Quotes About Novels

But life is what novels are about. A novel can contain more truth than a thousand newspaper articles or scientific papers. It can make you imagine, just for a little while, that you're someone else—and then you understand more about people who are different from you.

'Twilight' is very different to the 'Vampire Academy,' completely.

I don't like the vampire books. I don't like any of those.

Not to disparage anything, but most vampire stories tend to be romance novels that are 'Twilight'-ish with metrosexual guys.

Time spent researching varies from book to book. Some novels require months, even years of research, others very little. I try to do most of my research before I begin but inevitably questions emerge during the writing.

I, for one, love kids in my romance novels. When done right, kids add so much conflict. Not just of the 'interruption on the way to the bedroom' variety. But conflict about commitment and insecurity.

Each of my books is different from the last, each with its own characters, its own setting, its own themes. As a writer, I need the variety. I sense my readers do, too.

If to live is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.

By reading a lot of novels in a variety of genres, and asking questions, it's possible to learn how things are done - the mechanics of writing, so to speak - and which genres and authors excel in various areas.

Various books revolutionised what I think about novels and showed me that they're not strict, formulaic things. 'Coming Through Slaughter' by Michael Ondaatje was one of them.

Writing fiction is very different to writing non-fiction. I love writing novels, but on history books, like my biographies of Stalin or Catherine the Great or Jerusalem, I spend endless hours doing vast amounts of research. But it ends up being based on the same principle as all writing about people: and that is curiosity!

I always wrote as a vehicle for expression but did not try writing for publication until my mid-thirties, at which time I started writing for magazines. I wrote essays and then short stories, then moved into novels.

I've always been a big fan of utopian, future, new-world stories - 'V For Vendetta,' comic books, graphic novels.

To be honest, I wasn't a sci-fi geek at all. But I do love a good sci-fi film, especially one that can really take you away. And I read some reality-bending novels growing up, like stuff by Vonngeut, so I already had one part my brain open to the unnatural and unusual, and it's generally fun to venture into that world and film in it.

After closely examining my conscience, I venture to state that in my historical novels I intended the content to be just as modern and up-to-date as in the contemporary ones.

Milan Kundera was my literature professor. He's a Francophile, so he made us read French novels like 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses,' which I made a version of many years later as 'Valmont.'

The L.A Trilogy is a series of three novels starring Ray, a robot detective, and his boss, a computer called Googol. Set in an alternative version of 1960s Los Angeles, each book will be more or less standalone but together will form an overarching story arc with 'Brisk Money' as the origin story.

novels Cry Hard, Cry Fast (1955), Murdering the Wind (1956), Slam the Big Door (1960), A Flash of Green (1962), and the astonishingly good The End of the Night (1960) were among his finest work. There were also an imposing number of other paperback originals that were also first-rate crime stories—among them Dead, Low Tide (1953) and One Monday We Killed Them All (1961)

A few were journalists and one a novelist, who wanted to get it right. (Rhyme welcomed his presence; he himself was the subject of a series of novels based on cases he'd run and had written the author on several occasions about misrepresentations of real crime scene work. "Must you sensationalize?")

He began with The Bigger They Come by Erle Stanley Gardner, before moving on to Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep.

Jennifer Weiner

The Brothers Karamazov, and Anna Karenina, and Fathers and Sons.

The beauty of my work is that my sets cost nothing. That's what I love about being a writer of novels.

Comic books, graphic novels, involve constant toggling and it's hard work. You get tired reading comic books, but you never get tired looking at pictures or reading words.