Quotes About Novel

Tota novel·la és convencional. La gràcia consisteix a fer que no ho sembli.

Dystopia is just someone's failed attempt at utopia. In a dystopian novel or movie, society is the bad guy, or at least one of the antagonists. In real life Nazi society was as much to blame as Hitler. There is usually a "shift" that  initiates this change, this shift can be anything from hunger ("Soylent Green"), to a tornado (the "Wizard of Oz") to a deadly virus (my story, "Apocalypse Conspiracy).

The beach was such a novel experience that most were completely unfamiliar with the health hazards—and risks to life and limb—it posed." —Gideon Bosker and Lena Lencek, The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town.

Along the way, he published a novel about the music business with the title Sweetie Baby Cookie Honey.

This progressive effacement of human relationships is not without certain problems for the novel. How, in point of fact, would one handle the narration of those unbridled passions, stretching over many years, and at times making their effect felt on several generations? We're a long way from Wuthering Heights, to say the least. The novel form is not conceived for depicting indifference or nothingness; a flatter, more terse, and dreary discourse would need to be invented.

Eso de amor -decíase Ramiro ahora- sabe a libro; sólo en el teatro y en las novelas se oye el yo te amo; en la vida de la carne y sangre y hueso el entrañable ¡te quiero! y el más entrañable aún callárselo.

Suffering is not bad: It helps you very much. Do you know a novel about happiness? Or a film about happy people? We are a perverse race, only suffering interests us.

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel.

With no music to listen to, I just biked around in circles talking to myself like a kid on the cover of a Robert Cormier young adult novel, circling around puzzled Jewish families walking back to their cars. This is how I learned to ride a bike.

I find interesting characters or lessons that resonate with people and sometimes I write about them in the sports pages, sometimes I write them in a column, sometimes in a novel, sometimes a play or sometimes in nonfiction. But at the core I always say to myself, 'Is there a story here? Is this something people want to read?'

All effective writing, whatever the style, has three characteristics: purpose, form, and appropriateness. What makes writing effective when the purpose is to entertain might be inappropriate when the intention is to persuade. What makes for good writing in a comic novel would probably be ridiculous in a business memo. This

[The art of the novel] happens because the storyteller's own experience of men and things, whether for good or ill—not only what he has passed through himself, but even events which he has only witnessed or been told of—has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart.

The Bible is the story so far in the true novel that God is still writing.

I think of the Jewish novelist Chaim Potok, whose artistic hero Asher Lev searches for imagery to express the pain of modern Judaism. The only thing he can find that will do—to the predictable horror of his community—is the crucifixion scene, which he paints in fresh and shocking ways. I think of the way in which the first Harry Potter novel ends with the disclosure that Harry had been rescued, as a young child, by the loving self-sacrifice of his mother. We could go on.

But the transport of a novel, the false awareness of being within another time, place and life that was the pleasure of reading, for her, was not possible. She was in another time, place, consciousness; it pressed in upon her and filled her as someone's breath fills a balloon's shape. She was already not what she was. No fiction could compete with what she was finding she did not know, could not have imagined or discovered through imagination.

One of the many impressive things about The Way of Glory is how lightly it wears its scrupulous research. This fine novel invites you to lose yourself to the compelling character and tumultuous life of a young woman trying to find God and love at the heart of a crusade rooted in greed and hate. This is a remarkable debut by a writer to watch.

Literature allows us to cross the borders -- as imaginary as they are indispensable -- which circumscribe and define our selves. Reading, we allow other people to enter us -- and if we make room for them so willingly, it's because we know them already. The novel celebrates our miraculous capacity to recognize others in ourselves, and ourselves in others. Of all the literary genres, the novel is the genre humain.

Le roman est le genre humain par excellence .

Literature allows us to cross the borders -- as imaginary as they are indispensable -- which circumscribe and define our selves. Reading, we allow other people to enter us -- and if we make room for them so willingly, it's because we know them already. The novel celebrates our miraculous capacity to recognize others in ourselves, and ourselves in others.

When I read a novel I am not here. I am transported to far-off places, my eyes unseeing of the words on the page, busy with a scene being played out in my mind's eye, with my ears engaged, hearing the voices carry from the pen to the present. What a lovely place to be—not here.

Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina is a coming-of-age novel about Ruth Ann (Bone) Boatwright and a difficult childhood made even harder by her violent and predatory stepfather.