Quotes About Novel

I've ended up feeling fonder of 'The Paying Guests' than of any of my other novels.

When I first read Helen Weinzweig's 'Basic Black with Pearls' several years ago, I emerged in the sort of daze that happens when a book seems to ferret out your most secret thoughts and hopes. Since then, I've described the book to others as an 'interior feminist espionage novel.'

I write in a very peculiar way. I think about a book for 25 or 30 years in a kind of inchoate way, and at one point or another, I realize the book is ready to be written. I usually have a character, a first line, and general idea of what the book is going to be about.

I could easily pen an entire novel on why I love this city, and believe me, I am a lifelong advocate of the Big Apple, yet somehow Nashville weaved its magic around me.

Ever since the '70s, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were the godfathers of Scandinavian crime. They broke the crime novel in Scandinavia from the kiosks and into the serious bookstores.

'Frankenstein' did not invent the fear of science; the novel found its audience because it dramatized anxieties that already existed. Although popular entertainment can, over the long run, shape public perceptions, it becomes popular in the first place only if it addresses preexisting hopes, fears, and fascinations.

In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a character's and let his perceptions take over.

I find 'True Grit' to be one of the very best American novels: It is a rousing adventure story and deeply perceptive about the makeup of the American character.

Restoration I did because I really loved e novel and I like Michael Hoffman, who directed it, but it wasn't a really challenging part for me. I'm not critical of the film: I just don't think I gave a very interesting performance.

A passion for any novel, and any character, can crystallise your ideas when you really need to be as open as possible as a performer.

'Jitterbug Perfume' is one of my favorite books.

Perhaps that is why the novel flourished in England. You had these communities that would stay put and people would see one another all the time and cause one another to change and have the opportunity to observe the changes over time.

In a way, novel writing is such a permanently student lifestyle. When it comes to movies, and you have to go to these meetings and try and impress people and get money out of them, I feel as though I'm playacting at being somebody who's grown up.

What I want is to respond to the challenge posed by the mass media - to permit the novel to say what can only be said by narrative - to allow it to be itself.

I finished my first novel - it was around 300 pages long - when I was 16. Wrote one more before I got out of high school, then wrote the first Lincoln Perry novel when I was 19. It didn't sell, but I liked the character and I knew the world so I tried what was, in my mind, a sequel. Wrote that when I was 20, and that one made it.

The interesting thing is that Poul's novel seems just as fresh and brisk and lively today as it did to those of us, grizzled gray-beards now, who pounced on it when it made its first appearance in Analog.

Alain Robbe-Grillet once wrote that the worst thing to happen to the novel was the arrival of psychology. You can assume he meant that now we all expect to understand the motivation behind each character's actions, as if that's possible, as if life works that way. I've read so many recent novels, particularly those published in the Anglo world, that are dull and trite because I'm always supposed to infer causality.

Alain Robbe-Grillet once wrote that the worst thing to happen to the novel was the arrival of psychology.

Translation is so important. The new American translations of the Bible sound like a Judith Krantz novel.

The two things I enjoy the most about writing are the first page of a book and the last. What's in between is very hard work.

The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you're opposed to it. But when you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.

When you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

There is something a little vulgar about writing a novel that is too close to the present, too concerned with current events, too eager to critique technological advancements.

Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence.