Quotenik
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novel

“Novels take me a long time; short fiction provides a kind of immediate gratification—the relationship of sketches to battle paintings.”

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source: Interview with Larry McCaffery (1980), in Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews (New York: Random House, 1997), 261.

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medium: Interview

“Have you ever read the novels of Anthony Trollope? They precisely suit my taste,—solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of.”

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source: Autobiography of Anthony Trollope (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1905), 126.

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via: Sarah Kershaw

“Poetry is an art of beginnings and ends. You want middles, read novels. You want happy endings, read cookbooks.”

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source: The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2010), 86.

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medium: Literary Criticism

“THE HAIR OF HAROLD ROUX his notebook says to him. But that is only a title. The rest of his creation fades back across a long plain into mist and darkness. He has always thought of a novel, before it has taken on its first, tentative structure, as a scene on this dark plain, the characters standing around a small fire which warmly etches the edges of their faces. Distant mountains are turning moon-cold and blue as the last light fades as if forever. It is that small fire he must constantly re-create or these last warm lives will cease to live, will never have lived even to fear the immensities of coldness and indifference around them.”

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source: The Hair of Harold Roux: A Novel (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 10–11.

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medium: Fiction

“A good book of letters beats an almost-good novel any day.”

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source: “Friends Who Didn’t Mince Words,” The New York Times, December 9, 2010.

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medium: book review

“Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still therein the texture of the thing.”

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source: The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I (New York: Picador, 2006), 476.

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medium: interview

notes: Originally published in Issue 176 of The Paris Review, 2006.

“Each book I’ve written has started off with what I’d call a buzz in the head. A certain kind of music or rhythm, a tone. Most of the effort involved in writing a novel for me is trying to remain faithful to that buzz, that rhythm. It’s a highly intuitive business. You can’t justify it or defend it rationally, but you know when you’ve struck a wrong note, and you’re usually pretty certain when you’ve hit the right one.”

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source: The Paris Review Interviews, vol. IV (New York: Picador, 2009), 328–39.

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medium: interview

notes: Originally published in Issue 167 of The Paris Review, 2003.

“I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.”

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source: A Man Without a Country (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 17.

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medium: nonfiction

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