A Quote by Andre Maurois
The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.
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When I read a novel that I really like, I feel as if I am in direct, personal communication with the author. I feel as if the author and I are on the same wavelength mentally, that we have a lot in common with each other, and that we could have an interesting conversation, or even a friendship, if the circumstances permitted it. When the novel comes to an end, I feel a certain letdown, a loss of contact. It is natural to want to recapture that feeling by reading other works by the same author, or by corresponding with him/her directly.
But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel ... it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.
The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the 'messages' in a novel are put there by the reader. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. That's how literature functions.
I had this idea that being an introvert was a negative thing, that it had a negative connotation, and I really wanted, as a young person, to strive to be the life of the party and to be really outgoing and to have a million friends. And then I realized that an introvert isn't a negative.
Find me a first novel that doesn't have parallels with the author's life.
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.
The productions of a great genius, with many lapses and inadvertences, are infinitely preferable to the works of an inferior kind of author which are scrupulously exact, and conformable to all the rules of correct writing.
English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.
The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become
Is it not superfluous to write more than one novel if the writer has not become, say, a new man? Obviously, all the novels of an author not infrequently belong together and are to a certain degree only one novel.
In a novel, the author gives the leading character intelligence and distinction. Fate goes to less trouble: mediocrities play a part in great events simply from happening to be there.
I used the second year of my MFA program to write a young adult novel and began pursuing picture books as well. I loved the economy of this art form, choosing, with pristine attention, the exact right words to tell the exact right story.
As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.
People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.
People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that is important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.
The subject of the novel is reality liberated from soul. The reader in complete independence presented with a structured process:let him evaluate it, not the author. The façade of the novel cannot be other than stone or steel, flashing electrically or dark, but silent.
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