I don't like to read novels where the novelist tells me what to think about the situation and the characters. I prefer to discover for myself.

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I obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world.

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Alice Hoffman

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

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A Mirror Image

How many times when reading a book,
do we identify with the characters within?
Their traits they have we share,
their loves and heartaches
their lives go through somehow mirror our own.
It’s as if the author was writing about us.
As though he has put us under a microscope
and then writing down everything, he saw.
However, we know this isn’t so
because he or she has written
segments of their own life
and by accident they happen to mirror ours.
Every writer will tell you
that they have their characters under control.
Having written numerous novels,
I know the characters take on a life of their own
and do what they want to do.
We become their instrument as they guide us on our way.
We end up writing what they want us to say.
To every writer his characters are real,
they live, breathe and feel.
The more you write about them,
the more alive they become.
So the next time you pick up a book
and the characters seem real,
they probably are to the author
who looks after them.

24 September 2008

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Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.

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Jose Saramago

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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If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.

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An Essay or A Simple Biography of Yukio Mishima to Please My Brother Lalith!

First of all I must so grateful to my brother
Who introduced me the greatest Japanese Novelist!
Remeber you yelled at me ' Read his The sea of fertility, a cycle of four novels and his tetralogy, 'Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The temple of dawn and The decay of Angel.'
Sorry brother I have a small volume of second hand books
And I couldn't find those?
I work as a Graveyard shift Cashier for a convenient store
From 1155PM to 700 AM!
And my beloved leaves in the morning for a Montessori
And struggles there with kids!
We're two slow trains of the opposite tracks in the life shuttle?
I do scribbling in my whole life.
I bought his short novel recently from a junk book shop
'The sound of Waves' set in a remote village in Japan
It tells of Shinji, a young fisherman
And Hatsue the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man in the village.
I promise you to finish this book and I remember you told
'Mishima committed seppuku(ritual suicide)
At the age of 45!

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Essentially and most simply put, plot is what the characters do to deal with the situation they are in. It is a logical sequence of events that grow from an initial incident that alters the status quo of the characters.

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Nicholas Sparks

I do not use profanity in my novels. My characters all go to church.

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I consciously try to end my novels at a point where I won't have to wonder about my characters ever again.

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To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

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Robert Louis Stevenson

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

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Robert Louis Stevenson

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

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The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are purely imaginary.

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Milan Kundera

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

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Salvatore Quasimodo

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

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If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist.

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This is one of his most human and most amusing and witty novels. The characters are very Indian. I decided that I wanted to do a comedy, so this was just the right one.

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Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.

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Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.

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