Quotes About Novel

Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.

There's more to research than just looking up facts. Eventually, you have to make subjective calls. If you're writing a science fiction novel, there's probably some speculative technology in it. You'll have to decide how to project existing technology forward in a plausible way.

I wanted to write a novel where the meaning is in the story and characters and the subliminal, in the shades and nuances. It's exciting to develop that as a writer.

I usually submit a novel at a certain number of words, and when I've finished working with my editor, the novel is longer than when I submitted it. I need my editor to help me open up the story.

'War and Peace' holds a strange place in literary history, participating in the crowning of realism as a substantial and serious literary mode in America, even as the novel also contributed to the argument that historical fiction could be by nature dangerous, illegitimate, and inaccurate.

Film is a medium of clear lines and broad strikes - which can be fantastic - but compared to the subtleties and nuances of a novel, it doesn't even get close.

Reading Dorothy B. Hughes's novel 'In a Lonely Place' for the first time is like finding the long-lost final piece to an enormous puzzle. Within its Spanish bungalows, its eucalyptus-scented shadows, you feel as though you've discovered a delicious and dark secret, a tantalizing page-turner with sneakily subversive undercurrents.

Toda obra, toda novela, narra a través de la trama de los acontecimientos la historia de su propia creación, su propia historia.

A novel is a piece of prose of a certain length with something wrong with it.

never seen before. It made Kit's heart twist with sorrow. For just the tiniest

The idea of the one perfect soul mate—whether it be girl, boy, or flying chipmunk—is right out of an old-fashioned romance novel (okay, maybe not the chipmunk part, unless he's a shape-shifting paranormal chipmunk who turns into a sexy tattooed hunk when the moon is full—yeah, you can tell I'm babbling even in my thoughts).

I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business. The day you die.

I need as much of the business of making a film to be in my own workspace. It really ought to be a bit more like doing a novel, alone, at first. I'm feeling my way.

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. Sometimes you run over a drunk who's lain down and fallen asleep on the warm pavement. I mean, do you keep going, or what?

When a writer tells you his novel has received mixed reviews, it means that after his book was trashed and his heart broken in every newspaper and magazine in America, the weekend critic at the Pekin Daily Times said it was a heart-pounding race to the finish.

To write a book about Mickey Mantle and not to show people who he really was doesn't make any sense whatsoever. So I decided the only way to do this is call it a novel and plow full-speed ahead as to what my interpretation and my estimation of who he was and what was troubling him. This is a very complicated book. It's hardly just about sex.

The difference between a short story and a novel is the difference between an inarticulate pang in your heart compared to the tragedy of your whole life.

A cadaveric spasm had caused Rothwell to grab and hold onto a handful of dust at the moment of death, and Banks thought of the T.S. Eliot quotation, "I will show you fear in a handful of dust," which he had come across as the title of an Evelyn Waugh novel.

Holy shit! That's a vampire. He's writing a vampire novel. And I thought, this is the most tired cliche that anybody could dredge up out of the genre, and he just made it jump.

I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an sf story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is good sf the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all, it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader's mind so that that mind, like the author's, begins to create.

is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were.

tiene por casualidad una droga cuyo efecto, en unos términos semejantes a los del órgano Hammerstein, corresponda a algunos fragmentos del movimiento coral de la Novena de Beethoven?

If I'm reading something I happen to know and gets it wrong, I just don't trust the book any more. What I ask of a novel I'm reading is that it should know a fraction more about the things I know than I do. When I'm writing...I ask myself: would I be convinced by this if I read it? If I knocked against this bit of scenery, would it feel solid?

As Michael Cunningham would later write in his novel The Hours, I thought what I was feeling was the beginning of happiness. In fact, it was happiness.