Quotes About Novel

The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.

Used to all kinds of society, she watched people as one reads the pages of a novel, with a certain disinterested amusement.

And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.

Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality.

Like a clock of life on which the seconds race, the page number hangs over the characters in a novel. Where is the reader who has not once lifted to it a fleeting, fearful glance?

The "meaning of life" is really the center about which the novel moves.

Jobs later said that he never read the novel. "I heard it was about me," he told me, "and if it was about me, I would have gotten really pissed off, and I didn't want to get pissed at my sister, so I didn't read

The reader is always looking for two things in the novel: themselves and transcendence.

The most important lesson I've learned as a writer is that practice of the art is something I must exercise every day. The reason for this constant training is that any idea worth discovering is bigger than my head. The twists and turns, story and plot, characters and character development of a novel cannot be held in a single thought or even in a train of thought. This novel takes up a lot of space and needs room to breathe and evolve.

In Waverley the reader is introduced to one of the great ideas of the modern novel: that reading has the power to mediate and deflect experience. Six

If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a 'movie version' of a novel?

Who would ever want to read a novel about a punk and a drunk! Everybody knew a couple or a dozen; they were not to be taken seriously; nuisances and trouble-makers, nothing more; like queers and fairies, people were bell-sick of them; whatever ailed them, that was their funeral; who cared? - life presented a thousand things more important to be written about than misfits and failures.

took down The Great Gatsby and ran his finger over the fine green binding. "There's no such thing," he said aloud, "as a flawless novel. But if there is, this is it.

But it was not until Samuel Richardson's Pamela in 1740 and, a decade later, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, that the novel reached the form as we know it today, and opened an outpouring of work in 19C that would transform literature throughout the West.

Yes, Jonnie," Emma said. "Extraordinary as it seems, it was mere coincidence that brought you to our door. It's the sort of thing that you expect to find only in a novel — and only when you know the author has been too idle to work it out any better.

Reader, I married him.

In the tumult of the past year it seemed as if writing had left me forever, but as I hiked, I could feel that novel coming back to me, inserting its voice among the song fragments and advertising jingles in my mind.

No SF novel ever won the Booker, growls a prowling clansman on his way into the SF Café. The librarian swings a shotgun from inside her longcoat, blasts the bullshit axiom from the air. Screw the Booker, she thinks. She'd rather have a hookah.

'Caught' is a novel of forgiveness, and the past and the present - who should be and who shouldn't be forgiven. None of my books are ever just about thrills, or it won't work.

Out of little observations huge ideas may grow; and if a mind, made receptive by training in the use of the senses, can store away a mass of observations, the time will come when the whole collection can be unrolled, connected together as a great novel is planned, in a compelling pattern that tells us something new. Many

Is Moby Dick the whale or the man?

Harry Turtledove

Write a page a day and you'll have a complete novel in year.

Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.