D. H. Lawrence Quotes

Madly, futilely, I wrote novel after novel, eight in all, that failed to find a publisher. I persisted because for me the novel was the supreme literary form - not just one among many, not a relic of the past, but the way we communicate to one another the subtlest truths about this business of living.

Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.

Cinema and the arts invite viewers to focus on a story and, in doing so, peel away its layers and peer into the depths of the human soul.

For myself, I feel more natural writing stories or novels than writing plays. I feel more like myself, like I can express myself better, and like I have a greater clarity about what I want to do.

A novel seemed the easiest way to get what I had had in my head into the inside of other people's heads. Books are good that way.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

Fiction is not photography, it's oil painting.

For me, what I am making in the novel is a place to live. When I first switched from poetry to novels, I was asked why, and the metaphor I came up with was about poems as rooms. You can make a room perfect, but then you have to shut the door and never go back, whereas a novel is like a house - it can never be perfect, but you can make a life in it.

To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake, and if anything I've always steered a bit clear of that kind of thing, because it seems gimmicky to play around with text rather than do the work of telling a story and creating characters.

A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

I can be an artist a posteriori, not a priori. If my pictures tell the story, our story, human story, then in a hundred years, then they can be considered an art reference, but now they are not made as art. I'm a journalist. My life's on the road, my studio is the planet.

I write fiction, there's no guarantee that what I say is truthful.

If you want to become a man of letters and perhaps write some Histories one day, you must also lie and invent tales, otherwise your History would become monotonous. But you must act with restraint. The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie only about the greatest things.

I am far less interested in serving as a change agent than in functioning as a prose artist, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.

I am a director because I believe in my own impulses and my own point of view, and that belief encourages me to tell stories that will move, provoke, and change people. But I became a director because I wanted to be a part of the world.

All good novelists have bad memories.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.

All novels are experimental.

If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe the challenge for the novelist is to stretch his art and his language, to the point where it can finally describe what's happening around him.

It’s history. It’s poetry.

But rather that we should lose our sense that neither can become the other, that the traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lense and the Cinerama screen tend to narrow it.