Quotes About Novels

Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels-the biggest sin is to be blind to others problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.

I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.

Novels teach the youthful mind to sigh after happiness that never existed.

The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men

In my career as a writer, I preferred to avoid current events: I wrote young adult novels and book reviews and lifestyle journalism about health and parenting and other such evergreens.

We are not telling Tudor history; we are creating ' Wolf Hall ' from novels, which are already a rereading of Tudor history.

Historical novels, in particular, allow us to relive the past without the neatness of history, and with all the complexity of the present.

It seems to me that the basic plot of all historical novels is a romance swept aside by history.

Dystopian novels help people process their fears about what the future might look like; further, they usually show that there is always hope, even in the bleakest future.

People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.

But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.

READING, n. The general body of what one reads. In our country it consists, as a rule, of Indiana novels, short stories in "dialect" and humor in slang.

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.

For all my longer works (i.e. the novels) I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on.

I've written 17 novels, and I've found out that fiction can't keep up with real life.

Anaemia is an illness primarily affecting characters in novels.

The popular books are the novels, dealing with life under all possible conditions, and they are widely read not only because they are entertaining, but also because they in a measure satisfy an unformulated belief that to see farther, to know all sorts of men, in an indefinite way, is a preparation for better social adjustment--for the remedying of social ills.

I think, for one's single book, one would be wise to choose Mansfield Park or Emma rather even than Pride and Prejudice. "Wisdom is better than wit," as Jane Austen told Fanny, "and in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side." People who begin by loving Pride and Prejudice, may end by rereading the later novels more often.

It's a luxury to be able to tell a long form story. I love novels, and I love to have a long relationship with characters.

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.

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

Romance novels are birthday cake and life is often peanut butter and jelly. I think everyone should have lots of delicious romance novels lying around for those times when the peanut butter of life gets stuck to the roof of your mouth.

The freedom to be cruel is one of journalism's uncontested privileges, and the rendering of subjects as if they were characters in bad novels is one of its widely accepted conventions.

Unlikely truths are useful and life is full of them, far more than the very worst of novels, no novel would ever dare give houseroom to the infinite number of chances and coincidences that can occur in a single lifetime, let alone all those that have already occurred and continue to occur. It's quite shameful the way reality imposes no limits on itself.