Quotes About Novel

later drafts of this novel and encouraging me

Penderwick took off his glasses and cleaned them on his sleeve.

Sometime I'll get around to asking why the English nobility have so blasted many names that a conversation about them is like reading a Russian novel. I have a private suspicion it's done on purpose to confuse foreigners.

ONE OF THE MOST MEMORABLE SECTIONS of Tom Lea's memorable novel, The Brave Bulls, deals with the visit of the impressario, Eladio Gomez, to a mythical bull ranch known as Las Astas, where the Homeric figure of Don Tiburcio Balbuena raises the finest fighting bulls in all Mexico. By a fortunate chance I was once able to pay a similar visit to the reality on which Las Astas was based, and I found reality to be fully as fascinating as fancy. In

I sat in our bedroom reading a horror novel called Whose Heart is in My Popcorn? Characterization was a bit thin, but boy could that woman write dismemberments.

It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.

A novel about Auschwitz is not a novel—or else it is not about Auschwitz.

A whole bunch of people had some opinions about my novel for a short while, and then everyone moved on, because people are busy and they have their own lives to think about.

I wondered if a novel could have the power to make something so strange happen in actuality.

The whole point is that writing has a pattern and life hasn't. Life is so untidy. Art is so short and life so long. It is not possible to have perfection in life but it is possible to have perfection in a novel.

When Michael Frere came to see Elizabeth about her autobiography All the Dogs of My Life she found him 'such a boring little man. But it is because we are all growing old, and the bones of our inadequate minds come through the flesh that hid them.' She hadn't always found him boring, and Love, one of her best novels, is largely based on their romance.

1922 was a bad year for Elizabeth. She was disappointed by some of the reviews of The Enchanted April although it was to prove the most popular — excepting the first — of all her novels. She suffered from depressions that she couldn't throw off. Her doctor diagnosed menopausal symptoms.

This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop.

The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book -- it makes a very poor doorstop.

But the purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysticism: not by explaining it away, but by the introduction of novel verbal characterizations, rationally coordinated.

Working title? Paddy says. <...> Same as the novel, he says. To persuade people it's an adaptation of something a lot of people bought so it must be good.

But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we'll find out - and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out - what happened.

But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we'll probably find out – and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out – what happened. And if we don't, we feel cheated.

She recalled how Pauline had fallen off a bus one night, late, went skidding into Creedmoor. In a novel, it would have portended the fall they were all about to take

Great wealth could make an enormous difference over the next decade if they sensibly support the scientific elite. Just the elite. Because the elite makes most of the progress. You should worry about people who produce really novel inventions, not pedantic hacks.

Eventually, I decided that if I was going to really write a novel, I couldn't do it in New York City while holding down a job. You need a constant money source to live in New York City unless you're independently wealthy, which I'm not.

The Lusitania is important, of course, because this is where Germany began its maritime campaign using this brand-new weapon. We have to appreciate how the submarine, as a weapon against civilian shipping, was a particularly novel thing - so novel that many people at the time dismissed its potential power, its potential relevance.

We write in a culture that favors the heft of the novel. Better still if the novel in question is large enough to be wielded interchangeably as a doorstop and a weapon.

I'd like to get a chance to wear two different hats in the business. I also think it would be really great to do an adaptation of a great novel.