Quotes About Novel

Fanny Price leaves the poverty of her Portsmouth home to be brought up among the family of her

I am not usually such a sluggard, he said, as we walked quickly along the street, but yesterday evening I got a novel. I ought not to read novels. When I do, I am apt to make a single mouthful of it; and that is what I did last night. I started the book at nine and finished it at two this morning; and the result is that I am as sleepy as an owl even now.

I'm serious,' he said, though aware of how odd it was that he should choose to inform his wife of a personal crisis by comparing it to the experiences of a mystery novel heroine whom he had created. Was the dividing line between life and fiction as hazy for other people as it sometimes was for a writer? And if so... was there a book in that idea?

Eventually, the storm blew itself out, because it is in the character of these strange times that any outrage, regardless of its unprecedented dimensions and horror, is inevitably followed by another outrage more novel and more shocking still.

Sometimes, however, common sense required paranoia. It seemed that the political elites were striving, with admiration for George Orwell and rare unanimity, to ensure that the totalitarian state in the novel 1984 would be realized no later than fifty years after the author predicted. In

His second novel spent one week on the bestseller list, sold forty thousand copies

then went to the refrigerator and got a small bottle full of blood.

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 supporting player in one of billions of subplots. You know what happens to supporting players. Too often they are killed off in chapter three or in chapter ten, or in chapter thirty-five. A supporting player always has to be looking over his shoulder.

I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, jar of octopus, cuckoo's cry, 5-7-5, but now I want a russian novel, a 50-page description of you sleeping, another 75 of what you think staring at your window.

When Addie had signed up for this course she'd been determined to do whatever it took to get through with a passing grade. She hadn't expected to enjoy it or even learn from it. Yet the novel they were studying was filled with life lessons that seemed to apply directly to her.

I am a man and alive. For this reason I am a novelist. And, being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, te scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog....Only in the novel are all things given full play.

I had come to the conclusion - based on experience - that the only real way of learning to write a novel was probably to write a novel.

I couldn't think how long it had been since I had read a novel. And in the daytime! Feeling pleasantly wicked, I sat by the open window in my surgery and resolutely entered a world far from my own.

When you're writing a novel - at least the way I write is I work from what I would call 'emotional atmosphere,' ambiance to ambiance.

It's such a joy to talk to a roomful of people who have read my novel and are eager to talk about it.

A novel, especially a first novel, is... really an emotional autobiography. All these emotions I'm embarrassed at having had, I've written about.

You do not have to dramatize everything. In fact, you usually can't, not without ending up with a half-million-word novel.

I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.

'War and Peace' may be the most epic thing ever created by a human being.

Ildefonso Falcones

These two sections [of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise], plus some of the author's notes, are all we have -- this in itself is a tragedy and waste of war. Had this novel been finished we would be hailing it as one of the supreme works of literature. As it stands, it is like a great cathedral gutted by a bomb. The ruined shell still soars to heaven, a reminder of the human spirit triumphing despite human destructiveness.

I keep telling you, you don't pay enough attention to the minor characters. A novel should be like a street full of strangers, where no more than two or three people are known to us in depth.

Life is God's novel. Let him write it.

Life is God's novel. Let him write it.