A Quote by V. S. Naipaul

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

V. S. Naipaul

Quote Topics

Account Alone Little Narrative Novel Sit Weave Write

Quote Author

V. S. Naipaul
Trinidadian - Writer
Born: August 17, 1932

An account of an expedition is not a novel. Therefore an authentic account can never be given, let alone written down by someone who was not present.

Reinhold Messner

I weave the company into what we laughingly call 'Jack's novel.' I write this novel for them about who they are and what's going on in their world. When I had 90 people in 'Porgy and Bess,' each had a story, history and family relationship.

Jack O'Brien

The DNA of the novel - which, if I begin to write nonfiction, I will write about this - is that: the title of the novel is the whole novel. The first line of the novel is the whole novel. The point of view is the whole novel. Every subplot is the whole novel. The verb tense is the whole novel.

Mary Kay Zuravleff

I've never been able to write narrative as a character, really. Jenny Lewis, I love her stuff, I love that she can weave these American Gothic fairytales. I feel like I sound inauthentic when I do that, so I tend to write from a personal standpoint.

Lauren Mayberry

I write in reverse: Rather than come up with a narrative and write jokes for that narrative, I write jokes independently of the narrative, then I try to fit them in.

Jeff Kinney

When I'm writing a novel, which is what I like to write, I get up early, sit zazen, make a pot of green tea. I wear wrist cuffs to keep my wrists warm and minimize irritation from extended contact with the surface of my desk. I sit down and write.

Ruth Ozeki

When Im writing a novel, which is what I like to write, I get up early, sit zazen, make a pot of green tea. I wear wrist cuffs to keep my wrists warm and minimize irritation from extended contact with the surface of my desk. I sit down and write.

Ruth Ozeki

It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.

Annie Dillard

It is important to insist on the historical truthfulness of the narrative of the fall of Adam and Eve. Just as the account of the creation of Adam and Eve is tied in with the rest of the historical narrative in the book of Genesis, so also this account of the fall of man, which follows the history of man's creation, is presented by the author as straightforward, narrative history

Wayne Grudem

For me, I can sort of sit there and write something down, but I can't develop it. Because to do that, I have to sit on my own and sing. I have to be really alone to do that.

Romy Madley Croft

I think everything you are, everything that engages you, eventually comes to bear on the novel you write. I think the creative energy in novel writing, obviously, comes from tension. From trying to fuse. From trying to make coherent disparate things that might not at all seem to belong together within a narrative.

Francisco Goldman

When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel... you have to listen to it.

Jim Crace

I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.

Flannery O'Connor

At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.

Michel Faber

My writing method is to sit in a very small hut absolutely alone. I write in total solitude. And I write on paper, on hand, and then it gets typed. Normal for me.