Novel Quotes - page 17
I myself was, for nearly six years, in such close touch with the Malay language that it affected my English and still affects my thinking. When I wrote a novel called A Clockwork Orange, no European reader saw that the Malay word for "man" – orang – was contained in the title (Malay students of English invariably write "orang squash"...
Anthony Burgess
In the case of a novel, or any imaginative work, especially if the tone is poetic, my own preference is for ending with a touch of symbolism which shall leave the reader brooding. A fine novel, a well-written story, "proves" nothing. Certain characters have played their parts, life goes on, and the final passage may be allowed to remain with one foot in the air, as is the case with some of Chopin's conclusions. But there is no absolute rule in such matters, and there are epic novelists who like to end on a powerful crescendo, as Ravel does in Bolero, or Dvorak in the New-World Symphony. Composition has features which are common to all the arts, and the author can learn as much about his business in the concert hall as in the library.
André Maurois
I live with them for a long time in my head. When I first start writing about a character, I don't know them that well. It's through the process of writing of putting them in scenes, and contemplating them-when I've spent more time with them-that they take on more flesh. When I start writing, I have a lot of characters that I'm not sure what their place in the novel will be...And some characters recede as I put more flesh on them. I think I don't really need them; they're not giving me anything. Or they're there for a particular effect, and that's it.
Tracy Chevalier
I have huge respect for short stories-I just find them much harder to get right than a novel. A novel is a lot baggier and it gives you more leeway to go on for too long or to make mistakes. Whereas in a short story, every sentence, every word, matters-and that's very hard. I think it's easier to write too much than it is to write exactly the right thing.
Tracy Chevalier
Later Julian would give me another book he had culled from among the Archival duplicates, a short novel called The Time Machine by Mr. H. G. Wells, about a marvelous but apparently imaginary cart which carried a man into the future-and it fascinated me-but the Archive itself was a Time Machine in everything but name. Here were voices preserved on browning paper like pressed flowers, whispering apostasies into the ear of a new century.
Robert Charles Wilson
