Ralph Ellison Quotes

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building.

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.

I always think about the books I'm doing in pretty much the same way. I'm simply trying to write that particular novel as well as that particular novel can be written. I want to listen to what it is telling me, trying to figure out what it wants to do as much as what I want to do with it. There's a negotiation that's constant and ongoing between me and the material I'm working with, because I'm trying to listen to it.

I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder.

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to think that what you need to write a novel is imagination, creativity and a facility with words. Yes, you need all those things, but a novel is a highly complex organism that needs to be dealt with in quite a logical manner.

Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there's always some drive in it that is entirely personal - even if you don't know it while you're doing it.

My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.

When I'm writing a story, I try to reduce it to the barest possible components and go from there.

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).

I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.

Part of the work of writing a novel is to uncover the symmetries or connections that make it whole, which might not reveal itself at first.

What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch my materials.

One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

I don't know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it's true. We aren't satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.