead

There's no reason you should write any novel quickly. ~ John Irving

I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel. ~ Gay Talese