Quotes About Novel

While the subject matter of my novels could not be further removed from the stuff I used to trot out at the Comedy Store, the delivery of the material employs many of the same techniques.

My last novel, 'The Keep,' was very explicitly technological, about the quality of living in a state constantly surrounded by disembodied presences, and I was thinking very much about the online experience.

'Looking For Alaska' by John Green is a very great book. I feel like every teenage girl says John Green's 'Fault In Our Stars,' but 'Looking For Alaska' is better.

Babylon 5 is probably the biggest, most ambitious television science fiction series ever made. It's one big novel told over five years with 110 different stories told within it.

There is no need to tell you that the 'Prince of Salina' is the Prince Lampedusa, my great-grandfather Giulio Fabrizio.

To me, art and storytelling serve primal, spiritual functions in my daily life. Whether I'm telling a bedtime story to my kids or trying to mount a movie or write a short story or a novel, I take it very seriously.

Burroughs called his greatest novel 'Naked Lunch,' by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. Telling the truth. It's very difficult to do that in fiction because the whole process of writing fiction is a process of sidestepping the truth. I think he got very close to it, in his way, and I hope I've done the same in mine.

What could be more boring than a novel that tells you how to think about everything that happens in it?

John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying.

Every strong novel redefines our conception of fiction's dimensions and reorders our awareness of its possibilities.

edging his way closer to the writing of a novel in which he would remind his readers that telegrams and railways weren't the only ways in which they were all connected.

You can't plot murder like a novel. There are always loose ends in real life.

Exceptional estimable, good, nice, dear people they all were but they all, unluckily, kept asking me about the new novel, and that was excrutiating.

Are you New World or Old?' 'Sounds like a novel by Henry James.' 'Never read him.' 'Don't. But that was his question and he plumped for the Old.

When you write your first novel you don't really know what you're doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first 'Once upon a time'. I'm not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them.

I had been wandering, looking for something novel, something that suited my fancy. I came upon that place at that time in the same way we find anything. I let my desires lead me and I followed my instincts.

One novel has been all my reading, Our Mutual Friend, one of the cleverest that Dickens has written.

the English novel is childish because what is desired is not maturity and wisdom but a return to the safety and innocence of childhood—

New Historical

Dreiser's literary faults, it gives us to understand, are essentially social and political virtues.

for me the novel is a social vehicle, it reflects society.

The genius of Alba de Céspedes in this book is in shattering the illusion that writing is a place of refuge, and replacing it with the certainty that it is a place that always both pollutes and sabotages us." As Valeria discovers: toward the end of the novel, she tells her daughter, "Save yourself, you who can do it.

I would rather,' he said, 'give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.' (And here let me pause to make Mr. Douglas a sporting offer. I will provide a healthy boy, a phial of prussic acid, and a copy of The Well of Loneliness, and if he keeps his word and gives the boy the prussic acid I undertake to pay all expenses of his defense at the ensuing murder trial and to erect a monument to his memory after he has been hanged.)

Le galbe évasé de ses hanches: had one ever read a French novel in which that phrase didn't occur?