Quotes About Novel

The value of literature lies in these intermittent 'true impressions.' A novel moves back and forth between the world of objects, of actions, of appearances, and that other world, from which these 'true impressions' come and which moves us to believe that the good we hang on to so tenaciously—in the face of evil, so obstinately—is no illusion.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

La novela es una epopeya subjetiva en la que el autor pide permiso para tratar el universo a su manera; el único problema consiste en saber si tiene o no una manera; el resto viene por añadidura.

primitive planes that probably wouldn't even get a safety clearance in her day. If this were a movie or a cheap, particularly stupid novel, it was the point at which she would call up Jan Zumbach and order him to get his crazy-arse Poles back to base. But

To be shockingly original with your first novel, you don't have to discover a new technique: Simply write about people as they are and not as the predominantly liberal and humanist literary establishment believes that they ought to be.

There isn't, unfortunately, any way of discovering whether you can write a publishable novel except by writing it.

Should he make a note? He felt for the smooth shape of his pen in his pocket. 'Theme for a novel: The contrary pull ... " No. If this notion were real, he needn't make a note. A notion on which a note had to be made would be stillborn anyway, his notebook was a parish register of such, born and dead on the same page. Let it live if it can. ("Novelty")

which has inspired at least one novel, Apostolos Doxiadis's Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture29).

My only claim to distinction among writers is that I do not believe my life contains any materials for a novel. I have prowled around Limehouse and the gamiest sections of Paris, but I have never yet seen (a) a really choice murder in a locked room, (b) a mysterious mastermind or (c) a really good?looking adventuress with slant eyes.

Based on the Robert A. Heinlein novel Space Cadet, the series followed the adventures of Solar Guards trainees 400 years hence (as in the TV show, the exact correlating date was used, so the radio series was set in 2352).

A novel should be as like life as a painting, but not as like life as a piece of waxwork.

The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life.

In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

I think the novel is the American form because people read it in private, and the only valuable things that happen in America happen in private life, because public life is a dead loss.

Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.

I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.

The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.

I've never written an autobiographical novel in my life. I've never touched upon my life. I've never written a single scene that I can say took place.

My first crime novel, "Wild Horses," sold at auction, and that changed my life at an ideal time.

Life is like reading a novel or running a marathon. It's not so much about reaching a goal but rather about the journey itself and the experiences along the way. As Benjamin Franklin famously said, "Time is the stuff life is made of," and how you spend it makes all the difference.

A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty until found effective.

she did not still feel, as I did, the anxiety about a woman who was suffering for love. What did I care about shoes. I still had, in my mind's eye, the most secret stages of that affair of violated trust, passion, poetry that became a book, and it was as if she and I had read a novel together, as if we had seen, there in the back of the shop and not in the parish hall on Sunday, a dramatic film. I

Do you have your book?" "No, it's not out yet." "A copy of the last one you wrote?" "Yes." "Take it and sit here, pretend to be reading." I obeyed in a daze. Tina grabbed a book, too, and assumed the same pose, saying to Imma: Take a picture of me.

I ended up taking a literature class, too, about the nineteenth-century novel and the city in Russia, England, and France. The professor often talked about the inadequacy of published translations, reading us passages from novels in French and Russian, to show how bad the translations were. I didn't understand anything he said in French or Russian, so I preferred the translations.