Quotes About Novel

Ernest Hemingway, much like the Artisan hero in his novel, A Farewell to Arms, wanted to avoid figurative language (the language of inference and interpretation, of metaphor and symbol), trusting only descriptive words to present his perceptions as sensually and realistically as possible.

Se podría decir que escribí toda una novela sólo para cambiar el final de una canción.

Because what I am also suddenly know thinking about is that it could be an absolutely autobiographical novel that would not start until I was alone, obviously.

The novel has been the subject of several scholarly essays and has become a staple of college classes in contemporary fiction (and even the occasional philosophy class). Fifty-four rejections.

The writers she prefers are long dead and are on the wordy side. If the novel on the sofa is 700 pages long, and the author photo is an engraving, it's either hers or Hugh's.

593 Still (very still), at the heart of "literary culture" is the big, blockbuster novel by middle-of-the-road writers, the run-of-the-mill four-hundred-page page-turner. Amazingly, people continue to want to read that.

Pace excites, and dialogue is pace. Falling into good dialogue on page one can put us in your pocket.

If God is an author and the universe is the biggest novel ever written, I may feel as if I'm the lead character in the story, but like every man and woman on Earth, I am a suporting player in one of billions of subplots. You know what happens to supporting players. Too often they are killed off in chapter 3, or in chapter 10, or in chapter 35. A supporting player always has to be looking over his shoulder.

Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.

So I flew to Bombay. This is not so illogical if you realize three things: that a stint in India will beat the restlessness out of any living creature; that a little money can go a long way there; and that a novel set in Portugal in 1939 may have very little to do with Portugal in 1939. I

From Matheran I mailed the notes of my failed novel. I mailed them to fictitious address.

It's such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.

When you enter a beloved novel many times, you can come to feel that you possess it, that nobody else has ever lived there. You try not to notice the party of impatient tourists trooping through the kitchen (Pnin a minor scenic attraction en route to the canyon Lolita), or that shuffling academic army, moving in perfect phalanx, as they stalk a squirrel around the backyard (or a series of squirrels, depending on their methodology).

To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.

The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses.

Il romanzo e' una strada a due sensi dove la fatica che si richiede a entrambe le parti alla fine risulta uguale. Leggere, se lo si fa come si deve, e' difficile tanto quanto scrivere.

Neither my readers nor I are in the relatively sunlit uplands depicted in White Teeth anymore. But the lesson I take from this is not that the lives in that novel were illusory, but rather that progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and *reimagined* if it is to survive.

You need a certain head on your shoulders to edit a novel, and it's not the head of a writer in the thick of it, nor the head of a professional editor who's read it in twelve different versions. It's the head of a smart stranger who picks it off a bookshelf and begins to read. You need to get the head of that smart stranger somehow. You need to forget you ever wrote that book.

Characters you'll find difficult to forget (besides the two lead characters), include the astute Jim Traft, Sr., Molly's semi-outlaw brother Arch (Slinger) Dunn; faithful Andy Stoneham; kind-hearted Mrs. See; the rollicking cowboy, Curley Prentiss; the despicable villain, Hank Jocelyn; the supposedly deaf cook, Jeff Davis; Molly's embittered mother; Ring Locke, the range boss; and a host of other characters who play cameo parts.

Their Eyes is a bold feminist novel, the first to be explicitly so in the Afro-American tradition.

More people have read Hurston's works since 1975 than did between that date and the publication of her first novel

And she declared her first novel a manifesto against the "arrogance" of whites assuming that "black lives are only defensive reactions to white actions.

Unless I was to play an accepted character from a novel, I won't put on a toupee.

It's really hard to be a story writer - no matter how much acclaim you get - and not write a novel.