Quotes About Novels

The Eastern Question, too, was something I had heard of: like "the Woman Question," it turned up in nineteenth-century novels. The Eastern Question was essentially, "How do we divide up all the Ottomans' stuff?" It wasn't so different from the Woman Question, which was about whether women could have jobs and money. The things some people considered a "question." If you read stuff like that all your life, it would make you hate Russia.

It doesn't do to read too much,' Widmerpool said. 'You get to look at life with a false perspective. By all means have some familiarity with the standard authors. I should never raise any objection to that. But it is no good clogging your mind with a lot of trash from modern novels.

Romance is very pretty in novels, but the romance of a life is always a melancholy matter. They are most happy who have no story to tell.

Maybe it goes without saying that if you want to become a famous writer before you're dead, you'll have to write something. But the folks in my classes with the biggest ideas and the best publicity shots ready to grace the back covers of their best-selling novels are also usually the ones who aren't holding any paper.

I love it when novels contain a broad cast of characters, including queer ones.

Novels can change attitudes. Maybe we should speak quietly otherwise politicians will use novels as propaganda.

My first two novels were quirky detective stories followed by a couple of SF/Fantasy novels.

When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.

I loved writing the Spellman novels, but I never had any plan to only write in one genre.

I can tell you that when Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, our writer, when she would work on some of these grander novels like, say, a book like 'The Golden Bowl', that would take her months and I wouldn't know what she was doing, really.

I always wanted to write novels, even before I had read a lot of novels or had a very good idea of what they were.

Sometimes I think 'The Wire' said it all, and I might as well not write any more crime novels.

'The Chill,' by Jason Starr and Mick Bertilorenzi, was both a wise and nervy choice to start the year: Starr's standalone novels, such as 'Hard Feelings' and 'The Follower,' sustain a mood not unlike the perpetual unscratchable itch on one's back, and go Highsmith-level deep into the sociopathic mind.

Violence is inevitable in crime novels, but there are many different ways to tell a story. I use my characters' reactions to illustrate the worst moments rather than let readers witness them at first hand.

My favorite novels allow me to imagine the characters afterward and what happened, and that I've witnessed a really great story, where the world goes on.

There's a real emphasis on being witty in Scotland, even in crime novels.

When I started, I was pretty sure I was going to be writing some goofy little wizard novels that might make me some part-time money and would hopefully lead to something I could do better.

My books fall in the wobbly middle between historical fiction and historical romance.

I especially don't like the graphic violence against women and children often depicted in novels such as 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' and others. I'm not sure if it's being done just to entertain or whether it really is necessary for the characters involved.

When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I'm finished with a theme, I'm generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises.

I do seem to have a lot of family secrets in my novels. I guess I'm one of those writers who is often writing about the same sort of themes, but taking different angles on them.

I'm always writing across the same themes. But with short stories, I'm doing something different than with novels. In some ways, they're coming from a much deeper place.

I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. '

Now you mustn't think that I don't have any ideas for novels in my head. I've got ideas for ten novels in my head. But with every idea I have, I already foresee the wrong novels I would write, because I also have critical ideas in my head; I've got a full theory of the perfect novel, and that's what stumps me.