Lists Quotes - Page 13

The bad novelist constructs his characters; he directs them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them act; he hears their voices even before he knows them.

Lists are a form of power.

Become an expert in one fundamental area of your market or business, no one starts out as a generalist.

To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.

I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always try to make the argument from the perspective of personal pleasure.

A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.

The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.

When I begin to eliminate from the list all those professions which are impossible from a financial point of view and then those which I feel disinclined to-it leaves nothing

And that singular anomaly, the lady novelist-- I don't think she'd be missed--I'm sure she'd not be missed!

I am a huge fan of Alan Furst. Furst is the best in the business--the most talented espionage novelist of our generation.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.

The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All round its cramped margins lies the gulf.

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

I have so many playlists full of Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, Chris Brown.

I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.

I wouldn't be interested in just doing a show that's mapped out and choreographed with a set list. That would've been boring so long ago it just wouldn't be any fun.

If you're 70th or 80th on the money list, it's not very motivating.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

Stories are how we remember; we tend to forget lists and bullet points.

Our mailing lists (and their repeater newsgroups) are only for the purpose of promoting proprietary software.

How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.

I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival.