A Quote by Northrop Frye

Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.

Northrop Frye

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Made Novels Only Other Out Poems Poetry

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Northrop Frye
Canadian - Critic
July 14, 1912 - January 23, 1991

I write my novels personally, desperately and non-negligently. When I write my novels, I think about my novels only, and never do other works.

Haruki Murakami

I started to write my own stories, like small novels, and those novels became poems, and after poems, they became lyrics, and song came from that.

Dawn Richard

In Pakistan, many of the young people read novels because in the novels, not just my novels but the novels of many other Pakistani writers, they encounter ideas, notions, ways of thinking about the world, thinking about their society that are different. And fiction functions in a countercultural way as it does in America and certainly as it did in the, you know, '60s.

Mohsin Hamid

My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

John Irving

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

Paul Auster

I started out in life as a poet, I was only writing poetry all through my 20s, it wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them.

Paul Auster

The difference does not lie in the things that news does that novels do not do, but in the things that novels do that news cannot do. In other words, this basic technique of news - just one among many - is something a novel can use, but a novel can deploy a multitude of other techniques also. Novels are not bound by the rules of reportage. Far from it. They're predicated on delivering experience.

Zia Haider Rahman

People who attack biography choose as their models vulgar and offensive biography. You could equally attack novels or poems by choosing bad poems or novels.

Claire Tomalin

Trollope wrote so many novels and other works that they tend to crowd each other out.

Jane Smiley

The whole process of having to put the thing into the world seems so antithetical to the act of writing. Poetry is slightly easier, because there's less money and fewer people involved. You just let a book of poems trickle out in the world, and it finds its own people. Novels are much harder, and you don't think you should have to do some of the things you're made to do.

Nick Laird

Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don't need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning.

Anne Lamott

I don't write historical novels but novels that wonder, 'And what if it happened in this way and not in this other one?'

Alvaro Enrigue

I live in Harlem, New York City. I am unmarried. I like 'Tristan,' goat's milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike 'Aida,' parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.

Langston Hughes

Second novels are bears. As are other people's expectations for them. I think taking the time you need with the second book is key. Writers spend years and years on their first novels and then are often expected to turn out a second at warp speed, a recipe for failure.

Jandy Nelson

I am suspicious of writers who say their work is original and influenced by nobody. If it is, it is probably uninteresting. The biggest source of novels is other novels.

Teju Cole

On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world.

Laurence Housman

A Quote by Northrop Frye

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