Quotes About Novel

The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law. ( Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel , 1949)

Hammett was the ace performer... He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of [The Glass Key] is the record of a man's devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.

Keynes preferred memoirs as 'more agreeable and amusing, so much more touching, bringing so much more of the pattern of life, than … the daydreams of a nervous wreck, which is the average modern novel'.

I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the supreme expressions of story is the novel. Novels are not content. Nor are they are a mirror to life or an explanation of life or a guide to life. Novels are life, or they are nothing.

Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it's seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I don't share that pessimism because I think it is one of the great inventions of the human spirit.

Then somebody said—Carter Knott—that Eddie was writing a novel (the last outpost for a certain species of doomed optimist).

He picked one at random, a luridly violent far-future crime novel about a detective who could seemingly exchange bodies at will, but the subject matter was alien to him and his attention drifted. It all seemed very far-fetched.

I can't imagine a romance novel published today where the hero rapes the heroine and she falls in love with him.

He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.

Naturalness onstage is just as much an artifice as naturalism in the novel

And remember, whenever you see a character in a novel, let alone a biography or history book, reduced and neatened into three adjectives, always distrust that description.

the novel has almost as many forms as there are forms of love and sex.

Real literature was about psychological, emotional and social truth as demonstrated by the actions and reflections of its protagonists; the novel was about character developed over time.

In a novel, all his life's anxieties, his mixture of strength and weakness, his potential for hysteria - all would have been swirled away in a vortex of love leading to the blissful calm of marriage. But one of life's many disappointments was that it was never a novel, not by Maupassant or anyone else. Well, perhaps a short satirical tale by Gogol.

mie mi se pare ca romancierii care isi socotesc scrisul o unealt? pus? în slujba politicii dezonoreaz? literatura È™i înal?? în sl?vi, prosteÈ™te, politica...scriitorul care -È™i închipuie c? romanul este calea cea mai direct? prin care intr? în politic? este de regul? un romancier prost, un jurnalist prost È™i un politician lamentabil

Not over-interested in domestic matters, it was true; but then neither was he. In a novel, all his life's anxieties, his mixture of strength and weakness, his potential for hysteria--all would have been swirled away in a vortex of love leading to the blissful calm of marriage. But one of life's many disappointments was that it was never a novel, not by Maupassant or anyone else. Well, perhaps a short satirical tale by Gogol (p.38)

This was hopeless. In a novel, Adrian wouldn't just have accepted things as they were put to him. What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book?

When asked What The Novel Does, I tend to answer, 'It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.

I haven't published a novel in six years; instead, I fill my departmental hours casting words of praise into the bureaucratic abyss. On multiple occasions, serving on awards committees, I was actually required to write LORs to myself.

To me, a recently read novel was like a miniature planet: only a few hours earlier I had been breathing its air and living contentedly among its people - and now I was expected to pronounce a judgement about its worth?

Yaban KuÄŸular? - Çin'de Üç K?zkardeÅŸ

Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.

A few years ago when she'd read Paul several passages from Fifty Shades of Grey, they'd both giggled like teenagers. The biggest fantasy in that book, Paul had said, is that he changes in the end.

One novel that I think is an overriding influence in my life is 'All the King's Men,' the most beautiful book written in the U.S.