A Quote by Nick Hornby
The most important thing for me is realism. I don't like writing which does somersaults on the page, and I'm no great fan of the hard work literary novel.
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It may sound very strange, but I love the freedom that writing a novel gives me. It is an unhindered experience. If I come after a bad day, I can decide that my protagonist will die on page 100 of my novel in a 350-page story.
As much as I revere great writing, and am still humbled by it, literary activities are no longer esoteric to me. When I read a great novel - something that I could never have written myself - I'm still looking at it a little bit like a technician.
There were times in my career ... when I felt like a trapeze artist doing dangerous somersaults without a net underneath. When you execute those somersaults flawlessly, the audience feels the same sense of triumph the performer does.
The writing in Mission to Paris, sentence after sentence, page after page, is dazzling. If you are a John le Carr fan, this is definitely a novel for you.
The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel. The ambiguity of that is, he's writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way.
I have a hard time writing. Most writers have a hard time writing. I have a harder time than most because I'm lazier than most. [...] The other problem I have is fear of writing. The act of writing puts you in confrontation with yourself, which is why I think writers assiduously avoid writing. [...] Not writing is more of a psychological problem than a writing problem. All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. [...] It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. Especially when it goes on for years. It's much more relaxing actually to work.
'War and Peace' holds a strange place in literary history, participating in the crowning of realism as a substantial and serious literary mode in America, even as the novel also contributed to the argument that historical fiction could be by nature dangerous, illegitimate, and inaccurate.
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.
In the end, the most important thing to me is that I've raised three kids. I know that'll be the most important accomplishment of my life and it is the most easily obtainable, because all you have to do is pay attention. It is hard work and most people don't realize that's the real gift they are getting in terms of goals and success and accomplishments.
Writing a novel is not at all like riding a bike. Writing a novel is like having to redesign a bike, based on laws of physics that you don't understand, in a new universe. So having written one novel does nothing for you when you have to write the second one.
Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'
You start out with big dreams and I mean, big dreams artistically. You want to work with the greatest living directors, make a great movie. I wanted to make a great love story, I wanted to make a great epic and then you realize that the truth of it is that it's so hard to make a great film. It's hard to get a great role. Those big expectations change to realism pretty quickly. But what's never changed is my desire to work with great directors and to find projects that push me out of my comfort zone and keep me alive. I still don't think I've done my best work
I would argue, for perspective's sake, that the arc of a really literary work is precisely that it both intensely reflects, and simultaneously transcends the conditions of its making. I would say that is the difference between literature and other kinds of writing. That is what the literary is - it ultimately doesn't matter what his circumstances were. And the thing that you were just saying about being sympathetic to Brontë and the fact that she could only write what she wrote when she wrote it... that's true. But look at that novel, which means so much to so many people.
I don't know if nature is a direct literary influence on my writing, but it is certainly important to me. I take great joy in writing about it. It is something I have taken with me from my childhood; the body exposed to the threat of the physical world and at the same time being at home in it.
At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that the young man must possess or teach himself, training himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance-that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is to be-curiosity-to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does, and if you have that, then I don't think the talent makes much difference, whether you've got it or not.
Put your hand on your heart to keep it from flying off to the lovely magical literary island Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows have created in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. This novel is a delightful mix of fine writing, powerful emotions, glorious settings and amazing characters who deal with life in a way that will have readers falling in love on every single page.
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