A Quote by John Gregory Dunne

I’ve always thought a novelist only has one character and that is himself or herself.

John Gregory Dunne

Quote Topics

Always Character Herself Himself Novelist Only Thought

Quote Author

John Gregory Dunne
American - Writer
May 25, 1932 - December 30, 2003

I've always thought a novelist only has one character, and that is himself or herself. In my case, me.

John Gregory Dunne

There are two different ways of writing a novel. The first I call the traditional father way, when the novelist slightly situates himself or herself above the text and knows what each and every character is going to do. It's a bit like engineering. I've never felt close to that tradition. I like the second way, which relies a bit more on intuition.

Elif Safak

The one and only formative power given to man is thought. By his thinking he not only makes character, but body and affairs, for "as he thinketh within himself, so is he."

Charles Fillmore

I like nothing more than a character sacrificing himself or herself for the sake of others. That's drama at its finest for me.

Bryan Konietzko

Jerry and I always felt that the character was enjoying himself. He was having fun: he wasn't taking himself seriously. It was always a lark for him, as you can see in my early drawings.

Joe Shuster

They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.

Italo Calvino

Man knows himself only insofar as he knows the world, becoming aware of it if only within himself, and of himself self only within it. Each new subject, well observed, opens up within us a new organ of thought.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.

Mary McCarthy

There is always that thought that you might get stuck with a character. But there's always the notion that every character is always evolving.

Lena Headey

I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!

Alexander Chee

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

Anne Fadiman

So long as a novelist works selfishly for the pleasure of creating character and situation corresponding to his own illusions, ideals and intuitions, he will always produce something worth while and natural. Directly he takes himself too seriously and begins for the alleged benefit of humanity an elaborate dissection of complexes, he evolves a book that is more ridiculous and tiresome than the most conventional cold cream girl novel of yesterday.

Willa Cather

I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.

Hilary Mantel

The one and only formative power given to man Is thought. By his thinking he not only makes character, but body and affairs, for as he thinketh within himself, so is he. Prejudice is a mist, which in our journey through the world often dims the brightest and obscures the best of all the good and glorious objects that meet us on our way.

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.