Quotes About Novels

I write the kinds of novels I like to read, where the setting is rendered with love and care.

I feel just fine about ignoring or bypassing the rights of people I have known and loved to be rendered faithfully, or to be left in peace, and out of novels.

I've got a particular way of writing novels, and that carries over into the way I write comics and games, too. I'm a news journalist by background, so I approach everything as reporting - I treat it as real, I ask the questions I'd ask in a real situation, and I let the characters speak for themselves.

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

I think of myself as a softy. I think the 87th Precinct novels are very sentimental, and the cops are idealistic guys.

Ideally, I would like everyone in the world to read and love my novels. In fact, I can't believe that everyone in the world doesn't love them. What is there not to love?

There is a certain limitlessness to children's novels. You can be as fun and imaginative and creative as you want and your audience is going to believe it because they still have that huge imagination.

It took me a long time to know enough about writing to really write short stories. You can't just immerse yourself, as you do in a novel, and see where everything goes. Novels are a very flexible, accommodating form. Short stories aren't.

George Martin is an incredible writer.

I am indeed a fan of John le Carre's novels.

Hazel said novels was better value than poetry books because they had more words in them, poetry books was a rip-off (Winsome doesn't think Hazel should be in their reading group)

For many years, biographers and scholars, beginning with her great nephew James Austen-Leigh, presented her as a quiet, reserved, proper woman, but one has only to read her novels to realize that she was nothing so bland. Her genius, her craft, and her timeless prose are no secret, but thanks to Cassandra's scissors, most other aspects of her life will probably remain a mystery.

You tempt me to telephone Matron and ask her to let you have the afternoon off.' He spoke lightly and Sarah felt a surprising regret that he couldn't possibly mean it. 'That sort of thing happens in novels, never in real life. I can imagine Matron's feelings!

Novels and gardens," she says. "I like to move from plot to plot.

Coming out of university, one of my obsessions was that in the novels I was reading, they seemed to be portraying a world that had a social fabric. People knew each other in 'War and Peace.' They went to all the same balls. These were societies with tightly wound, woven, social textures.

My entire career writing novels was wrapped up around Harry Bosch. This character was too important to me to just hand off.

'The Marriage of Souls', like 'The Rationalist', is an exploration of humanist philosophy wrapped between the delicate leaves of an eighteenth-century tale. The story of the two novels - and they should be read as a two-volume work - centres around the old war-horse of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl. But what a boy and what a girl.

The 1930s birthed two great agrarian novels: 'Gone with the Wind' from the viewpoint of the ruling class, 'The Grapes of Wrath' for the underclass. And both were turned into movies that dared to be true to the books' controversial themes.

I read Claire Messud's 'The Emperor's Children,' I read Joseph O'Neill's 'Netherland' - but to me, they're not 9/11 novels. In 'The Emperor's Children,' 9/11 felt to me like a piece of the plot; the novel wasn't wrestling with what 9/11 meant. And 'Netherland' felt the same way. I liked both books a lot but I don't see them as 9/11 novels.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

It's true that romance novels do detail the courtship phase of a relationship. We usually write 'And they lived happily ever after' before our heroine starts snoring or our hero starts tossing his socks over the hamper.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do ever - was write novels.

I'm a morning person because I learned to write my novels while still practicing law. I would get to the office at 6:30 a.m. and write until other people arrived, around 9. Now I still do that. I start at 6:30 or 7, and I'll write until 11, then take an hour off, then work until about 2 p.m. By then my brain has had enough.

The Florida in my novels is not as seedy as the real Florida. It's hard to stay ahead of the curve. Every time I write a scene that I think is the sickest thing I have ever dreamed up, it is surpassed by something that happens in real life.