Quotes About Novels

Mr Wooster, I am not ashamed to say that the tears came into my eyes as I listened to them. It amazes me that a man as young as you can have been able to plumb human nature so surely to its depths; to play with so unerring a hand on the quivering heart-strings of your reader; to write novels so true, so human, so moving, so vital! Oh, it's just a knack, I said.

Do you write novels? I said. Novels, Lord no, she said. I can't even stay married.

Bennett advises his daughter not to develop a passion for poetry because it is 'dangerous to a woman': like novels, poetry heightens a woman's 'natural sensibility to an extravagant degree' and 'inspires a 'romantic turn of the mind,' that is 'utterly inconsistent with the solid duties and priorities of life.

I take it as an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.

You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.

The writing of novels is one of the few ways I have found to approach the altar of God and Creation itself. You try to worship God by performing the singularly courageous and impossible favor of knowing yourself.

But sometimes stories hide themselves from writers like trolls under bridges. Then the writers of the world must keep their bodies attuned for the sudden appearance of the story that is powerful enough to change their novels and their lives. They must train themselves to recognize the divine moment when a great story reveals itself.

A woman in Charlotte approached me and said that she's tired of the dysfunction in my novels. I told her I was sorry, but that is how the world has presented itself to me throughout my life.

Description, which had seemed like background in novels, static and inert as a butterfly pinned to the pages of my notebook, proved to be a dynamic engine that stoked voice and, even more, propelled the occasional narrative arc.

I suppose that there are many novels that are set during the summer because it's a lonely time of year. Friends come and go, comfort comes and goes, which makes it a perfect time of year to indulge in melancholia.

When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt.

The further I go, the more I am confirmed in the idea that systems of metaphysics are for philosophers what novels are for women."59 "It is only charlatans who are certain. We know nothing of first principles. It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God formed the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will. Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.

Those novels with old-fashioned heroes and heroines in them -- are ruinous!

And that is why people read novels, to identify projections of their own unconscious. The hero has to be fearfully real, to convince them of their own reality, which they rather doubt. A novel without a hero would be distracting in the extreme. They have to know what you think, or good heavens, how can they know that you're going through some wild conflict, which is after all the duty of a hero.

I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.

If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?

The truth is, everything we know about America, everything Americans come to know about being American, isn't from the news. I live there. We don't go home at the end of the day and think, "Well, I really know who I am now because the Wall Street Journal says that the Stock Exchange closed at this many points." What we know about how to be who we are comes from stories. It comes from the novels, the movies, the fashion magazines. It comes from popular culture.

Se?am se da sam u jednom od stotine romana koje sam to leto pro?itao našao jednog preterano strasnog junaka s gustim obrvama i toliko sam zaželeo da li?im na njega po spoljašnjosti (moralno sam se ose?ao sasvim isti on), da sam posmatraju?i svoje obrve pred ogledalom došao na misao da ih malo podšišam, da bi mi porasle guš?e.

I'd never been around a homicide detective. But I grew up reading crime novels and had an idea what to expect. It turned out those books hadn't made me as smart as I thought.

Novels by serious writers of genius often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are written by second-class writers whose psychological brew contains a touch of naïvety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and a mysterious sympathy with the day-dreams of ordinary people.

Se fosse stata un'amante della lettura, Paola avrebbe senza dubbio trovato conforto nei molti romanzi dedicati all'argomento.

One already feels like an anachronism, writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of, but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country.

There are catacombs underneath the library," Penny said. "That's another special collection: it's all the novels people meant to write but didn't.

I urge aspiring writers to write three full-length novels before contemplating publication.