Quotes About Novels

252,000 a year—not a huge amount for a TV job where you pulled several all-nighters a week, and obscene compared to, say, a fourth-grade teacher's salary. Even if Danny didn't yet earn more than I did from TNO, he'd recently begun appearing in movies, whereas I used my summers off for the considerably less lucrative activities of reading novels and traveling.

I found out a lot about my father as he regaled my wife. He'd learned how to be a potter in a small village in Bolivia. There, working on a kick-wheel in a shack the size of an outhouse, he started thinking about the few novels he'd read.

Time, yes … We waste it or save it or use it—one would almost think we mastered it instead of the other way around. Yet are all novels really a waste of the precious dimension? Perhaps you underestimate the value of invention.

Looking over the brightly-jacketed novels, he thought of the volumes at home in his father's library, the books that had never been taken away when his father left and still remained in the shelves in his mother's house: the salesman-sets his father had always fallen for—the green Kiplings, the blue de Maupassants, the maroon Bjornsons (who the hell was he anyway and why a whole set of him?),

Perhaps we would all like to love more richly than we do. Many novels are about love—most are, perhaps—and it gives us pleasure to identify with the loving characters. They are free, and we are not. But we may not want to admit this; for to do so might make us feel, consciously, that our own loves are inadequate.

Misunderstandings are fine and many of the novels we read start out that way, but misinterpretations between adults are easily discussed and cleared up.

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, and The Optimist's Daughter, by Eudora Welty.

I wrote seven Myron Bolitar novels in a row, and I never want to write a Myron book where he just solves a crime. Every one of them I want to be personal, and I want him to grow and change. The problem with that is, it makes the series limited, you can't write a series where a guy is always going through some kind of crisis.

Though his formal education had ended after seventh grade, he grew up to be a voracious consumer of dime detective novels, tabloid newspapers, and the tracts of various occult and pseudoscientific beliefs—phrenology, astronomy, palmistry, spiritualism.

A bank book makes good reading — better than some novels.

I kept my poker face on and listened to him with an air of interest and respect (I thought of what it says in one of Rand's novels, how the winner can afford to be generous).

But I do know that any place where there are six novels by the author of Pride and Prejudice must be a very special sort of heaven.

I have therefore focused, in the main narrative, on only the best of the stories and on those eleven novels-Eye in the Sky (1957), Time Out of Joint (1959), Confessions of a Crap Artist (w. 1959, p. 1975), The Man in the High Castle (1962), Martian Time-Slip (1964), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Ubik (1969), Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974), A Scanner Darkly (1977), Valis (1981), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)-that

And here we come to the heart of Phil's 2-3-74 experiences. Certitude had he none. Oh yes, one can find numerous passages-in interviews, the novels, and the Exegesis-in which Phil advances a theory with the sound of certitude. But always (and usually quite soon thereafter) he reconsidered and recanted. Indeterminacy is the central characteristic of 2-3-74.

It has been the sad experience of many that much of the best and the most beautiful is lost to those whose mental food consists exclusively of the sensational paper or the cheap novel, or of that frothy mass of waste material which is thrown up like scum upon the molten metal of life--novelettes, serials, and fragments of a type which neither teach the ignorant, nor strengthen the weak, nor develop the immature.

Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter.

People who are well-known, famous people, I think, make very poor characters for fiction. They make good characters for gossip columns. But not for fiction.

Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch crime novels. Bosch was an LAPD detective who, over a thirty-year career

One of the world's most tiresome questions is what object one would bring to a desert island,because people always answer "a deck of cards" or "Anna Karenina" when the obvious answer is "a well equipped boat and a crew to sail me off the island and back home where I can play all the card games and read all the Russian novels I want.

Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. — It is not fair. — He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. — I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it — but fear I must.

I will read you their names directly; here they are in my pocket-book. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time. ' '...but are they all horrid? Are you sure they are all horrid?' 'Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every one of them.

It is possible to read too many novels. Henry Tileny, Northanger Abbey

I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt.

Have you ever read Udolpho, Mr. Thorpe? Udolpho! Oh, Lord! Not I; I never read novels; I have something else to do. Catherine, humbled and ashamed, was going to apologize for her question, but he prevented her by saying, Novels are all so full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since Tom Jones, except The Monk; I read that t'other day; but as for all the others, they are the stupidest things in creation.