Quotes About Novel

What I've done is I've started writing a novel, so that's my big adventure.

When I was really young, my ambition wasn't to do science. I didn't really know that I could. It was to write a great novel.

'Lagoon' is an ambitious novel.

Generally, I'm not anti the novel.

If John somehow turns into a different man and we do not witness that transformation, the editor considering your novel will somehow turn into an editor considering a different novel.

When well executed, description is unobtrusive and lends substance to a novel. It is the body fat of prose: too much is unhealthy, but without any, you no longer have the thing—you have its skeleton.

A good approach is to allow one dream per novel. Then, in the final revision, go back and get rid of that, too.

Unfortunately, this is so obviously a convention of bad fiction that it might as well read, 'Looking in the mirror, Joe saw a tall, brown-haired man, trapped in a poorly written novel.

Like a small business, a novel cannot afford to carry dead weight, even if it is a close family member. It is likewise unnecessary to introduce a mother and/or father into a narrative—usually through the medium of a long telephone call on the subject of 'How's things?'—to demonstrate that the protagonist does, like all mammals, have parents.

Historical research has the same status as all background information. The author must know it, even if it does not appear directly in the novel. Otherwise, the characters won't seem like people, and the setting won't seem like a place.

Any of the following crimes against fiction can prevent the publication of your novel. Committing several will prevent the publication of novels by anyone whose name is similar to yours, just in case.

To treat things with respect and intrigue, we don't need to understand their motivations and inner lives—whatever knowing the inner life of a tangelo or a floor tile would mean.4 We just need to pay enough attention to discover what they do and how they work—to discover what they obviously and truly are—and then to make use of them in gratifyingly novel ways. And

Indeed, and crucially so, the serial form took the control of the novel away from the reader and left him in an imagined space that could not be thought of in terms of the physical space still to be read. At the end of each instalment the reader would contemplate a vacuum, an 'end' which looked forward to a continuing verbal space which he could not measure. He might speculate but he could not know.

When we discuss a novel it is only partially to hear another person's 'view', it is much more to find out what we ourselves think in order to possess the text more completely. Such a possession is then a composite one, it is the book itself and the articulated reaction to it. So vivid can be the latter that it is not uncommon to find that the pleasure survives the cause; some novels seem more enjoyable to talk about than to read.

What The Mysteries of Udolpho suggests is how a novel, by presenting phenomena before it present resolutions, can create an on-going, perhaps spurious, but nevertheless compelling dynamic between details which can undermine the ability of form to impose its particular tyranny on the reader's experience: there is a life in the novel which comes from within.

Every novel has at least three stories. Of course, there's story in its pages. But then there's the story of its writing. And there's also the story of its reaching, or not reaching, the bigger world of its readers.

Rebus lifted a Guardian

No vale la pena agitar el frasco de las garrapatas. Esto es un juego, como todo lo que vale en la literatura. La palabra es una y la misma; la novela, digan lo que digan, viene de siempre y continúa. Rompiéndola, prevalece. En efecto, si no hay nada nuevo bajo el sol, es porque lo viejo vale para la novedad.

It was raining a motherfucker. It was raining a Dostoyevsky novel. It was raining a Kurosawa film. It was raining a Trout Mask Repilca.

Combining the gait of a fine horse, the comfort of your favorite Indian blanket, and the ease of a well-worn saddle, Mark Langley's Path of the Dead is one heck of a debut novel coming out of the gate. —Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire Mysteries, the basis for the Netflix drama Longmire.

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

They visited a bookshop and each bought a paper-back thriller to read in bed.

In 1916, Universal Studios released the first filmed adaptation of Jules Verne's novel '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.' Georges Melies made a film by that name in 1907, but, unlike his earlier adaptations of Verne, Melies' version bears no resemblance to the book.

I wasn't creative enough to imagine my first novel becoming a film directed by Alexander Payne. Nor did I consider the possibility of seeing Hollywood stars moving through my personal version of Hanalei town: going to Tahiti Nui, rehearsing a scene in front of my cousin's cottages, driving the snaky roads.