Quotes About Novels

My view is that comic books are meant to be long-form stories. They're meant to be novels.

I tend to stay away from the comics.

That's why I love crime novels so much: When I write a crime novel, the conflict is built in.

There is nothing that's been in any of my novels that, in my view, hasn't been either illuminating surroundings or defining a character or moving a plot.

I have favorite authors from a lifetime of reading, so there are some I'll automatically read every time they have a new novel. Included in them: Robert Goddard, Jeffery Deaver, Sophie Kinsella, Katherine Neville, Greg Isle, Laurie King, Lee Child, Lisa Tucker, Susan Howatch, Paul Auster. Barry Eisler, David Hewson, Tracy Chevalier.

I've had a dozen novels published and have made far more than a dozen mistakes. Which is why Randy Susan Meyers and I wrote a guidebook to help authors avoid making our mistakes.

I like to believe my suspense novels marry the strong characters from my romance writing past, with the twisty, clever plots of my mystery writing present.

In suspense novels even subplots about relationships have to have conflict.

The mystery form was very helpful for me as a beginning writer because mystery novels and suspense novels have a beginning, a middle and an end.

One of my favorite authors to read is Eric Ambler, who helped pioneer the form of realistic suspense novels.

Novels will remain my meat and potatoes, what sustain me imaginatively.

People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.

I really love to make sweeping historical gestures that are like little illustrations of novels.

I've changed in my sympathies since I've become a mother myself. In high school I went through a period where I was close with my mom and had to break with her in order to find myself and come back. Since that was my experience, that's often what happens in my books.

One of my heroes, G.K. Chesterton, said, "The old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal." Discovering that the modern world can still contain the wonder and strangeness of a fairy tale is part of what my novels are about.

Le leggi del desiderio sono universali ma non comportano l'uniformità delle opere romanzesche, nemmeno sui punti di applicazione. La legge fonda la diversità e la rende intelligibile. L'unità romanzesca appare a condizione che smettiamo di considerare il personaggio - il sacrosanto individuo - come una entità perfettamente autonoma e scopriamo le leggi dei rapporti fra tutti i personaggi.

Love, as all the good novels know, is a question of title, deed, and possession.

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than than a sense of life itself. All my life had shaped me for the realism, the maturalism of the modern novel, and I could not read enough of them.

quiet. But when no one was looking I would slip into Ella's room and steal a book and take it back of the barn and try to read it. Usually I could not decipher enough words to make the story have meaning. I burned to learn to read novels and I tortured my mother into telling me the meaning of every strange word I saw, not because the word itself had any value, but because it was the gateway to a forbidden and enchanting land. One

The plots and stories in the novels did not interest me so much as the point of view revealed. I gave myself over to each novel without reserve, without trying to criticize it; it was enough for me to see and feel something different. And for me, everything was something different. Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

Sylvie's knowledge, like Izzie's, was random yet far-ranging, "the sign that one has acquired one's learning from novels, rather than an education," according to Sylvie.

She was the one always pretending to have finished anything anyone happened to be reading; and she was the only one with this notion that the way to demonstrate your superior reading was to go around telling people the plots of novels they were in the middle of.

It's night in the Free People's World Tree Library. All the librarians are asleep, ... between the pages of their enchanted novels.

You can't write novels about people who are timid, risk-averse and passive. Or you can, but they're called literary novels.