Nell Zink Quotes

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

I prefer to talk about the gift of literature rather than its role or task.

A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market - it knows nothing about target markets.

Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.

I don't believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don't think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It's all about the good word, properly inserted.

If you set out to write an adjective novel, you're setting out to write a mediocre novel; your allegiance is to the adjective, not to the story, and then that just sucks all the joy right out of it.

A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

The novelist, he's not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He's someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.

A first novel should be brash and ambitious, and announce the arrival of a new talent.

Minor writers think style is all.

When it's something you really adore, I think you don't want to be the one who accidentally writes a crap episode.

I read a lot of scripts, and there's a lot of good writing and a lot of OK writing and a lot of crappy writing. And even with the really good writing, it doesn't necessarily speak to me.

I never had a highfalutin' view of what I write.

You can't take a story and just stretch it out - that does not a novel make.

A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific.

Literature is my calling To hold up the mirror to my countrymen comes natural to me; and in the open field of invention I am not without hopes of giving them pleasure.

For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows.

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.

You set out to tell a good story. You don't do it because there is a deep message involved because the movie is almost always bad when you do that.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

I used to be more of a purist about literature. I thought, 'If it's a really propulsive story, then maybe there's something unliterary about it.'

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

I'm very conscious that I'm an entertainer. Something like 73 percent of my readers are college graduates, so you can't condescend to people. You've got to tell them a story that they will be willing to pay money to read.

I actually think that 'Bandbox,' by far the silliest of my books, is the best constructed of them.