Quotes About Novels

Novels can do anything in the dark horrors of consciousness. Films do close-ups, car drive-ups, places, chases, and explosions.

Precision is easier to master than artful vagueness, especially now when, thanks to Google, novels are fact-heavy. We no longer refer to "flowers" but to particular varieties of roses. The whole valuable distinction between foreground (precise) and background (blurred) has been lost, and now everything is crowding toward the viewer, clamoring for attention.

Mr Earbrass escaped from Messrs Scuffle and Dustcough, who were most anxious to go into all the ramifications of a scheme for having his novels translated into Urdu, and went to call on a distant cousin.

That was the wonderful thing about historical novels, one met so many famous people. It was like reading a very old copy of Hello! magazine.

First novels are a lot like first children. You lavish all your love and attention on them, but you also make all your rookie mistakes on them. First novels teach you how to write. They are your initial opportunity to put into practice everything you've heard about long-haul narrative. They're your primary attempt at trying to walk in the footsteps of the giant (and not so giant) writers you revere and adore.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

And the world around me was nothing if not an infinity of distractions: cute girls, novels and comic books, my budding record collection, neighborhood boys whistling from the playground under my window, beckoning me to a soccer game.

I think our refusal to read {some} novels exactly corresponds with..our refusal to confront inconvenient facts of a changing world and our moral culpability in what our government has done in our name . . . While more novels are read than ever before--those are escapist novels--so as to forget what we need to remember.

Most novels, I find, are three times longer than they need to be. Very little happens, and I don't want to waste my time with them.

If something is crucial to the plot, then I'd better be sure I've got my facts straight. Readers of crime novels are smart and savvy, and they'll waste no time letting me know if there's a hole in my plot.

I remember how I would wait for a play idea. I wasted a tremendous amount of time. I didn't realize that ideas could be made into movies or novels.

I think watching TV has influenced my books, but I don't think writing TV has.

I've read all of Sarah Waters's novels which have been translated into Korean.

Character is character and voice is voice, which translates nicely from writing novels to writing TV. But the process is different. You have a writer's room, people pitch you jokes and you collaborate.

Political novels are full of pitfalls, particularly for a novelist with strong political leanings.

My first book deal was for two Mark Genevich novels. I hadn't planned on writing a second Genevich novel, but I was contracted to do so, and so there I was being introduced as a crime writer.

Even my fiction novels are all about outdoor adventure, and have plenty of information to encourage the reader to get interested in adventure and conservation.

In everything I've written, the crime has always just been an occasion to write about other things. I don't have a picture of myself as writing crime novels. I like fairly strong narratives, but it's a way of getting a plot moving.

In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.

The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems.

Everything is personal - the poems and the crime novels. I have never been involved in any murders, but there are strong autobiographical elements in each.

I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.

For myself, I feel more natural writing stories or novels than writing plays. I feel more like myself, like I can express myself better, and like I have a greater clarity about what I want to do.