Quotes About Novels

day fiction, but two of the best books I've read recently—Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel and The Marlowe Papers by Ros Barber—are set several centuries ago.

Zane Grey, Max Brand, and Louis L'Amour

I'm a feminist, but I think that romance has been taken away a bit for my generation. I think what people connect with in novels is this idea of an overpowering, encompassing love - and it being more important and special than anything and everything else.

But was this the touted bliss of love that she'd read about in Madame Sand's spicy novels? It was not the crushing sensation she'd expected, but rather feathery and weightless. How lightly had his hand covered hers! And how much it assured: to keep her safe, to guide and delight. Such a simple act, holding hands. We are a pair, it said. Two in harmony against this inattentive, suffering world.

Some novels even overdramatize events, which, in real life, happen in a far more unassuming and inconsequential way; they happen, then they're over, they run into one another, floating like clouds scattered by the wind between the odd deceptive pause that turns out to be impossible, because time—which no one understands—stops for nothing.

Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.

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My high school did not offer courses in philosophy, so the books that initially stimulated philosophical reflection in me were novels by Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

I don't read 'genre' fiction if that means novels with lots of killing and shooting. Even Cormac McCarthy's 'No Country for Old Men' seemed pretty childish in that regard.

I have questioned myself about the brutality in the last few novels. Actually in 'The Leopard,' in hindsight, I feel I went a little bit too far with screaming blood. There are a couple of scenes that I regret and wish I had the chance to rewrite. 'Phantom' has less blood.

Having 'The Expats' not be 'wholesale-y' rejected by the world made it possible for me to write the second book and have a publisher buy it before it was entirely written. And it made it easier for me and my publisher to get 'The Accident' out into the world without trying to convince people to pay attention to it the way you do for a first novel.

Historical novels are hard to do for the general public for commercial writers like myself.

I love being educated by historical novels.

I read all kinds of novels, as long as they're good. I get a bit piqued when people say, 'I don't really like that kind of book.' It's akin to marking yourself as proudly poorly read.

A ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system.

If one thing is accomplished in this story of the aftermath of Gettysburg, it is the hope that we can dispel some of the pure nonsense and myth that has grown up surrounding the Civil War, and which is perpetuated even now by movies, novels, and battle reenactments around the country.

I chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels - the late '30s and World War II.

In Ireland, novels and plays still have a strange force. The writing of fiction and the creation of theatrical images can affect life there more powerfully and stealthily than speeches, or even legislation. Imagined worlds can lodge deeply in the private sphere, dislodging much else, especially when the public sphere is fragile.

I mean, there are many other directors who are probably both more skilled and excited to adapt novels or work within certain genre conventions. I'd like to do that kind of work someday, but for better or worse I'm too drawn by my own material.

The worst thing you can say about libertarians is that they are intellectually immature, frozen in the worldview many of them absorbed from reading Ayn Rand novels in high school. Like other ideologues, libertarians react to the world's failing to conform to their model by asking where the world went wrong.

I won't go so far as to say that novels sell in inverse proportion to their worth, for just occasionally, someone like Dickens or George Eliot comes along to prove the opposite.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.

If Tom Clancy didn't write any Op-Centers, he would be $60 million less rich.