A Quote by Joan Didion

You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.

Joan Didion

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Focus Line Novel Overheard Throw

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Joan Didion
American - Author
Born: December 5, 1934

The DNA of the novel - which, if I begin to write nonfiction, I will write about this - is that: the title of the novel is the whole novel. The first line of the novel is the whole novel. The point of view is the whole novel. Every subplot is the whole novel. The verb tense is the whole novel.

Mary Kay Zuravleff

To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.

Philip Roth

To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel, really.

Philip Roth

I'm inspired by watching and listening to people. For example, my first novel, The Scale, came to life after I overheard two women discussing their struggle with their weight at the gym.

Mika

I need to focus on getting to the free-throw line and knocking them down in practice and getting them in the game.

Kevin Knox

There is a fine line I have to walk throughout the writing process in a novel. It is this line between drama and melodrama, and it is this line between evoking genuine emotional power and being manipulative.

Nicholas Sparks

If I think of something, half-way into it, I can throw it in there and it won't be so far down the line that it would be insignificant. However, I also like to completely focus on something for a certain period of time, and then be able to move on to something else.

T.I.

I think I was also afraid of the novel. I write line by line, proceeding at snail's pace, rewriting as I go and paring the excess away. This is against all the best advice for writing long form prose, and I have tried over the years to break myself of the habit, but I can't bear to leave anything ungainly on the page and half the fun for me is that tinkering. So the length of a novel was a daunting prospect.

Debra Dean

Just about everybody has written a first novel that they throw away before writing their actual first novel.

Daniel Handler

It's disingenous for me to say that I wasn't trying to write a moral novel. By its very nature as a novel about the Iraq War, Fobbit steps into the political conversation. There's no way to avoid that. I can appreciate that readers are probably going to line up on one side of the novel or the other. I hope they go to those polar extremes, actually.

Dave Abrams

Writing a novel is so hard, and there are so many problems that the last thing you're thinking about is adapting this mess you have on your hands as a movie. You just want to get it to work as a novel. That's your main focus.

Maria Semple

Remember that a good football novel has to have the same ingredients as any other good novel: drama, convincing and interesting characters, a strong story-line, and some kind of magic in the writing.

Mal Peet

Any fool can take a bad line out of a poem; it takes a real pro to throw out a good line.

Theodore Roethke

Somebody once told me, ‘Manage the top line, and the bottom line will follow.’ What's the top line? It's things like, why are we doing this in the first place? What's our strategy? What are customers saying? How responsive are we? Do we have the best products and the best people? Those are the kind of questions you have to focus on.

Steve Jobs

I found out that I could not choose a subject, throw it out of focus, and then have a good picture. I found that I had to learn to see No-focus from the beginning.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Usually when you play a team, you want to focus on one line. Pittsburgh is the only team where you have to focus on one player [Mario Lemieux]. When he's coming toward you, all you see is him.

Patrick Roy

A Quote by Joan Didion

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