Quotes About Novel

Thank you, Dain, she said. I should like that very much. I've never seen a proper wrestling match before. I daresay it will be a novel experience all round, he said, gravely eyeing her up and down. I can't wait to see Sherburne's face when I arrive with my lady wife in tow. There, you see? she said, unoffended. I told you there were other benefits to having a wife. I can come in very handy when you wish to shock your friends.

If you write a book set in the past about something that happened east of the Mississippi, it's a 'historical novel.' If you write about something that took place west of the Mississippi, it's a 'Western'- and somehow regarded as a lesser work. I write historical novels about the frontier.

There is no lake at Camp Green Lake." (p. 3) It immediately sets a mood of hardship and confusion and starts right in with the irony that permeates the novel.

with blue eyes, and yellow hair curling on her shoulders, pale and slender, and always carrying herself like a young lady mindful of her manners. What the characters of the four sisters were we will leave to be found out.

I had planned to write the great American novel, having the Standard Oil Company as a backbone!

My mother had brought me here when I was fifteen, on a Sunday after I'd read Look Homeward, Angel for the first time. She'd loved the novel, memorizing whole paragraphs, and, of course, naming me after the book's main character. It is a novel you have to read as a young person or you don't get it.

La novela es el único territorio literario en el que reina la misma imprecisión y desmesura que en la existencia humana. Es un género sucio, híbrido, alborotado. Escribir novelas es un oficio que carece de glamour; somos los obreros de la literatura y tenemos que colocar ladrillo tras ladrillo, mancharnos las manos y baldarnos la espalda del esfuerzo para levantar una humilde pared de palabras que a lo peor luego se nos derrumba.

I have come to believe that nothing is ever wasted; out of mistakes or through mistakes, something quite worthwhile can come, in my case the see of another novel.

Habiby has been able to see man in unheroic positions. If the core of the tragic world is a moral order corrupted by evil, then the world depicted in this novel is a closed one where two evils have met and where heroism has been born out of the havoc that resulted from their meeting (In her introduction to Habiby's Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist)

Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code ... a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name. (Discussion at Woodruff Auditorium in Lawrence, KS; October 7, 2005.)

the art of the novel revealed anything, it was that human nature was the great constant, in any culture, in any place, in any time, and that, as Heraclitus had said two thousand years earlier, a man's ethos, his way of being in the world, was his daimon, the guiding principle that shaped his life – or, in the pithier, more familiar formulation of the idea, that character was destiny.

said, think of life as a novel, let's say a novel of four hundred pages, and then imagine how many pages in the book your story has already covered.

Winner of the "Booker of Bookers," Midnight's Children is the novel that can be said to have done for Indian literature what One Hundred Years of Solitude did for the literature of the Americas, exciting a boom whose echoes have yet to fade.

The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.

In writing I found a way to make silence and to be silent. The short story has a lot more silence than the novel and that is its success.

In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.

In China, where equality of conditions is very great and very old, a man passes from one public office to another only after submitting to a competition. This test is encountered at each step in his career, and the idea of it is so well introduced into mores that I remember having read a Chinese novel in which the hero after many vicissitudes finally touches the heart of his mistress by passing an examination well. Great ambitions breathe uneasily in such an atmosphere.

History is a novel whose author is the people

That is the joy of reading fiction: when all is said and done, the novel belongs to the reader and his or her imagination.

she opened a book and was therefore saved, discovering that a novel was as great an escape as any spell.

Well, I think of life as a novel. You can't just hop out of the mess you're in and into another story. You carry it all with you.

I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got past page 30. Then, with the approach of old age, I began to just think: "Well, lucky I can do anything at all.

How Are We to Live is a collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book's authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel … I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected moments of experience. I guess that's the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don't understand. The novel has to have a coherence which I don't see anymore in the lives around me.