A Quote by Emily Barton
Because I think of novels as collaborative enterprises between the writer and the reader, all of my novels so far have ending with endings that maybe point in more than one direction, and that seems important to me because it seems important to me that after you've invested twenty or thirty hours of your imaginative life into this narrative that you have some stake in how it ends.
Related Quotes
I started thinking about the endings of novels not because I think endings are so important, but because I think they're actually not as important as they're sometimes given credit for.
We spend more time with our coworkers than we do with our loved ones, and yet we don't have that many novels on the subject. We have far more novels about families bickering at Thanksgiving and not enough about the day before Thanksgiving at the office. If we lived in, say, Romania, maybe a workplace job might not be as important to the cultural discussion. But we live in America, where work is crucially important and capitalism drives everything we do.
I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.
I saw a news report recently that measured average video game use by American men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five: twenty hours per week. Do you mean the flower of America's masculinity can't think of anything more important to do with twenty hours a week than sit in front of a video screen? Folks, this ain't normal. Can't we unplug already?
It's very important to me that people know that depression doesn't discriminate. A lot of people look at people who have depression and think that it's not legitimate because they're wealthy or it looks like everything seems to be doing fine. But it doesn't pick and choose. It can affect anybody in the brain, no matter how perfect your life seems.
I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.
I know a lot of actors talk about the importance of wardrobe, and it always seems like it's kind of a cop-out, maybe, because it seems like a minor detail to some people. But I think it's hugely important.
I think that after divorce, I took my life a little bit more seriously, because you have to face endings in a way that you maybe never - death in one thing, but an ending in your own chapter. It's so clearly placed there for you with divorce.
I'm a hopeful romantic who adores novels with happy endings, because there are enough sad endings in real life.
Painting from life was incredibly important for me because it allowed me to train my eyes to see everything that is there. But I realized early on that painting from life wasn't something that I was all that invested in. I was always more interested in the painting than I was the people. For me, removing that as a compulsion offered me a lot more freedom to actually paint and think about color, form, movement, and light.
If I am a prolific writer and turn my hand, with what seems to some as indecent haste, from novels to screenplays to stage and radio plays, it is because there is so much to be said, so few of us to say it, and time runs out.
There are not many athletes who are out. And I think it's something that's important. It felt important to me. I guess it seems like a weight off my shoulders, because I've been playing a lot better than I've ever played before. I think I'm just enjoying myself, and I'm happy.
Biographies are, in their nature, far more difficult to make into films than novels, because novels come with plots constructed and dialogue written, whereas I don't invent dialogue for my subjects or plot their lives for them.
I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since.
I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.
It seems like we are moving towards something, some kind of point and it is probably going to be an important point in our development or dissolution. That is what everybody seems to be thinking.
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