Quotes About Novels

She had always been an unashamed reader of novels.

It was no doubt significant that Mary Beamish should have the novels of Miss Goudge while Piers had those of Miss Compton-Burnett,

I give novels as gifts, and there is nothing I like to receive more as a gift.

In many joyfully-admired recent novels, love appears as little more than sex-manual instruction.

I always favor the hero and heroine from whichever book I've completed most recently. Yes, I'm faithless and fickle!

You want to make entertainment sometimes, and sometimes you want to make art, because I think the way we understand ourselves as human beings is through art, and the way we process emotions - I know I do - is through recognizing experiences on screen or in novels or in paintings.

In novels, and American novels in particular, it's not just about redemption, it's about forward movement and healing oneself. Americans are very big on getting better.

White people use their literature to maintain culture. That's why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.

I love doing the research for the novels. For me, the writing is hard work.

I'm a big Hemingway and Salinger fan.

Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own sound.

At any rate that year of reading novels was the only real education, in the sense of book–learning, that I've ever had. It did certain things to my mind. It gave me an attitude, a kind of questioning attitude, which I probably wouldn't have had if I'd gone through life in a normal sensible way.

Tout concourt à I'histoire, tout est I'histoire, meme les romans qui semblent ne se rattacher en rien aux situations politiques qui les voient eclore.

There are two people in the waiting room. One is an extremely thin old man, a retired teacher of French who still gives tuition by correspondence, and who whilst waiting his turn is correcting a pile of scripts with a pencil sharpened to a fine point. On the script he is about to examine, the essay title can be read: In Hell, Raskolnikov meets Meursault ("The Outsider"). Imagine a dialogue between them using material from both novels.

I think gaming has influenced popular culture in a huge way. It's worked its way into novels, and blockbuster movies.

Writing and producing television very much speaks to the extroverted part of my personality. I love collaboration, the joint effort of hundreds of people working together to create something. But the other part of who I am is extremely introverted. I love being alone and dreaming up ideas and writing novels.

The theatre has always been voraciously omnivorous. Dramatists have always raided every medium to find grist to their mill: myths, folk tales, newspapers, novels, films, works of art of all kinds.

I love how easy it is to run my business, Writing Workshops Los Angeles, with the help of email and my website. I love that I don't have to use cuneiform, a quill, or a typewriter to write my novels - I love to write on my laptop!

But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it.

I'm famously secretive about my work. Nobody reads my books till they're finished.

I remember when I was writing 'The Tin Drum,' I had the totally misguided idea of giving Oskar Matzerath a sister, and he just wouldn't have it. There was no space for a sister, yet I had the character of the sister in my head. In fact I used her in later novels, in 'Cat and Mouse' and 'Dog Years,' Tulla Pokriski.

I first read the 'Raj Quartet' in the early 1970s, when Paul Scott's decision to set his novels in the dying days of the British Raj in India seemed an eccentric choice, almost as though he did not want readers. The British were tired of their imperial past.