Quotes About Novels

Faulkner's 'As I Lay Dying' had an immense effect on me, and most of my novels bear the burn marks of this experience, those short chapters with their conflicting points of view, truth expressed by multiple perspectives. The other attractive thing about 'As I Lay Dying' was the way it gave rich voices to the poor.

Despite the volatile mixture of family, politics and past misdeeds darkening the present, 'Hardball' doesn't have the sharp tang of the early novels or the expansive reach of more recent series installments.

The surprising thing is that so many teenage cancer novels are very good. John Green's 'The Fault in Our Stars,' recently published by Penguin, was voted Time Magazine's book of the year in 2012 ahead of Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith.

I find that most novels are not good all the way through. A story can be good all the way through, every sentence.

With both novels and short stories, I think a lot in terms of character arcs, when it comes to endings.

Once upon a time, it had sufficed to write 'The Sound and the Fury' or 'The Sun Also Rises.' But now bigness was essential. Thickness, length.

Would not the characters of her many novels be the search, if not the expression, of her many selves? Add the thousands of letters sent, as if cast upon the sea in so many bottles, in the search for understanding, for love... (...)

It was the stuff of Alexandre Dumas' novels as it would be of George Sand's; Romanticism had some roots in reality.

I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.

novels, the great lies that tell the truth, the world in its most heroic and salacious forms can always

I disappear for twenty minutes into Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier while John does the dishes, fighting past my initial irritation all the class nonsense and how no one will say anything of significance because it's simply not done to be explicit. Like in James or Wharton. Those novels where you're screaming at characters to go ahead already and blurt it out, save us a hundred pages of prevarication.

Well whattaya know. Frogs love Harry Potter, too. There weren't even interested in one of the most celebrated new literary American novels of last year, but they get their panties in a knot for Harry Fucking Potter. That's so, I don't know, reverse xenophobic.

People lose it when I say this, but I'm a novelist who doesn't read novels. There are lots of good reasons for not reading novels! I'm also a game writer who doesn't play games - I keep everything very separate. The only crossover with me is comics. I write them, and I read them passionately.

I myself am pathetically impressed when I meet writers of very long novels. How can they spend so many hundreds of hours at the miserable, lonely pastime of creating fiction?

Novels by British writers are among my favorites because our family has enjoyed travel in England and because they are written with an economy of words as if they were written with a pen instead of a computer. Penelope Fitzgerald is a favorite.

I'm a fast writer, and crime novels are easy to do. It's much harder to write a 1,000 word article, where everything has to be 100 per cent correct.

I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.

Actually, the 14 novels were written over a period of just over 6 years.

Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites.

The relation in detail of one's dresses and dreams, together with plots of novels and plays one has read and seen should be made a penal offence, except perhaps to Mr. Henry James, to whom I would give the floor for a nightmare.

When I first thought of the idea for 'Sweet Valley High,' I loved the idea of high school as microcosm of the real world. And what I really liked was how it moved things on from 'Sleeping Beauty'-esque romance novels where the girl had to wait for the hero. This would be girl-driven, very different, I decided - and indeed it is.

My novels about medieval Wales were set in unexplored terrain; my readers did not know what lay around every bend in the road.

I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.

I hate prologues because they're kind of gimmicks to suck you in.