Quotes About Novels

You'll want to read books - novels, because ladies are frivolous; poetry because ladies are sentimental; and sermons, because we are pious. If you must read essays, Mr. Emerson might be best. Your gentleman may have a nodding acquaintance with his works.

Frederick Ward thought novels immoral and had been known to leave the room rather than subject himself to "bohemian" opinions.

You really love to gossip, don't you?" he asked, wishing she had brought him a glass of wine. "Yes, I suppose I do," she answered, sounding surprised at the realization. "You think that's why I love reading novels so much?

Dorothy Eden (1912–1982) was the internationally acclaimed author of more than forty bestselling Gothic, romantic suspense, and historical novels. Born in New Zealand, where she attended school and worked as a legal secretary, she moved to London in 1954 and continued to write prolifically. Eden's novels are known for their suspenseful, spellbinding plots, finely drawn characters, authentic historical detail, and often a hint of spookiness.

Judge Dee mystery novels

Dorothy Koomson is the author of seven other novels: The Cupid Effect, The Chocolate Run, My Best Friend's Girl, Marshmallows for Breakfast, The Ice Cream Girls and The Woman He Loved Before –all of which have spent several weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list. Her books have been translated into thirty languages and regularly top the bestseller charts around the

Usually I read biographies of interesting people. I am not attracted to novels - make-believe, or recreations of what people think life should be.

I write about relationships and I try to create real-life characters.

The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd - one cannot answer deep questions about what one's life was like - one writes novels about it.

Few of us write great novels; all of us live them.

In real life, things don't all end at the nice same place. To keep the story real, there has to be kind of a ragged edge at the end of a novel.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. . . . I am a proud non-reader of books. —KANYE WEST (Reuters, May 2009) This book be dedicated to Kanye West, because he'll never fuckin' read it.

the stack of her seven favorite novels that she's been curating since childhood,

I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.

I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are, or should be, written for both men and women to read, and I am at loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.

I actually started trying to be a professional writer with novels, and I wrote two that exist and are around... kind of. But they never really went anyplace in particular. I still like them both. What it showed me was that you can spend years on a novel, and then it could just be, like, OK, you spent that time and that's that.

Maybe it's because I was named for him, but I've always wanted to meet Nathaniel Hawthorne. It's oversimplifying, but all Hawthorne's short stories and novels are, in one way or another, about guilt. Something profoundly disturbing must have happened to him at an early age. I'd like to know what that was.

I think novels are profoundly autobiographical. If writers deny that, they are lying. Or if it's really true, then I think it's a mistake.

If novels and stories are bulletins from the progressive states of ignorance a writer passes through over the years, observations and opinions about horses are all the more so, since horses are more mysterious than life and harder to understand.

I've always been charmed by houses, and descriptions of them are prominent in my novels. So prominent, in fact, that my editor once pointed out to me that all of my early novels had houses on the covers.

We've all faced the charge that our novels are history lite, and to some extent, that's true. Yet for some, historical fiction is a way into reading history proper.

I do have two data identities. I have my name, Bruce Sterling, which is my public name under which I write novels. I also have my other name, which is my legal name under which I own property and vote.

I'd love to see more novels and short stories where the characters have their own folklore that isn't the Plot-Bearing Prophecy of Doom.