A Quote by Flannery O'Connor

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

Flannery O'Connor

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Decay Experience Falls Hair Novel Often Out Teeth Terrible Which Writing

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Flannery O'Connor
American - Novelist
March 25, 1925 - August 3, 1964

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.

Flannery O'Connor

People fall in private, long before they fall in public. The tree falls with a great crash, but the secret decay which accounts for it, is often not discovered until it is down on the ground.

J. C. Ryle

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

John Irving

And the wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.

Maurice Sendak

Nature is full of teeth that come in one by one, then decay, fall out.

Anne Sexton

Man can have only a certain number of teeth, hair and ideas; there comes a time when he necessarily loses his teeth, hair and ideas.

Voltaire

Hair is the first thing. And teeth the second. Hair and teeth. A man got those two things he's got it all.

James Brown

What I found interesting writing a screenplay as opposed to writing a novel is not the obvious thing, which is having to pare everything down and find the kind of essence, the skeleton if you like, which can then be fleshed out by performance and cinematography.

Salman Rushdie

My writing often contains souvenirs of the day - a song I heard, a bird I saw - which I then put into the novel.

Amy Tan

I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.

Flannery O'Connor

There was a terrible fear for me when I started writing, which was that if you'd been denied unbelievably tumultuous experience, you didn't have permission to write.

Nathan Englander

If I'm writing a novel, I'll probably get up in the morning, do email, perhaps blog, deal with emergencies, and then be off novel-writing around 1.00pm and stop around 6.00pm. And I'll be writing in longhand, a safe distance from my computer. If I'm not writing a novel, there is no schedule, and scripts and introductions and whatnot can find themselves being written at any time and on anything.

Neil Gaiman

One of the ready advantages of writing a road or quest story is that it mirrors the experience of writing a novel.

Chang-Rae Lee

I don't like to use writing assignments, exercises. I think too often people get comfortable writing in that vein, but you can't go on to write a novel comprised of short writing exercises.

Chang-Rae Lee

When I was 28, my wisdom teeth were coming through and I had all four out under general anaesthetic. I remember friends who'd had terrible experiences, but my teeth were removed at 8am and I ate steak and chips for lunch that day.

Tim Henman

Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.

John Berger

A Quote by Flannery O'Connor

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