Quotes About Novel

Why are murder mysteries so popular? There's a 3-part "formula" (if you want to call it that) for a genre novel: (1) Someone the reader likes and relates to (2) overcomes increasingly difficult obstacles (3) to reach an important goal. The more important the goal, the stronger the novel. And the most important goal that any of us have is survival. That's why murder mysteries are more gripping than a story titled "Who Stole My TV Set.

When I finally got tired of arguing with her and decided to write a novel as if I was some kind of formulaic, genre writing drone, just to prove to her how awful it would be, I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files.

The long-term impacts of GMOs are unknown, and once released into the environment, these novel organisms cannot be recalled.

Life is like reading a third-rate novel written overnight upside down by a crazy drunk. You're not supposed to try to get it. Said by E-Wan

I was not going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life reduced to a short story. I was going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do.

This "I" was the voice of no author in my house. This "I" was someone who not only knew why Charlotte went to the airport but also knew someone called "Victor." Who was Victor? Who was this narrator? Why was this narrator telling me this story? Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.

'Caught' is a novel of forgiveness, and the past and the present - who should be and who shouldn't be forgiven. None of my books are ever just about thrills, or it won't work.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

A novel is something that stands at the end of a lengthy process called writing. It is not a preexisting Platonic form embedded within the writer... I do not have a Boston marathon inside me waiting to get out. The marathon is a peak experience I am rightly entitled to only as the culmination of years of regular training and love of running.

A nineteenth-century Russian novel and vodka accompanied each other perfectly. Reading a novel while one sipped vodka legitimized the drink, while the drink made the novel seem much shorter than it truly was.

I think of the novelist Haruki Murakami, who compares writing a novel to digging a hole through deep rock to reach a source of water. To access mystery and intuition requires hard work and is a gamble, for there is no guarantee that we will find that source of water.

I think of the novelist Haruki Murakami, who compares writing a novel to digging a hole through deep rock to reach a source of water.

Put romantic love at the center of a novel today, and who could be persuaded that in its pursuit the characters are going to get to something large? That love is going to throw them up against themselves in such a way that we will all learn something important about how we got to be as we are, or how the time in which we live got to be as it is. No one, it seems to me. Today, I think, love as a metaphor is an act of nostalgia, not of discovery.

Cuando una novela nos da menos de lo que muchos de nosotros sabemos, nos hallamos ante una escritura conservada. Una escritura así está más cerca del sentimentalismo que de la realidad. El lector siente que la obra peca de sentimentalismo porque las metáforas no son precisas. Para llegar a esas terminaciones nerviosas, una metáfora ha de ser exacta, no aproximada. La metáfora exacta es el oro del escritor.

I wrote the first novel in the A Dog's Purpose series to convince my then girlfriend, Cathryn Michon, that despite the pain of losing her dog Ellie, we should adopt a puppy. (It worked: we brought little Tucker into our family, and Cathryn liked the story so much she married me!)

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

I have just read a long novel by Henry James. Much of it made me think of the priest condemned for a long space to confess nuns.

I am writing my second novel for children for Simon and Schuster.

Nevil Shute's On the Beach is no Christmas carol, but it seems to me a remarkably fine novel, one which I read, in the peculiarly repulsive phrase, with my eyes glued to the page.

I feel I owe it to the women that their stories should be told fully by us—the descendants and heirs to their very real struggles and genuine victories. And so I hope very much that you will find this novel is a gateway to take you closer to the lives of your inheritance, your forebears: these real women and their world.

The fiction, as always, is secondary to the history; the real women are always more complex and more conflicted, greater than the heroines of the novel, just as real women now, as then, are often greater than they are reported, sometimes greater than the world wants them to be.

A good notion for a novel is far too precious to waste; it must be caught the moment it flashes into mental view, or it will escape to the brain of some other writer who really doesn't deserve it.

May those who feel Xanth is sexist have pleasure in this novel, where Mundania is shown to be worse.