A Quote by Imre Kertesz

A book is either autobiography or a novel.

Imre Kertesz

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Autobiography Book Either Novel

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Imre Kertesz
Hungarian - Author
November 9, 1929 - March 31, 2016

A novel, especially a first novel, is... really an emotional autobiography. All these emotions I'm embarrassed at having had, I've written about.

Min Jin Lee

It's very bad to write a novel by act of will. I can do a book of nonfiction work that way - just sign the contract and do the book because, provided the topic has some meaning for me, I know I can do it. But a novel is different. A novel is more like falling in love. You don't say, 'I'm going to fall in love next Tuesday, I'm going to begin my novel.' The novel has to come to you. It has to feel just like love.

Norman Mailer

The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it's not like I'm writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it 'a novel,' it separates it from other books.

Aleksandar Hemon

Every novel is a biography. Well, then, this is a novel [The Paper Men] which is a biography that is pretending to be an autobiography. That's what you could say about it.

William Golding

I suppose drama can either take the place of a novel or can be very closely allied with it. It's quite customary to turn a successful novel into a film or a television series because you can dramatize and pictorialize a novel.

William Golding

To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.

Per Petterson

If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.

D. H. Lawrence

A memoir is not an autobiography. It's a true story told as a novel, using techniques of novelization. The author is allowed to compress events, combine characters, change names, change the sequence of events, just as if he's writing a novel. But it's got to be true.

Homer Hickam

I first heard the term "meta-novel" at a writer's conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The idea is that even though each book in a series stands alone, when read collectively they form one big ongoing novel about the main character. Each book represents its own arc: in book one of the series we meet the character and establish a meta-goal that will carry him through further books, in book two that meta-goal is tested, in book three - you get the picture.

Carolyn Wheat

The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

V. S. Pritchett

The process for writing a picture book is completely different from the process of writing a chapter book or novel. For one thing, most of my picture books rhyme. Also, when I write a picture book I'm always thinking about the role the pictures will play in the telling of the story. It can take me several months to write a picture book, but it takes me several years to write a novel.

Sarah Weeks

'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both.

Junot Diaz

When people write a novel, they want to have that reach and that impact. To get it with a first novel, you can either see it as an albatross or a calling card.

Irvine Welsh

I have a children's book already out and my autobiography.

Della Reese

I am not sure I knew what I was doing, writing an "apocalypse" novel, when I started this book. Now that the book is done, I can own that I have in fact written an apocalypse novel, one that speculates on a dark, dark future. Why I did it, I really don't know - every time people read my work they comment on its darkness, its sadness.

Edan Lepucki

'The Dovekeepers' is a fantastic novel written by Alice Hoffman; it was a bestselling novel, and I fell in love with the book and bought the rights to it.

Roma Downey

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