Quotes About Novel

the novel is a vicious attack on the guiding ideology of the party – Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought.

It is sometimes the minor, not the major, characters in a novel who hold the author's affection longest. It may be that one loses affection for the major characters because they suck off so much energy as one pushes them through their lives.

by far my most popular novel, and one that allows me to join the small company of "respectable" writers whose fiction deals with the American West: Cormac McCarthy, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Tom Lee and a handful of others

my first day of ninth grade had no assembly no First Ten Lies They Tell You in High School no showdown with Mr. Neck Speak is a novel rooted in facts, to be sure, but a story bred with its own DNA an invasive species growing out of a stump of a tree hit by lightning growing from the girl who survived

Many writers, good writers who ought to know better, focus so tightly on the structure demanded by a crime story that they lose track of the fact that they are writing a novel. Accusations of both sensationalism and trivialisation are, alas, often justified.

The work of any decent detective is at least nine-tenths monotony, despite the invariably brisk pace of any detective novel, or even a police file, for that matter . . . . No, if I wanted a life filled with non-stop excitement and challenge, I should not choose the life of a detective. High-wire acrobatics, perhaps, or teaching twelve-year-olds, or motherhood, but not detecting.

there is no better way to learn how to write than by writing a novel.

And I won't deny your neighbors will take you more seriously if you tell them you've written a novel. (Of course if that's the main concern, just go and tell them. You don't have to write anything. Just lie a little. Don't worry—they won't beg to read the manuscript.)

The book was How to Write a Novel, by Manuel Komroff; a professor at Columbia University, he was a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction. His book, published in 1950, is available from used booksellers for between $10 and $25.

I might add that one short novel of Schnitzler's, Casanova's Homecoming, was on the shelves of my parents' library, and I had the great good fortune to read it at an impressionable age.

thought of writing a lesbian novel. I read a great deal of lesbian fiction and nonfiction, some by Marijane Meaker under one name or another. I'm sure I read them in part out of prurient interest, but that's why I initially read John O'Hara, James T. Farrell, and no end of fine writers.

not Small Town turns out to be what New Yorkers want to read, it is very definitely the book this New Yorker needed to write. It is, I came to realize, a post-apocalyptic novel set in New York in the summer of 2002. We've had our apocalypse, and we're New Yorkers, and we're moving on.

A novel should be an act of divination by entrails, not a careful record of a game of pat-ball on some vicarage lawn!

famous novel about us all, things began in exactly this way. I was strangely echoing his protagonist, summoned to the bedside of a dying friend (this was the difference) who had important things to reveal to him. Sylvie was there, too, in the centre of the picture as she always has been. Her madness was touchingly described. Of course in a way the characters were travesties of us; but the incidents were true enough and so was Verfeuille, the old chateau

Steve Yarbrough's Safe from the Neighbors will take your breath away. Ambitious, funny, sad, smart, and beautifully crafted, it's everything a novel should be.

Wrote a science fiction novel about a man who wins an argument with his wife, but it was rejected for being too farfetched.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Take a scientific fact or theory, add a futuristic or other-worldly setting, stir in an imaginative plot and fascinating characters, and a science fiction novel emerges from the cosmic mix.

The value of a novel is not limited to its depiction of emotions and people akin to those in our own life; it stretches to an ability to describe these far better than we would have been able, to put a finger on perceptions that we recognize as our own, but could not have formulated on our own.

Reading Proust nearly silenced Virginia Woolf. She loved his novel, but loved it rather too much. There wasn't enough wrong with it—a crushing recognition when one considers Walter Benjamin's assessment of why people become writers: because they are unable to find a book already written that they are completely happy with. And

So if speaking in clichés is problematic, it is because the world itself contains a far broader range of rainfalls, moons, sunshines, and emotions than stock expressions either capture or teach us to expect. Proust's novel is filled with people who behave in un-stock ways.

The book will have sensitized us, stimulated our dormant antennae by evidence of its own developed sensitivity. Which is why Proust proposed, in words he would modestly never have applied to his own novel: If we read the new masterpiece of a man of genius, we are delighted to find in it those reflections of ours that we despised, joys and sorrows which we had repressed, a whole world of feeling we had scorned, and whose value the book in which we discover them suddenly teaches us.

Rather than militantly pursue both truth and affection, they discern the incompatibilities, and so divide their projects, making a wise separation between the chrysanthemums and the novel, between Laure Haymann and the Odette de Crecy, between the letter which gets sent and the one that stays hidden but nevertheless needs to be written.

But why would readers seek to be the readers of their own selves? Why does Proust privilege the connection between ourselves and works of art, as much in his novel as in his museum habits? One answer is because it is the only way in which art can properly affect rather than simply distract us from life