Marlene van Niekerk famous quotes

Nobody can be so beautiful from the outside and so hollow from inside. Not even in a third-rate novel.
-- Marlene van Niekerk

#Beautiful #Novel #Rate

Marriage is holy and it's private.
-- Marlene van Niekerk

#Holy

...a butterfly is like the soul of a person, it dries out in captivity.
-- Marlene van Niekerk

#Butterfly #Soul #Captivity

We all have to do things in this life that we don't like.
-- Marlene van Niekerk

#This Life

In a state of pseudo-death you restore your substance.
-- Marlene van Niekerk

#Substance #Pseudo #States

Read non-fiction. History, biology, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology. Get a bodyguard and do fieldwork. Find your inner fish. Don't publish too soon. Not before you have read Thomas Mann in any case. Learn by copying, sentence by sentence some of the masters. Copy Coetzee's or Sebald's sentences and see what happens to your story. Consider creative non-fiction if you want to stay in South Africa. It might be the way to go. Never neglect back and hamstring exercises, otherwise you won't be able to write your novel. One needs one's buttocks to think.
-- Marlene van Niekerk

#Writing #Exercise #Thinking

Everything is important. To the smallest insect, even the mouldering tree, the deepest stone in the drift.
-- Marlene van Niekerk

#Tree #Important #Stones

Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else. Winning is important to any man's or woman's sense of satisfaction and well-being. Winning is not everything; but it is something powerful, indeed beautiful, in itself, something as necessary to the strong spirit as striving is necessary to the healthy character.

There is a beautiful and life-enhancing alternative outlook that offers insight, consolation, inspiration and meaning, which has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with the best, most generous, most sympathetic understanding of human reality.

I know that people think I'm sexy and I am looked at as that. It is cool with me. It's wonderful to have sexy appeal. If you embrace it, it can be a very beautiful thing.

It's been a straight strip, I must tell you, I've enjoyed it all the way. If I'm saying things to make it sound like it's hard, hard work, it's not. It's beautiful work. It's fun work. It's everything you'd ever want to do.

Don't frown beautiful, you fascinate me.

I invented the historical spy novel.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written

It took me six novels before I felt confident of my voice as a writer,

Mostly what happens in the novels never happened in real life.

All novels are experimental.