Quotes About Novels

I am very fond of Edith Wharton. She's quite high brow but also a great storyteller. My favorite is 'The House of Mirth.' I also like 'The Reef.'

When I first started, stand-up comedians writing novels was thought of as a great encroachment on the art form and people got very angsty. But comedians are storytellers so it's really a hop, skip and a jump.

Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.

There are two different forms of storytelling: Novels tend to come from the inside of a character, and movies tend to look at them from the outside in relation to others in their world.

For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.

As new technology emerges as the greatest challenge to novels since the advent of film, it may be that the fragmentation of storytelling into installments key to Dickens's era will be recreated in some way.

Some of the writers I've praised are Sara Paretsky, Val McDermid, Elisabeth George and Minette Walters. Strangely enough, almost all are women.

Garry Disher (Australia) The Dragon Man Kittyhawk Down Snapshot Chain of Evidence Blood Moon Wyatt Whispering Death Port Vila Blues

Magdalen Nabb (Italy) Death of an Englishman Death of a Dutchman Death in Springtime Death in Autumn The Marshal and the Madwoman The Marshal and the Murderer The Marshal's Own Case The Marshal Makes His Report The Marshal at the Villa Torrini Property of Blood Some Bitter Taste The Innocent Vita Nuova

To find his successor, Yeltsin's entourage organized a public opinion poll about favorite heroes in popular entertainment. The winner was Max Stierlitz, the hero of a series of Soviet novels that were adapted into a number of films, most famously the television serial Seventeen Moments of Spring in 1973.

As modern readers of masterpieces like The Plum in the Golden Vase and The Story of the Stone know, some degree of "unfinishedness" was to be expected, and perhaps desired, even in novels of undeniable craft and artistry by tremendously sophisticated authors. Vernacular novels were intentionally circulated not as finished products, but with room for readers, as well as editors and commentators, to contribute their own thoughts.

I've seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn't occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me, so I don't feel like going back and dredging them up.

I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.

I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they're not blueprints for action, ever.

Oh, I am very old fashioned about my literature taste. I like Henry James. I like George Elliot. I like Dostoyevsky. I like the old people. I really do. I like people who write big, fat, juicy novels you can get completely lost in!

It's true that immigrant novels have to do with people going from one country to another, but there isn't a single novel that doesn't travel from one place to another, emotionally or locally.

On one level, all of the characters in 'Game of Thrones' grow out of George R.R. Martin's imagination. Therefore they are his. As long as they are in the novels they are his. But the moment they step forth onto the TV screen, they become filtered through the showrunners. In a business sense, it's the same way with comics.

Novels are pirated all the time, but it's hard to imagine that you're at work and you open up the attachment that your brother sent you and it's the new Phillip Roth novel.

Novels often have leisurely openings; a TV drama needs an arresting opening.

What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb. American novels, answered Lord Henry.

I hope it did not end happily? I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.

The English novels are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. But one should not be too severe on them. They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.

I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going deep down into life and not caring a damn...

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the paper. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.