A Quote by Sergio Chejfec

Novels with a "thesis" don't interest me. They just don't - novels that want to "show" something, that want to "argue" something specific. I don't read novels that are looking to convince me of anything.

Sergio Chejfec

Quote Topics

Anything Argue Convince Interest Just Looking Me Novels Read Show Something Specific Thesis Want

Quote Author

Sergio Chejfec
Writer
Born: 1956

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 don't read novels that are looking to convince me of anything. I believe that literature needs to be a machine of illusions.

Sergio Chejfec

I like the freedom of novels. With the memoirs, I always had to keep to the facts. I like that with novels, if I want to go off and write something quite dramatic or outrageous or something completely different, I can do it if I want to.

Carol Drinkwater

I never could read science fiction. I was just uninterested in it. And you know, I don't like to read novels where the hero just goes beyond what I think could exist. And it doesn't interest me because I'm not learning anything about something I'll actually have to deal with.

James D. Watson

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

It’s the ability to bring events and characters to a resolution that draws me to writing, especially writing for children. I don’t want to ever be didactic, but if there’s something I do want to say, it’s that you can bring things around. You can make a change. Adult novels are about letting go. Children’s novels are about getting a grip.

Tim Wynne-Jones

For everyone else who aren't fantasy fans or who don't know anything about 'The Witcher', this is something that we can experience together because it's drawn from the novels, but there is so much within the novels that we have developed.

Anya Chalotra

All things in my novels are real for me. Some western critics said that Garcia Marquez's novels are magic realism. However, I believe that Marquez must have experienced everything in his novels.

Haruki Murakami

From an early age, my favorite thing to read was novels. For years, when I was writing only nonfiction, still I was reading almost exclusively novels. It's weird to be producing something that you don't consume. It feels really alienating.

Elif Batuman

When I write a novel, I want it to be completely different from a screenplay. I'm very conscious of the difference, and I want novels to work purely as novels. Otherwise I don't see how they'll survive - why don't we just all go to the movies or watch television.

Kazuo Ishiguro

I'm a severe graphic novels junkie. People ask me about it, and I say I like the graphic novels. Comic books are for kids, and graphic novels are for adults. But you can't really separate the two.

Dave Pirner

Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can't be done.

Paul Auster

I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way.

Dana Spiotta

People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.

Alice Oswald

I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate the human condition.