You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.
Perhaps writing a story or a novel was not something that should be done for money, or to win praise, but for the sheer sensual pleasure of it. I liked that idea. It made me want to write lots of stories, to give myself that pleasure.
Contemporary novels can have a fleeting existence within the current multiplication of medias and the technological rapidity with which art is delivered and consumed. A cultural lacuna has opened, one that needs arresting.
How to Lose Weight Through the Miracle of Diarrhea. That sounds like a bestselling Romance novel title if I’ve ever heard one. I’m a sucker for a good love story.
If you go to the craft market you will see them everywhere. They represent the mix of cultures and races here in the Dominican Republic, that are the result of centuries of international commerce, colonization, conquest, and the slave trade. The face...
Certainly, Gandhi is not inferior to Christ in goodness and sanctity, and he surpasses him in touching humility. Gandhi is the prophet of hope in this age of pessimism and disillusionment. He is a promise of sanity in the madness induced by our world...
Where the rivers meet you tell me of your black dreams. Your memories make me uneasy. But I listen because I know my listening, like all other listening allows you to heal.
Memory is fiction . . . All memory is a way of reconstructing the past. . . The act of narrating a memory is the act of creating fiction. [Armitstead, Claire. “Damon Galgut talks about his novel In a Strange Room.” The Guardian. 10 September 2010...
I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel.
Hardy classified A Pair of Blue Eyes among ‘Romances and Fantasies’. A favourite of Tennyson, its melancholy treatment of youth, love and death is expressive of late nineteenth-century susceptibilities. Not unnaturally in an early novel, Hardy dr...
Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of...
The striving of humanity for knowledge and truth [can] not be suppressed. The growth of the spirit [is]an essential part of Creation; it was planned like the growth of the body, of the plants and animals and people - every living thing that God had c...
If she would just let herself go I would be there to catch her if she fell but she wasn't ready to take that step yet." Ethan Sterling in Private Emotions
Peace will not occur magically because one or two individuals awaken to the truth of the nature of harmony and order. Peace will only prosper when the principle of harmonious order becomes common sense rather than a novel idea.
So few American novels have happy endings. Perhaps this is not surprising in a nation whose declaration of independence provides its citizens not with the right to happiness, but the right to its pursuit.
Part of what I love about novels and dogs is that they are so beautifully oblivious to economic concerns. We serve them, and in return they thrive. It's not their responsibility to figure out where the rent is coming from.
I see you in every flower in the park, every color in a rainbow and in every scent that reminds me of the things I love. Without knowing how, or even why it happened, I can’t imagine a world where you don’t exist.
Sure, I knew the differences between a space opera and a hard-boiled detective story and a historical novel...but I never about such differences. It seemed to me, then as now, that there are good stories and bad stories, and that was the only distinc...
CUSTOMER: I’m always on night shift at work. BOOKSELLER (jokingly): Is that why you’re buying so many vampire novels? CUSTOMER (seriously): You can never be too prepared.
...I could feel her burrowing into my heart. I didn't know if the burrowing was like a kitten cuddling up to its mother or if it was like a chigger depositing its larvae underneath the skin of my ankles.
Once a man is truly dead and carried pale and cold across the Styx--once Old Bones has put an arm about his shoulders and walked him through the Gate into Darkness--might Science yet summon him back?
