A Quote by Jonathan Miller

What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.

Jonathan Miller

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Characters Does Interesting Literature Made Makes Novel Out Sentences Substance Survive Translation

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Jonathan Miller
British - Entertainer
Born: July 21, 1934

I think if German literature could survive the '40s and Russian literature could survive Sovietism, American literature can survive Google.

Joshua Cohen

Some of the most interesting characters in literature and in movies and TV have been ones that you can't quite figure out all the way.

Michael McKean

I would much rather read a book about Ty Cobb, who was quite possibly a sociopath. It makes for more interesting copy. Some of the most memorable characters in literature were villains.

Jonathan Weeks

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.

John Green

If you directly try to write about an idea, it will never be what you imagined. But if you're imagining through the building of sentences, through the characters, and paying attention to avoid ease and comfort yet still thinking about making the sentences work, you will get a shot at some real interesting stuff.

Dana Spiotta

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

I have done literary translation because the University of Arkansas, where I did my MFA, was program of creative writing and translation, and it's a very different experience. You're trying to honor the writer. You shouldn't allow yourself, for example, to encounter a sentence that's three lines long and break it up into four smaller sentences.

Miroslav Penkov

I don't mind being called a "feminist," as I certainly embrace the tenets of feminism, though it does feel a little sad to me that we need to call a novel "feminist" simply because the female characters are interesting and strong.

Laurie Foos

Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human.

Keira Knightley

That's what makes characters interesting. If Sherlock [Holmes] had started out being a straightforward man, we wouldn't be talking about him now. If he became one, that would be interesting. But you have to give him somewhere to go, as [Conan] Doyle did.

Mark Gatiss

There's a remarkable amount of sexism on TV. When male characters are flawed, they're interesting, deep and complex. But when female characters are flawed, they're just a mess. It's good to put more flawed but interesting female characters out there because it promotes equality.

Ellen Pompeo

Sometimes, the smaller roles in movies can be the most interesting. If you only take the stance that you'll only play central characters in movies, you'll find yourself not being able to indulge in that morally grey terrain that makes support characters so rich and interesting.

Joel Edgerton

I've made the decision to adhere to three general truths when it comes to my novels: There will be a love-story element to the story, the novel will be set in eastern North Carolina, and the characters will be likeable. Then, I make each novel unique through differences in voice, perspective, age and personalities of the characters, and of course, plot.

Nicholas Sparks

Writing doesn't come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency, I think - the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.

Adam Gopnik

The words are strung together, with their own special grammar-the laws of quantum theory-to form sentences, which are molecules. Soon we have books, entire libraries, made out of molecular "sentences." The universe is like a library in which the words are atoms. Just look at what has been written with these hundred words! Our own bodies are books in that library, specified by the organization of molecules-but the universe and literature are organizations of identical, interchangeable objects; they are information systems.

Heinz Pagels

The truth is, everything ultimately comes down to the relationship between the reader and the writer and the characters. Does or does not a character address moral being in a universal and important way? If it does, then it's literature.

Whitley Strieber

A Quote by Jonathan Miller

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