Quotes About Novel

One of his students was an intense young man who was interested in writing fiction. My father lent him some books and talked to him for hours about the art of the novel. The boy went on to write a novel himself, a colorful fantasy about New Orleans, but no one wanted to publish it. He later killed himself. His name was John Kennedy Toole

The novel, I believe, allows, encourages ways to experience the public – in time, with affect, in a communal space, with other people (characters), and in language that insists on individual participation. It also tries to illuminate and recover the relationship between literature and public life.

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it. – Toni Morrison (1931-2019)

Life is always a novel. Our existence may cease to be a song; it may cease even to be a beautiful lament. Our existence may not be an intelligible justice, or even a recognizable wrong. But our existence is still a story. In the fiery alphabet of every sunset is written, "to be continued in our next.

Then I realized that I was falling victim to one of the fallacies of the bad reviewer (whose habits we already discussed at length in yesterday's commentary). I was wishing that Hamid had written a different book than he had. How I might have written this story is completely irrelevant. It would be like dismissing The Godfather because I wished it were a musical. The novel needs to be considered on its own terms.

Writing a novel is like having a baby. I know because I've had both, and the experiences were hellish. By comparison, the torture of the damned—plunged into excrement, boiled in blood, beheaded, set upon by harpies—are like love nips from your yippy little dog.

Writing one page a day equals a 365 page novel in a year.

This well-researched and moving novel provides insight into their lives as it raises important and difficult questions.

I am this long ongoing novel. My life consists of it. It is memory that solders together the processes scattered across time of which we are made. In this sense, we exist in time. It is for this reason that I am the same person today as I was yesterday. To understand ourselves means to reflect on time. But to understand time, we need to reflect on ourselves.

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the world—have been sucked up into the phantasmagorical pages of a novel by Neal Stephenson, the shy West Coast

No one will be alive by the last book. In fact, they all die in the fifth. The sixth book will be just a thousand-page description of snow blowing across the graves ...

Sure, I knew the differences between a space opera and a hard-boiled detective story and a historical novel...but I never cared about such differences. It seemed to me, then as now, that there are good stories and bad stories, and that was the only distinction that truly mattered.

George R.R. Martin

will be along next year in A Dance with Dragon...

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life. (La vie ressemble plus souvent à un roman qu'un roman ne ressemble à la vie.)

There are times in a man's life when writing a novel is like taking an angel in his arms. When I wrote this one, ten years ago, that was how I felt.

The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room. Thus there may be a covert, betraying link between the cultivation of aesthetic response and the potential of personal inhumanity.

We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.

It's a distillation of all I know about writing: short-story writing, screenwriting, journalism—everything. There is no future in the novel, so far as I can see. I'm trying to show where writing is going to be. I may not get there, but I will point the way." In

One of the West's singular migrations--from the Azores to California's Great Central Valley--is given faces and voices in Anthony Barcellos's new novel, Land of Milk and Money . Along with its triumphs, the Francisco family embodies the challenges to an immigrant family in a new land, including the often ignored difficulties posed by success and the loss of the old culture. A must read...

Life is a handful of short stories, pretending to be a novel.

A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.

Many of these books were quite good, most were middle-of-the-road, and a few brought to mind a review by Dorothy Parker, in which she stated, "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.