Books Quote by Josh Gondelman

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who…

— Flannery O'Connor

I really need to know where I'm going with fiction to write it in a way that at least I'm happy with. And I…

— Dave Barry

I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.

— Ian Mcewan

If you're going to have a book full of clever people and nobody ever jokes, it's just not going to ring true to the…

— Patrick Rothfuss

And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer…

— Karen Russell

“No novel is anything, for the purposes either of comedy or tragedy, unless the reader can sympathise with the characters whose names he finds…

— Anthony Trollope

With fiction, there’s no reason why everything you write shouldn’t be amazing. Nobody’s stopping you from making up better stuff.

— Wells Tower

It's terrible to write what are essentially comedies for people with no sense of humor. Everyone thinks they have a sense of humor, but…

— Whit Stillman

Reviewers try to square the antics of a writer's life with the antics in the fiction. Even satirical verbal play is too often read…

— Joanna Scott

“Drama usually bases itself on the bedrock of original sin, whether the writer thinks in theological terms or not. Then, too, any character in…

— Flannery O'Connor

Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see…

— David Foster Wallace

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and…

— J. G. Ballard