Quotes About Novel

The job of the screenplay is to identify and extract the essence of the story from the novel and reconfigure it for the screen, maintaining its essence in a different vehicle.

I don't like to use writing assignments, exercises. I think too often people get comfortable writing in that vein, but you can't go on to write a novel comprised of short writing exercises.

Sometimes I think I'd be perfectly happy to go on rewriting 'Tipping the Velvet' forever because it was so much fun.

I belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer.

Expertise and judgment in the art of lending for novel ventures must be reacquired.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

I advise all my novel students to write in the company of 'Veronica Mars.'

'The Sound of Things Falling' may be a page turner, but it's also a deep meditation on fate and death. Even in translation, the superb quality of Vasquez's prose is evident, captured in Anne McLean's idiomatic English version. All the novel's characters are well imagined, original and rounded.

One of the first serious attempts I made to write a novel was when I was in Grade 6 and I had read 'Matilda.' I wrote my own version and my teacher had it bound and permitted me to read it to the class - cementing my love of reading, writing and Roald Dahl!

Nothing has changed and yet everything exists in a different way. I can't describe it; it's like the Nausea and yet it's just the opposite: at last an adventure is happening to me and when I question myself I see that it happens that I am myself and that I am here: it is I who am piercing the darkness, I am as happy as the hero of a novel.

Every time a rat enters an environment, the grid cells establish a reference frame. If it is a novel environment, the grid cells create a new reference frame. If the rat recognizes the environment, the grid cells reestablish the previously used reference frame.

Donald E. Westlake It's an accepted fact that Donald E. Westlake has excelled at every single sub-genre the mystery field has to offer—humorous books (Scared Monster); terrifying books (The Ax, about a man who wants vengeance on the company that downsized him out of a job, and probably Westlake's most accomplished novel);

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.

She used a line from Trollope's Barchester Towers as an epigraph:There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage.

Diana, meanwhile, reads every novel she can find that's set on the Cape, and describes for her father the pristine, golden beaches, sand dunes with cranberry bogs and poets' shacks hidden in their declivities. She conjures the taste of briny oysters and butter-drenched lobsters, fried clams eaten with salt water-pruned fingers, ice-cream cones devoured after a day in the sun.

It would not be a good place for the heroine of a modern novel to stay at.  The heroine of a modern novel is always "divinely tall," and she is ever "drawing herself up to her full height."  At the "Barley Mow" she would bump her head against the ceiling each time she did this.

Good fiction must be entertaining- but what makes fiction special- and True- is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.

This reminded him of Alvis Bender's contention that stories were like nations - Italy, a great epic poem, Britain, a thick novel, America, a brash motion picture in technicolor...

I think that the power of art is the power to wake us up, strike us to our depths, change us. What are we searching for when we read a novel, see a film, listen to a piece of music?We are searching, through a work of art, for something that alters us, that we aren't aware of before. We want to transform ourselves, just as Ovid's masterwork transformed me.

Even a novel drawn from reality, faithful to it, is not the truth, just as the image in the mirror is not a person in flesh and blood. It remains, that is, an abstraction, no matter how realistic, how close to the facts.

It is simply much easier to infuse life, feeling, and higher truth into a novel than a non-fiction work, to find the license to write truth without being wedded to fact.

There's a perception that good writing is writing which runs smoothly. But smooth-running prose can work against what you're trying to express in a novel.

Baseball is more like a novel than a war. It is like an ongoing, hundred-year work of art, peopled with thousands of characters, full of improbable events, anecdotes, folklore and numbers.