A Quote by Steve Erickson

I believe novels can have secrets from their author, a notion I imagine would appall Nabokov.

Steve Erickson

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Steve Erickson
American - Novelist
Born: April 20, 1950

Of course, both [Oscar] Wilde & [Vladimir] Nabokov believe in many things, and these things emerge in their writing clearly - for Wilde, the folly of humankind and the (romantic) grandeur of the heroic, lone individual (not unlike Wilde himself); for Nabokov, the possibility of a kind of transcendence through a great, prevailing, superior sort of love (especially in Ada, the most self-congratulatory of novels.)

Joyce Carol Oates

Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.

Edward Abbey

There is no obligation for the author of a film to believe in, or to sympathise with, the moral behaviour of his characters. Nor is he necessarily to be accredited with the same opinions as his characters. Nor is it necessary or obligatory for him to believe in the tenet of his construction - all of which is a disclaimer to the notion that the author of Drowning by Numbers believes that all men are weak, enfeebled, loutish, boorish and generally inadequate and incompetent as partners for women. But it's a thought.

Peter Greenaway

Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.

Kevin Patterson

I really believe that readers are smart and sophisticated enough to realize that the author is not the narrator of his novels.

Bret Easton Ellis

I think overtly political novels - those that never transcend or contest their author's conscious intentions and prejudices - are problematic. This is not just true of the innumerable unread books in the socialist realist tradition, but also of novels that carry the burden of conservative ideologies, like Guerrillas, Naipaul's worst book, where the author's disgust for a certain kind of black activist and white liberal is overpowering.

Pankaj Mishra

Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood.

Stephen King

I can only write one novel at a time. The author of the Perry Mason novels, Erle Stanley Gardner, often worked on four novels simultaneously, and produced a million words a year. I'm envious.

James Thayer

Why do grown-ups think it's easier for children to bear secrets than the truth? Don't they know about the horror stories we imagine to explain the secrets?

Cornelia Funke

Nabokov quote: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."

Nick Laird

I don't know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it's true. We aren't satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I don't sleep. All night long I'm wide awake, thinking, Secrets, secrets, secrets. There are secrets in my past no one needs to know. Secrets in my present that might kill Kim and Chip. I don't want to take my secrets with me when I go. When I pass through the light, i want to be free of everything and everyone.

Julie Anne Peters

I can't inhabit my characters until I know what kind of work they do. This requires research because my jobs for the last decade have been author and professor, and I'd like to spare the world more author or professor novels.

Victor LaValle

I believe death is only a door. One closes, and another opens. If I were to imagine heaven, I would imagine a door opening. And he would be waiting for me there.

David Mitchell

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

People, in my long experience, want to talk. They may believe they wish to keep secrets, and they may believe that they are capable of doing so. But the truth is that secrets exist to be revealed; and it is usually very easy to find the combination of words that will cause them to emerge.

J. Robert Lennon

A Quote by Steve Erickson

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