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I've never really understood that whole thing of writers avoiding other writers' novels while they're working on their own.

Ned Beauman

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Ned Beauman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Understood
Novel
Working
Whole
Thing
Really
Avoiding
Never
Novels
Writers

More quotes by Ned Beauman

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I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.
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I would love to learn how to air kiss non-awkwardly.
Ned Beauman
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I'm very finicky about when I'm in the right mood to write. So most days, I find some excuse not to do anything.
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There are probably a couple of things I'd never write about until everyone I know is dead. And then there's other stuff which nobody would want to read a book about anyway.
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You couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate at least something. Indeed, perhaps you couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate almost everything.
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The reason I start a novel is because there's something that excites me and I want to explore it.
Ned Beauman
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So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.
Ned Beauman
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You couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate at least something. Indeed, perhaps you couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate almost everything.
Ned Beauman
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Plot is tremendously important to me: I can't stand books where nothing happens, and I can't imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder.
Ned Beauman
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I love sentences. I love characters. But most of all, perhaps, I love to work on plot, and that may be where my natural gifts lie, if I have any. I like to think hard about plots in TV shows and films.
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I read 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford again every so often.
Ned Beauman
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I was always determined that one way or another I would force a book on the world, even if I had to resort to writing one about a tabby cat who solves mysteries.
Ned Beauman
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I don't have a day job, so I read any time of day.
Ned Beauman
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Until I was 16, I read nothing but science fiction. I loved William Gibson and I still do. But my favourite book when I was growing up, for a long time, was 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson, which I must have read about a dozen times when I was a teenager.
Ned Beauman
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I hate going back over what I've written. It makes me feel physically sick.
Ned Beauman
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I always save a huge book for a flight, because then you read it at both airports and on the plane and by the time you get home you're a quarter of the way through and it doesn't feel so unmanageable any more.
Ned Beauman
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The simile has to match the tone of its surroundings and has to be like a little joke. Writing a simile that isn't funny on some level is quite hard.
Ned Beauman
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If I want to feel as if I'm being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.
Ned Beauman
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I'm reasonably good at talking onstage, but actually holding court in a pub is all to do with power dynamics which I don't think has anything to do with fiction.
Ned Beauman