Quotes About Novels

Though games were barely acknowledged as a legitimate form of expression, let alone a legitimate art form, Tom was convinced that they were almost sublime forms of communication, just as films or novels. After

While the mini-series based upon novels generate a good deal of interest, it's these real-life dramas that tend to draw a larger audience. Why? I chalk it up to five simple words we use in every print or televised promotion. Five words: "Based Upon a True Story." Not made up in the mind of some typist, but true. Some say that truth is stranger than fiction

Dying gloriously sounds good in bad historical novels. Speaking for myself, I think doing it in real life when you don't have to is fucking stupid, and it irritates the hell out of me that we don't appear to have any choice.

I have learned a great deal from novels. Some of it is even true.

Well, Mr Thomas, while I'm in favour of education, I couldn't in good conscience recommend a university career in anything but the hard sciences. As a working environment, the rest of academia is a sewer of irrationality, hate mongering, envy, and self-interest. I'm getting out the moment I earn my twenty-five-year pension package, and then I'm going to write novels...

Novels are what I know, and the novel door in my personality is always open.

Chuck functions here as a kind of authenticity fetish, allowing Hans (and the reader) the nostalgic pleasure of returning to a narrative time when symbols and mottoes were full of meaning and novels weren't neurotic, but could aim themselves simply and purely at transcendent feeling.

Each novel you read (never mind the novels you write) will give you some theory of which attitude is best to strike at which moment, and—if you experience enough of them—will provide you, at the very least, with a wide repertoire of possible attitudes. But out in the field, experience has no chapter headings or paragraph breaks or ellipses in which to catch you breath…it just keeps coming at you. 7

Sometimes it is right to submit to love, and wrong to resist affection. Sometimes it is wrong to resist disease and right to submit to the inevitable. And vice versa. Each novel you read (never mind the novels you write) will give you some theory of which attitude is best to strike at which moment, and —if you experience enough of them— will provide you, at the very least, with a wide repertoire of possible attitudes.

I think great novels free us into an understanding that the tension between true/not true might in fact be liveable, might not have to be judged and immediately neutralized in the court of public opinion or in the oppressive conservatism of our social lives.

This use of the vernacular became the fundamental framework for all but one of her novels and is particularly effective in her classic work Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, which is more closely related to Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and Jean Toomer's Cane than to Langston Hughes's and Richard Wright's proletarian literature, so popular in the Depression.

These two "speech communities," as it were, are Hurston's great sources of inspiration not only in her novels but also in her autobiography.

I've adapted my own work a couple of times, and I've also given my novels to other people to adapt, and I do find that quite difficult.

This is the title of Balzac's monumental series of interlinked novels and stories, which depict French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy, from 1815 to 1848. The series comprises 91 finished works and 46 unfinished works, with some only existing as titles.

Balzac's first works were written without any overall plan, but by 1830 the author began to group his first novels (e.g. Sarrasine, Gobseck) into a series entitled Scènes de la vie privée (Scenes from Private Life).

It was at this time that he devised the idea of having characters reappear from novel to novel, and the first novel to use this technique was Le Père Goriot in 1834. The idea may seem simple now to modern readers, but having characters reappearing in novels over a time period creates an impression as though they have lives of their own.

In 1839, for the first time Balzac mentioned in a letter to his publisher the expression La Comédie humaine and the title is recorded in the contract he signed in 1841.

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

Tides" The evening advances, then withdraws again Leaving our cups and books like islands on the floor. We are drifting, you and I, As far from another as the young heroes Of these two novels we have just laid down. For that is happiness: to wander alone Surrounded by the same moon, whose tides remind us of ourselves, Our distances, and what we leave behind. The lamp left on, the curtains letting in the light. These things were promises. No doubt we will come back to them.

Because it is written by a nineteenth-century American, and because of its closeness to the twentieth century, The Portrait of a Lady foregoes Victorian affirmations. The price it pays, however (together with several twentieth-century novels) is that it eventually leaves the reader, along with its heroine, 'en Vair' amid its self-reflections.

I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building.

I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.

It had always been my habit-- privately I felt it to be an ecstasy-- to enter, as into a mysterious vault, any public library. I was drawn to books that had been read before, novels that girls like myself had cradled and cherished. In my mind-- I suppose in my isolation-- I seized on all those previous readers, and everyone who would read after me, as phantom companions and secret friends.

I was well under the spell of the old Gold Medal Crime novels when I wrote 'Savage Season,' and I wanted to write a modern version of that. I had tried the same thing with 'Cold in July,' and I wanted to give it another go.