“The second person to write a story about a young boy and an escaped slave on the Mississippi wasn't a novelist, he was a typist.”
[http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/07/the-importance-of-going-first.html "The importance of going first" "Seth's Blog" (2012-07-18)
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Seth Godin 37
American entrepreneur, author and public speaker 1960Related quotes
Letter to Shirley Wiley (30 March 1954), in The Letters of E. B. White (1989), p. 391
In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis (1991)
Context: I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel and story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, and, for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an investigation and presentation, analysis and response and personal history. My audience will always be limited to those people.
“Great novelists are philosopher-novelists who write in images instead of arguments.”
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
B.B. King http://www1.gitarrebass.de/magazine/0008/top10.htm
About
"A Conversation With Roger Zelazny" (8 April 1978), talking with Terry Dowling and Keith Curtis in Science Fiction Vol. 1, #2 (June 1978)