Quotes About Novel

There were cats; cats I was wildly attached to — my husband and I spoke in cat voices. Once the marriage was over, I never thought of the cats again (until I wrote about them in a novel and disguised them as hamsters).

He didn't expect to find her. I didn't expect him to find her. She makes a difference, in him, in the book.

This is the paradoxical responsibility of the reader: to replenish the strangeness of the novel by making connections with the familiar.

There's even an 1892 novel called Golf in the Year 2000 that (somewhat incredibly) predicts the advent of televised sports.

There is no alternative universe where Ralph Sampson is a beloved symbol of excellence. There's no Philip K. Dick novel where he averages a career double-double and gets four rings. He could never be that guy. He was needed elsewhere, for other reasons. He was needed to remind people that their own self-imposed mediocrity is better than choking on transcendence.

By the middle of the novel I decided that what two people don't say to each other forges a stronger bond than honest.

To a degree, literary taste is a subjective matter. One can admire a work of fiction without particularly enjoying it; one can dislike a novel even while appreciating its value.

Women who'd never had any particular interest in D/s read a popular BDSM pulp novel for their book club. Now they think they're into the scene. But all they really want is maybe a blindfold or a playful, pretend spanking.

and a hooked nose. His skin was the color of weak tea.

Black hair fell past his neck but just short of the shoulders. His head was protected by a stained Mexican sombrero.

And nobody has ever gotten emotional over a James Patterson novel.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?

The novel is the medium which makes it possible for people of ordinary intelligence to communicate their ideas to the world.

I have written this book quicker than any other," she notes in her diary, "[and] it is all a joke; & yet gay & quick reading I think; a writers holiday. I feel more and more sure that I will never write a novel again

I would never re-write you. You are by far my most complete and greatest novel.

The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman, he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the English novel and the French novel.

How resilient I am; and how fatalistic now; and how little I mind and how much; and how good my novel is; and how tired I am this morning; and how I like praise; and how full of ideas I am; and Tom and Stephen came to tea, and Ray and William dine; and I forgot to describe my interesting talk with Nessa about my criticizing her children; and I left out—I forget what.

Una mujer debe tener dinero y una habitación propia para poder escribir novelas; y esto, como veis, deja sin resolver el gran problema de la verdadera naturaleza de la mujer y la verdadera naturaleza de la novela.

If one shuts one's eyes and thinks of the novel as a whole, it would seem to be a creation owning a certain looking-glass likeness to life, though of course with simplifications and distortions innumerable.

No se sabe lo que ocurrirá cuando el ser mujer ya no sea una ocupación protegida, pensé abriendo la puerta. Pero ¿qué tiene todo esto que ver con el tema de mi conferencia, las mujeres y la novela?, me pregunté entrando en casa.

las mujeres y la novela son dos problemas que no he resuelto.

la novela es como una telaraña ligada muy sutilmente, pero al fin y al cabo ligada a la vida por los cuatro costados.

She was an extravagantly slender girl. Her ribs showed. The conspicuous knobs of her hipbones framed a hollowed abdomen, so flat as to belie the notion of belly. Her exquisite bone structure immediately slipped into a novel - became in fact the secret structure of that novel, besides supporting a number of poems.

My knowledge of Mr. Forster's works is limited to one novel which I dislike; and anyway it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or whereever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves.