Quotes About Novels

The whole point here, and the seed that JJ Abrams laid in my mind is, is the power of curiosity enough? What happens next? That dramatic construct is what has driven soap operas and serialised novels over the course of history.

Look at Austen. In her novels, you get a dance, followed by an encounter, followed by a letter, then a period of solitude. No flashbacks and no backstory. Let's have no more back story!

The beauty of cinema is that it can do some things that novels just can't.

I used the pen name because I knew I wanted to write better novels under my own name someday.

I love the Swedish people for their detective novels, their archipelago, their sense of humor, their carbonated vodka, and most especially, for their wonderful hospitality.

Poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling.

Perhaps it is because novels are like affairs, and small novels - with fewer pages of plot to them - are affairs with less history, affairs that involved just a few glances across a dinner table or a single ride together, unspeaking, on a train, and therefore affairs are still electric with potential, still heart-quickening, even after the passage of all these years.

The Killer Inside Me is a chilling first-person story of an evil lawman, while Pop. 1280 is a strangely funny version of the same plot. Of all the noir writers, Thompson is the most popular today, in part because several of his novels, including The Grifters, were successfully adapted for film.

I was secretly convinced that with such a marvel one would be able to write anything, from novels to encyclopedias, and letters whose supernatural power would surpass any postal limitations--a letter written with that pen would reach the most remote corners of the world, even that unknowable place to which my father said my mother had gone and from where she would never return.

Se não confiar num escritor de romances, vai confiar em quem?

Esta es una historia de libros. De libros malditos, del hombre que los escribió, de un personaje que se escapó de una de sus novelas para quemarla, de una traición y de una amistad perdida. Es una historia de amor, de odio y de los sueños que viven en la sombra del viento.

On one of his visits, he told me how, for a pittance, he'd just acquired the Spanish rights for the novels of Julián Carax, a young writer from Barcelona who lived in Paris. This must have been in 1928 or 1929.

Between 1928 and 1936, he published eight of Carax's novels.

Anyway, where Cabestany really made his money was in catechisms and a series of cheap sentimental novels starring a provincial heroine called Violeta LaFleur. Those sold like candy in kiosks. My guess, or anybody's, is that he published Carax's novels because it tickled his fancy, or just to contradict Darwin.

Gosh, Bess, you'd think you were going on a date with a hot new guy instead of to a book signing at a stuffy downtown hotel. If I didn't know how much you love romance novels, I'd wonder what had gotten into you.

Being addicted to soft-porn romance novels in Ithaca, Georgia, was like filling a prescription for head lice or genital herpes. It just wasn't the kind of thing you went around bragging about, not if you were a good Southern girl, anyway, from a good Southern family.

I like to read novels where the author seems knowledgeable, like someone you know you could walk calmly next to through a complicated situation, and he or she would be alive to its meaning and ironies. And you wouldn't even have to mention them out loud to each other.

God, I just love 'A Journey to the End of the Millennium,' by A. B. Yehoshua. My favorite novel by an American Jew is probably 'Humboldt's Gift.'

The Loser proceeds to narrate the same story he tells in virtually every one of his plays and novels: a story of frustrated ambition and (incestuous) love, suicide, and the generally grotesque absurdity of existence. But

Literary works are not democracies. We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. We may, but the country of Novels, Etc., doesn't. In that faraway place, no character is created equal. One or two of them get all the breaks; the rest exist to get them to the finish line.

How could I be expected to know? I was a child when I left this house four months ago. Why didn't you tell me there was danger? Why didn't you warn me? Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance of discovering in that way, and you did not help me!

Why didn't you tell me there was danger in men-folk? Why didn't you warn me? Ladies know what to fend hands against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance o' learning in that way, and you did not help me!

Por qué no me dijiste que se corría peligro entre los hombres? ¿Por qué no me previniste? Algunas señoras saben defenderse porque leen novelas que les hablan de estas cosas, pero yo nunca tuve ocasión de aprender de ese modo y tú no me lo enseñaste.

Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.