“The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.”

Source: The Works of Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life and Other Essays

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Arthur Schopenhauer261

German philosopher 1788–1860

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“Say not "a small event!" Why "small"?
Costs it more pain that this ye call
A "great event" should come to pass
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“Never let your small business make you small-minded.”

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“Great novelists are philosopher novelists — that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.”

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“The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself.”

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“...life has taught me to make no distinction between a hero and a little man, between great events and small trifles. From my point of view, men and events are all more or less the same size.”

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“Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

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“Great novelists are philosopher-novelists who write in images instead of arguments.”

Albert Camus (1913–1960) French author and journalist

This may have arisen as a paraphrase of statements found in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), "An Absurd Reasoning", or one found in The Novelist as Philosopher: Studies in French Fiction 1935-1960 (1962) edited by John Cruikshank, p. 218
Disputed

“Historians are concerned with events which can be assigned to specific timespace locations, events which are (or were) in principle observable or perceivable, whereas imaginative writers – poets, novelists, playwrights – are concerned with both these kinds of events and imagined, hypothetical, or invented ones.”

Hayden White (1928–2018) American historian

"The fictions of factual representation"

“We cannot make Events. Our Business is wisely to improve them.”

Samuel Adams (1722–1803) American statesman, Massachusetts governor, and political philosopher

Letter to Samuel Cooper (30 April 1776) http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2093 <br class="br">Context: We cannot make Events. Our Business is wisely to improve them. There has been much to do to confirm doubting Friends & fortify the Timid. It requires time to bring honest Men to think & determine alike even in important Matters. Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason.

“A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist. ”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

“The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.”

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Arthur Schopenhauer261

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