Quotes About Novels

I must say, it was a lot easier writing novels than I thought it would be. I think it's because I'm a novelist at heart, and it took me a while to figure that out.

I started writing novels by not thinking about actually writing a whole novel - that felt altogether too daunting. I thought out a rough idea, then wrote chapter by chapter, and then by the time I'd hit 40,000 words, it was a challenge just to see if I could get to the end.

I write novels, mostly historical ones, and I try hard to keep them accurate as to historical facts, milieu and flavor.

I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all.

There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress.

I've done a lot of books with Asian antecedents to them - some of my fantasy novels have been that way, and certainly in the 'Battletech' universe, there's a lot of Asian culture in that.

Novels are the means by which we can escape the moment we are imprisoned in, but at the same time, the roots of a novel are in the world in which it is written. We write, and we read, to understand the world we live in.

The fact is that most crime novels contain a good many punchlines. They are just rather darker than the ones you might hear in a comedy club.

Being the family's literate one, my wife doesn't watch television much, preferring third-world novels, though she'll sit in now and then when I have on Jon Stewart.

Just like all my novels, 'Illusion' is a good way to observe where Frank Peretti was in his life when he wrote it.

I read many wonderful novels, though I now find the idea of literary fiction obsolete.

I don't believe novels should carry an obvious message. I don't want to write characters you can immediately say are good or bad; as in life, most people are a mixture.

With 'J', at a deep base level, there is still some comedy, but that masculinist voice that had driven so many of my novels I suddenly did not want to occupy. I wasn't reneging on it; I just didn't want to do it.

Characters in novels sometimes radiate more energy, therefore, when we don't enter their mind. It is one of the techniques a novelist acquires instinctively—don't go into your protagonist's thoughts until you have something to say about his or her inner life that is more interesting than the reader's suppositions.

I will now make an apology, although I will do my best not to repeat it. (Good readers do not read fiction, after all, to put up with the author's regrets.) I will say that having read the best and worst of novels for many years, which is, to remind you, part of a good devil's education, I know by now that not even a loyal reader can stay true to an author who is ready to leave his narrative for an apparently unrelated expedition.

Eventually, we come to love certain novels because we have expended so much imaginative labor on them. This is why we hang on to those novels, whose pages are creased and dog-eared.

I always think that it's wrong to put images of my protagonists on the cover of my novels because readers can identify with characters only if they are given the chance to imagine them independently.

Hayati ciddiye almayi, gencligimde romanlari ciddiye alarak ogrendim. Edebi romanlar bize hayati ciddiye almayi, her seyin elimizde oldugunu, kisisel kararlarimizin hayatimizi sekillendirdigini gostererek ogretir.

The reason we turn to literary novels, great novels, where we search for guidance and wisdom that might confer meaning on life, is that we fail to feel at home in the world.

Museums should no longer concern themselves with history on a grand scale, the sagas of kings and heroes, or the forging of national identities; they should focus instead on the lives and belongings of ordinary people, just as modern novels do.

We write novels not because we feel we understand life and people, but because we feel we understand other novels and the art of the novel, and wish to write in a similar way.

We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.

I'm not a character in one of your novels." "More's the pity. You would speak more interesting dialogue if you were.

The ugly fact is books are made out of books, the novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.