Quotes About Novels

I hope for so much from every book I read. And time and again, I find myself disappointed. I look across my bookshelves and see hundreds of titles which in my memory seem merely mediocre or second-rate. Only occasionally does a novel appear for which I feel a lasting passion, a book that I think could in time become a classic.

I'm not really a book person, to be honest.

I'm not that big of a reader, to be honest.

In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.

It's a given that we exist in a world where we have to live in continuity every day; no one is immune to that, in life or romance novels. By the same token, it's not something I find terribly important.

Consensus wisdom has it that all modern commercial fantasy novels fall into two camps: those derived from J.R.R. Tolkien and those derived from Mervyn Peake. The 'Lord of the Rings' template or the 'Gormenghast' mold.

When I was a teenager, what I most wanted to read were fantasy novels. Not Tolkien and Malory, but sword-and-sorcery pulp. I craved glowy blue magic, chainmail bikinis, dragons with unpronounceable names.

A lot of the novels that I've really enjoyed in my life, whether it's Tolstoy's 'Cossacks,' or 'Sons and Lovers' or 'Jude the Obscure' or 'David Copperfield' or 'Herzog,' have an autobiographical spine.

All my novels are rooted in their time and in their place.

I feel quite at home writing short stories but nervous and anxious when writing novels, as if the bad time of consecutive failures might arise again.

I don't read novels whilst I'm writing one; I just haven't got a wide enough brain to concentrate on incoming and outgoing in the same time zone.

I'm jealous of everyone discovering Lovesey and Diamond for the first time-you have a wonderful backlist to catch up on. Me, all I can do is wait for the next book.

Toronto may be the only city where novels are integral to high art, the alternative scene and mainstream culture all at the same time.

I love James Baldwin essays, but also his novels. I recently read "Another Country." I couldn't believe how ahead of his time he was.

Cuando se escriben novelas sobre adultos, uno sabe donde tiene que parar: esto es, en la boda. Pero cuando se escribe una novela sobre jóvenes, hay que parar donde mejor se pueda.

Whatever junk novels were, however they worked, they were close to therapy, and airports were close to therapy. They both belonged to the culture of the waiting room. Piped music, the language of calming suasion. Come this way--yes, the flight attendant will see you now. Airports, junk novels: they were taking your mind off mortal fear.

To describe Monroe's books is like trying to describe the Lowcountry itself.

Someone in a novel, was he not? I don't take much stock of detectives in novels--chaps that do things and never let you see how they do them.

She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple.

This was the Mars that inspired some of the greatest works early science fiction, including H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (1897), in which the Martians reverse the Avatar story where aliens come to our world for its resources-including human blood! and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom novels, beginning wi A Princess of Mars, serialised from 1912.

To use a distinction made by E. M. Forster when talking about people in novels, the world now went from flat characters to rounded characters—to the development of personalities whose actions could surprise. The fun began.

Writers remember everything...especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar. Art consists of the persistence of memory.

Hicks was examining the paperbacks Maura had culled from the shelves: Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Joe Hill.

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel and The Marlowe Papers by Ros Barber—are set several centuries ago.