Lucy Poate Stebbins famous quotes

Curiosity is the prime requisite of the novelist.
-- Lucy Poate Stebbins

#Curiosity #Novelists #Prime

The desire to confess ... lies at the root of most fiction writing ...
-- Lucy Poate Stebbins

#Lying #Writing #Roots

Women writers lift themselves up from the depths; as they rise, each brings with her what she is able to carry.
-- Lucy Poate Stebbins

#Depth #Able

Human curiosity, the urge to know, is a powerful force and is perhaps the best secret weapon of all in the struggle to unravel the workings of the natural world.

At no period of [Michael Faraday's] unmatched career was he interested in utility. He was absorbed in disentangling the riddles of the universe, at first chemical riddles, in later periods, physical riddles. As far as he cared, the question of utility was never raised. Any suspicion of utility would have restricted his restless curiosity. In the end, utility resulted, but it was never a criterion to which his ceaseless experimentation could be subjected.

The apartments of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: a conglomeration of classical antiquity, gothic, renaissance; Louis XIII... Something from every century but our own, a predicament that has arisen in no other period... so that we seem to be subsisting on the ruins of the past, as if the end of the world were near.

It is not the office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves; it is not the business of fiction to teach us anything.

If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

The novelist must be his own most harsh critic and also his own most loving admirer and about both he must say nothing.

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

It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations.

Few bands in hard rock history have been so adept at balancing the awesome and trivial as Van Halen in their prime.