Quotes About Novel

I don't plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system - it's a quest.

I could understand the impulse to make the novel more accessible. I want as many people as possible to read The Mill on the Floss too. But like paperback editions of classic novels issued with updated covers resembling those of Twilight , it seemed a pandering and misbegotten effort, as if no young reader today might possibly pick up a novel written one hundred and fifty years ago unless the book were in sexy neo-Gothic drag.

The underground appeared in this novel as the failure and reversal of Christianity.

Frey, James, How to Write a Damn Good Novel. Helpful emphasis on the three C's of Premise: character, conflict, and conclusion; useful throughout. One of the damn best books on the subject.

STUDY IN SCARLET (ILLUSTRATED COLLECTOR'S

You may have heard of the one called Chute, on Mars, who wrote a novel called Waste, a metaphysical detective novel about the nature of life and waste that featured Smeg, the detective.

you would do well to turn from Chapter XXXVI to Chapter CXXXIII without further delay, thus saving nearly a hundred chapters without anybody's knowing the difference if you keep quiet. After all, Ahab isn't the only one entitled to be a skipper.

The praise Greene most valued, however, came not in a review: Faulkner himself wrote in a letter to his British publisher, the contents of which were soon passed on, 'I have also read Mr Greene's THE END OF THE AFFAIR; not one of yours, but for me one of the best, most true and moving novels of my time, in anybody's language.'9

Greene felt that a disaster had set in for the English novel after the death of Henry James; whereas traditional novelists had always conceived of their characters as being somehow under the eye of God, where their actions had an eternal consequence, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster had produced characters who seemed nothing more than the sum of their drifting perceptions. This is a problem philosophers have worried about since the days of John Locke,

I think What Dreams May Come is the most important (read effective) book I've written. It has caused a number of readers to lose their fear of death the finest tribute any writer could receive. ... Somewhere In Time is my favorite novel.

He tries to read a novel, something about privileged people having trouble getting along with each other in exotic locations. He throws it against the wall. Something has broken in him. His appetite for human self-regard is dead.

life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

product here is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience. Ease is the disease and Nick is its vector. His employers are a virus that will one day live symbiotically inside everyone. Once you've bought a novel in your pajamas, there's no turning back.

the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

Rutherford's and Soddy's discussions of radioactive change therefore inspired the science fiction novel that eventually started Leo Szilard thinking about chain reactions and atomic bombs.

do a typing and shorthand

The wounds of war, Juliet thought, rather pleased with the way the words sounded in her head. It could be the title of a novel. Perhaps she should write one. But wasn't artistic endeavor the final refuge of the uncommitted?

L'histoire est un roman qui a été, le roman est une histoire qui aurait pu être History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been E & J de Goncourt

Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

My best advice for aspiring writers is to read a lot and write. Don't worry if you don't get your first, fifth or tenth novel published, if you keep going you'll make it. Also read how to write books as they may make the process a bit quicker.

(The short story) is a form that has all the power of the novel - some would say more - but none of the self-importance.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (whose mother died ten days after she was born) wrote a novel that anticipates Semmelweis's discovery and serves as a parable for the destructive power of decaying matter.

Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.