Quotes About Novels

Art has no meaning if it's not an escape. If it's not born of a prisoner's despair. I can't respect any art that comforts and relieves, those novels and music and paintings designed to make your prison more bearable.

The amount of insight to be gained from reading novels is tremendous.

Though Amelie was a voracious reader of romantic novels, she was painfully shy around men in whom she found an interest.

In its descriptions of a family trying to find suitable mates for three sisters, The Makioka Sisters by Junichir ? Tanizaki brings to mind the novels of Jane Austen and Anton Chekhov.

Chaim Potok wrote two novels that I think are indispensable to understanding the Hasidic and Orthodox American Jewish communities following the Holocaust: The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev.

A. B. Guthrie's 1947 novel The Big Sky (even better than its sequel, The Way West, which won the Pulitzer Prize), The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1940), and Jack Schaefer's Shane (1949) were all made into well-regarded movies, but these three classics of Western fiction continue to make for wonderful reading.

Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.

Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.

In the United States, Islamists threatened bookstores and firebombers hit the offices of the Riverdale Press, a weekly paper in the Bronx, after it published an unexceptional editorial saying that the public had the right to read whatever novels it pleased.

Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history.

I wondered what he would have thought if he'd known that I'd gleaned most of my information from reading historical romance novels.

People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.

It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.

Novels arise out of the shortcoings of history.

Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.

She wasn't writing romance or feel-good novels," mystery author Walter Mosley said. "She was writing very difficult, brilliant work.

My grandmother left a whole bookcase of old science fiction novels. The company-city subgenre always seemed to star a hero who outsmarted, overthrew, or escaped "the company." I've never seen one where the hero fought like hell to get taken in and underpaid by the company. In real life, that's the way it will be. That's the way it is.

Oh, well, naturally I've read a few novels. And then, too," she went on, "there are broad plays and musical shows and moving pictures for giving information to inexperienced but curious spinsters like me.

Adults are thoroughly schooled in this way of seeing, which makes it quite easy for them to empathize with others. Each teardrop is a source of pride. Young people, it's true, will also sometimes indulge in this kind of trivial emotionality. But if adults acquire this ability only after making compromises with their lives, to put it generously, where do young people pick it up? From junk novels like this one?

Tillie Olsen. James Joyce. Robert Stone. I must have read Updike's Rabbit, Run five times and Bellow's Herzog

Cecy, I do think it is unfair. People in novels are fainting all the time, and I never can, no matter how badly I need to.

I do think it is unfair. People in novels are fainting all the time, and I never can, no matter how badly I need to.

He has a frightening aversion to text messaging in general. "It's a phone. It's for making calls, not for writing novels".