Quotes About Novel

Somehow, too, I remembered Chichikov's round of weird visits in Gogol's "Dead Souls.

Let us not look for the soul of Russia in the Russian novel: let us look for the individual genius. Look at the masterpiece, and not at the frame—and not at the faces of other people looking at the frame.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash. Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), Russian-born U.S. novelist, poet. Interview in Writers at Work(Fourth Series, ed. by George Plimpton, 1976).

Then Van and Ada met in the passage, and would have kissed at some earlier stage of the Novel's Evolution in the History of Literature.

She turned to him, her cheeks burning red. "What is this? Vampire porn?" "Yep." "Oh, and this is a good one. Muffy the Vampire Layer.

There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is 'idiot'.

Almost every writer I know dreads the moment when someone tries to give you an idea. It's not that the ideas are bad, just that the relationship between writer and novel is so personal that it's a little like someone trying to play matchmaker for a happily married person.

Mitchell Dukore's A Novel Called Heritage.

but that is how the clues God leaves sometimes work. Sometimes nothing comes of them. Sometimes, as in a great novel, you cannot see until you get to the end that God was leaving clues for you all along. Sometimes you wonder, how did I miss it? Surely any idiot should have been able to see from the second chapter that it was Miss Scarlet in the conservatory with the rope.

More wisdom can be transmitted through a novel than a textbook.

The sensation of flight was novel and delightful, and the fact of accomplishing what several eminent scientists have 'proved' impossible gave an added satisfaction.

A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.

Oh indeed! Our and the Wilfers' Mutual Friend, my dear.

The picturesque doctor's daughter, Miss Manette.

To have all those noble Romans alive before me, and walking in and out for my entertainment, instead of being the stern taskmasters they had been at school, was a most novel and delightful effect.

You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.

While writing a novel about those who have lost their memories, he himself begins to lose his memory… He rushes to finish it before he forgets what he was writing.

There's a whole world all around more interesting, wonderful, terrifying, mysterious, amazing than any novel ever written. Pay attention. Take a chance. Dare life.

añoraba a su anterior editor, que decía preferir la novela imperfecta de un escritor con talento, que la novela perfecta de un escritor mediocre. En la obra de un escritor con talento puedes hallar una frase, una sola, que te cambiela vida. En un escritor mediocre lo más que podrás encontrar es corrección gramatical.

Conocer esa arista romántica de mi hermano me emocionó como si de una novela de supermercado se tratara.

En una novela es muy cómodo el recurso de hacer morir a los personajes cuando tienen herido el corazón y produce dramático efecto; pero en la vida real eso no sucede, aunque perezca a su alrededor cuanto le hacía querer la vida.

why had she found the story so absorbing? Of course it was quite possible she hadn't. Maybe she merely preferred a novel--any novel--to reading a newspaper or chatting with the girls she worked with all day. And maybe she always read like that--with an air of having surrendered totally to a spell.

He was surprised to find that beyond his puzzlement he had few misgivings, and none at all on his own behalf. There were moments in life when one opened wide one's soul just as one might open wide one's purse if an evening's entertainment were proving unexpectedly costly but also unexpectedly novel.

There were moments in life when one opened wide one's soul just as one might open wide one's purse if an evening's entertainment were proving unexpectedly costly but also unexpectedly novel.