All Quotes

A novel takes place over time. It's a historical narrative, and it needs to have a series of peaks and valleys and the move through. You can't just start at the highest pitch and stay there, but you can in a lyric poem.
‐‐ Edward Hirsch

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
‐‐ Milan Kundera

A novel that features real people is complicated, but in the end, that extra challenge is all for the good.
‐‐ Rick Bass

A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.
‐‐ Rose Tremain

A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving.
‐‐ Lev Grossman

A novel wouldn't be a book if there weren't some flights of fancy on the part of the author, stopping time to examine things, or to tell a joke.
‐‐ Ned Vizzini

A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.
‐‐ Janet Fitch

A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.
‐‐ Patrick Modiano

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.
‐‐ Jerzy Kosinski

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
‐‐ Vladimir Nabokov

A novelist needs to know his own strong points and weak points.
‐‐ David Mitchell

A novelist, poet and playwright who writes equally well in Shona and English, Charles Mungoshi is Zimbabwe's finest and most versatile writer. His life project has been to interrogate the notion of family.
‐‐ Petina Gappah

A novelist's lack of awareness of and critical distance to his own body of work is due to a phenomenon that I have noticed in myself and many others: as soon as it is written, every new book erases the last one, leaving me with the impression that I have forgotten it.
‐‐ Patrick Modiano

A novelist's sense that he or she is 'above' a certain genre mainly comes out of the notion that the genre is somehow a debased version of his or her preferred form.
‐‐ Lynn Coady

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
‐‐ Anthony Burgess

A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow.
‐‐ J. B. Priestley

A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.
‐‐ August Wilson

A novelty in Polish filmmaking was that it was possible to find funds for a big production. However, at the same time, the state budget committed less and less money to filmmaking.
‐‐ Andrzej Wajda

A nuclear power reactor is just a fancy way of boiling water.
‐‐ Leslie Dewan

A nuclear program has arguably worked as a deterrent for North Korea and other states - would Moammar Gadhafi have been deposed and summarily killed if Libya had had nuclear weapons? Iranians might not think so.
‐‐ Richard Engel

A nuclear weapon of some dimension, whether it's actually a nuclear weapon, or a dirty bomb, or some kind of radiological device. Yes, I think it's probably a near thing.
‐‐ Michael Scheuer

A nuclear-weapons armed Iran is not in anyone's human-rights interests. That is a direct threat to the lives and the livelihoods and the stability not only of the region but beyond.
‐‐ Hillary Clinton

A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two.
‐‐ John Updike

A number of Americans were used, most often unwillingly, by North Korea to arm spies with English-speaking skills so they could target American interests in South Korea and beyond.
‐‐ Robert Jenkins

A number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was finally killed, he won some major successes in his war against the U.S.
‐‐ Noam Chomsky

A number of bloggers in economics and the financial sector have risen to prominence through the sheer strength of their work. Note it was not their family connections nor ties to Ivy League schools or elite banks, but rather the strength of their research, analysis and writing.
‐‐ Barry Ritholtz

A number of cases have been reported in which a dying individual has a vision of a person about whose death he or she did not know.
‐‐ Stanislav Grof

A number of countries around the world, and indeed the E.U. as a whole, have chosen not to allow the import from the U.S. of beef from cows fed a diet that includes the hormone ractopamine, because of the fairly grave health concerns.
‐‐ Zac Goldsmith

A number of countries, including Russia and China, have put forward proposals to regulate aspects of the Internet like 'crime' and 'security' that are currently unregulated at the global level due to lack of international consensus over what those terms actually mean or over how to balance enforcement with the protection of citizens' rights.
‐‐ Rebecca MacKinnon

A number of girls of my acquaintance went to school to the nuns of the Congregational Nunnery, or Sisters of Charity, as they are sometimes called.
‐‐ Maria Monk

A number of images put together a certain way become something quite above and beyond what any of them are individually.
‐‐ Francis Ford Coppola

A number of immunisation programmes are funded and announced by the government and international bodies, but little thought goes into the injecting or delivery mechanism.
‐‐ Marc Koska

A number of organizations are already using Web GIS to create shared information and facilitate collaboration, and it is literally changing the way organizations operate.
‐‐ Jack Dangermond

A number of people have read 'Two-Way Split' and made certain assumptions about what the author's like, and I'm highly disappointing to them. I don't drink, I don't eat meat; that's very disappointing for a hard-boiled writer.
‐‐ Allan Guthrie

A number of people in the United States, almost everyone, is using plastic cards to pay for things, but it's extremely difficult to accept these cards. So let's make it's easy and take more and more of the friction out as we can.
‐‐ Jack Dorsey

A number of people who have supported me on the border fence in the U.S. have observed the fences in Israel and their effectiveness.
‐‐ Duncan Hunter

A number of scientists with greatly different backgrounds can come up with completely different assessments. The discussions or controversies are endless. Once a year, we try to bring the most important discoverers together to exchange their experiences and knowledge.
‐‐ Richard Leakey

A number of the major terrorist captures we have made, the terrorist operations designed for the United States that we have interrupted, were enabled by the terrorist tracking program.
‐‐ Kit Bond

A number of things in 'Dhalgren' are just meant to function as mysteries. They're mysteries when the book begins, and they're mysteries when the book ends.
‐‐ Samuel R. Delany

A number of us had conversations with the Kerry campaign about what he was going to say about CAFE. What he told us was that he did not want to sacrifice jobs and that he wanted to work with the auto industry to achieve that goal.
‐‐ Jennifer Granholm

A number of women have reportedly been victims of what appear to be discriminatory decisions taken by Sharia councils, and that is a significant concern.
‐‐ Theresa May

A number of years ago, I found a book of photography by Weegee; he was a crime photographer in the 1930s in New York. He was the first person to put a police scanner in a car and drive around.
‐‐ Dan Gilroy

A nutritionist has told me to have very little butter and very little spices, but I can't live like that.
‐‐ Jill Scott

A nutritionist helps me eat healthily at home.
‐‐ Leighton Meester

A one-hundred-thousand-word novel might take a year or several years, and then you just come to 'The End' one day. But it takes hundreds of days to get to 'The End.' As a writer, you have to put in those hundreds of days.
‐‐ Bob Mayer

A one-time tax does not get figured into people's investment decisions.
‐‐ Mitch Daniels

A one-year budget doesn't mean the government won't last, and a two-year budget doesn't mean it will.
‐‐ Moshe Kahlon

A P2P business is a company that creates a platform which allows individuals or 'peers' to directly buy and sell from each other. This activity has sometimes been called the 'sharing economy.' Some are wary of these new companies and the challenge they pose to the established market.
‐‐ Sam Graves

A pacifist will often - at least nowadays - be an internationalist and vice versa. But history shows us that a pacifist need not think internationally.
‐‐ Christian Lous Lange

A page a day means I need to focus on a gag a day, and that's great for laughs but bad for plot, and I'm primarily a plot guy.
‐‐ Doug TenNapel