Quotes About Novels

I'm not a big crime reader, but I'm reading Michael Connelly's 'The Reversal.' I'm going back to his novels. I'm also reading Keith Richards' 'Life.' I'm always fascinated by the transition from the innocent late '60s and early '70s and the youth culture becoming an industry.

Teaching does allow me to keep one foot in the youthful waters I tend to occupy in my novels, so I'm thankful for that. My students also remind me on a daily basis that the stories I collected during my district attorney days are actually interesting to people who haven't had that experience.

I am sometimes asked to name my favourite books. The list changes, depending on my mood, the year, tricks played by memory. I might mention novels by Nabokov and Calvino and Tolkien on one occasion, by Fitzgerald and Baldwin and E.B. White on another. Camus often features, as do Tolstoy, Borges, Morrison and Manto.

Yugoslavia was a kind of superpower. Great movies. Beautiful novels. Great rock-and-roll. We became a superpower in basketball. The problem is that people needed to identify more strongly with it after Tito and his awful, tricky way of leading the country.

I would normally never set out to write a trilogy.

In crime fiction, I cut my teeth on early Robert Parker, Elmore Leonard, John D. MacDonald, and Alan Furst. I always loved the writing of Hemingway and Faulkner. Cormac McCarthy's 'Border Trilogy' has been a huge influence; I think I read those novels four times.

Novels aren't pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline. A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it's a good starting place for me.

To me, novels are a trip of discovery, and you discover things that you don't know and you assume that many of your readers don't know, and you try to bring them to life on the page.

I used to be something of an obsessive when it came to research. When I first began writing the Thorne novels, I would drive to a set of traffic lights in the early hours of the morning to make sure you could turn left. I thought it was important to get even the most trivial details right.

No matter how troubled a character's history, romance novels tell us, love can be built upon it, and happily-ever-after can result. What's more, the darker the past, the brighter the future - and the better the read.

'Troublemaker' is not an adaptation of 'Metro Girl' or 'Motor Mouth.' It is an original story. The hardest part was probably trying to keep the sound true to the novels. I always write in first person, and it was important to us that the readers of 'Metro' and 'Motor' be comfortable with the change over to a graphic novel.

I think all novels are contemporary. When people went to see 'Antony-Cleopatra' at the Globe in the 16th century, they were not going to get a history lesson on the Roman Empire. It was about love, sex, and also about dynastic troubles.

There are still some people out there who believe comic books are nothing more than, well, comic books. But the true cognoscenti know graphic novels are - at their best - an amazing blend of art literature and the theater of the mind.

There will be the 5% on the fringe of any hardcore fanbase that get angry about any change you make to the source material. The truth is that novels, games, comics, and what-have-you are not usually ready to be slapped up on screen as-is.

Readers tell me that my novels are filled with significant mothers. Do I realize this? Do I do it on purpose? The truth is, I don't. I think of myself as a writer of family stories. I write more often than not from a male point of view, and I usually begin by focusing on siblings, spouses, even fathers, before I think about the mothers.

Every time I finish a book, it's my favorite. I have a lot of favorites. I did just finish Jane Eyre and it was fabulous. I didn't want it to end.

My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books.

I write contemporary fiction, and that is what my readers want to read.

Hope E.L .James doesn't think I'm being a prankster. I really want to adapt her novels for the screen. Christian Grey is a writer's dream.

Volume 2 will begin with Cervantes and end with the most interesting novel of 2012.

Finally, while I don't want to disparage the traditional novel--I still prefer Dickens's Great Expectations over Kathy Acker's Great Expectations, though I'll take Lauren Fairbanks's Sister Carrie over Dreiser's any day--there's a whole other world of novels out there most people never even hear of, much less read. Let's go see.

Sorel's novels deserve to be revived, but Polexander can be left in its watery grave.

I suppose someone could trawl through the 383 volumes of Migne's Patrologiae Cursus Completus and extract some book-length hagiographies that qualify as novels — there had to be a few protonovelists who adopted hagiography as the only game in town, as painters of religious subjects learned to do — but that someone isn't me.

Imogen was a bright girl naturally, but she had read so many novels that her brain was completely turned.