Quotes About Novel

If it takes you seven years to write each novel, you need a patron. And I would rather have my corporate self as my patron than any arts council or bestower of grants.

Have the courage to analyze great emotions to create characters who shall be lofty and true. The whole art of the analytical novel lies there.

... the novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.

If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.

What would happen is that every idiot in this town who owns a gun, which is basically every idiot in this town, would grab his gun, jump into his car, or somebody else's car, and lay rubber for I-95. Inside of ten minutes the city is gridlocked, and what happens next makes IwoJima look like a maypole dance. This whole town turns into the end of a Stephen King novel.

I'd like to emphasize that when a reader finishes a great novel, he will immediately begin looking for another. If someone loves your book, it increases the chance that he or she will look at mine. So there is no competition between writers. Another writer's success helps build a larger readership for all of us.

Infinite Jest specifically: an endlessly, compulsively entertaining book that stingily withholds from readers the core pleasures of mainstream novelistic entertainment, among them a graspable central narrative line, identifiable movement through time

The fact that twenty years have gone by and we still do not agree what this novel means, or what exactly it was trying to say, despite saying (seemingly) everything about everything, is yet another perfect analogy for the Internet. Both are too big. Both contain too much. Both welcome you in. Both push you away.

How is it, then, that Infinite Jest still feels so transcendently, electrically alive? Theory one: as a novel about an "entertainment" weaponized to enslave and destroy all who look upon it, Infinite Jest is the first great Internet novel. Yes

La Broma Infinita / D. F. Wallace

O blessed idleness! Divine lazy nymph! Reach me a novel as I lie in my dressing-gown at three o'clock in the afternoon; compound a sherry-cobbler for me, and bring me a cigar! Dear slatternly, smiling Enchantress! They may assail thee with bad names—swear thy character away, and call thee the Mother of Evil; but, for all that, thou art the best company in the world!

I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel. (- Saroyan, when once asked the name of his next book.)

Conversation should be pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, free without indecency, learned without conceitedness, novel without falsehood.

Thanks to Sven, I was being prepared to understand a congregation as a gathering of people that requires a context as large as the Bible itself if we are to deal with the ambiguities of life in the actual circumstances in which people live them….For me, my congregation would become a work-in-progress—a novel in which everyone and everything is connected in a salvation story in which Jesus has the last word. No reductions to stereotype.

a novel which I called Pornografia. At that time it wasn't such a bad title, today, in view of the excess of pornography, it sounds banal, and in a few languages it was changed to Seduction.

Kugelmass, unaware of this catastrophe, had his own problems. He had not been thrust into Portnoy's Complaint , or into any other novel, for that matter. He had been projected into an old textbook, Remedial Spanish , and was running for his life over a barren, rocky terrain as the word tener (to have) - a large and hairy irregular verb - raced after him on its spindly legs.

It's the professional deformation of many writers, and has ruined not a few. (I remember Kingsley Amis, himself no slouch, saying that he could tell on what page of the novel Paul Scott had reached for the bottle and thrown caution to the winds.)

You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.

She's got Marian Keyes's new one ready to begin.

A novel without romance is like a car without an engine, love is the fuel.

Raised in the hot sun, my idea of romance was to feel cold. North was a thrilling word to me. Balzac said that a novel should send the reader into another country. My dreams were like that. They still are.

It may not be the "Great American Novel" they talk about, because its scope is not broad enough to take in all of America, but it pictures the people and the customs and the drama of upstate New York in the days preceding and following the Civil War with a simplicity that, to my mind, is true art.

She feels "Brutal Dynasty" actually may become the Great American Novel she and her fellow critics have been looking for so long.

Holly is the bestselling author and co-creator of The Spiderwick Chronicles series and won a Newbery Honor for her novel Doll Bones. Cassie is the author of bestselling YA series, including The Mortal Instruments and The Infernal Devices. They both live in Western Massachusetts, about ten minutes away from each other.