Quotes About Novel

How are we to write The Russian novel in America As long as life goes so unterribly?

I was desperate for something to read that dealt realistically with teenage life, and I thought others might be, too.

I don't think I'll write a large novel again because it was like being in jail for me. Even though that's the funniest book I've ever written, it was the saddest period of my life.

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.

We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.

Of course we all know that's not how life works. The novel that is our life can end at any time. Sometimes even on page one.

If life were a novel, then dead would mark the end of the first chapter.

A life without purpose is like a novel without a plot. It wanders all over the place, is hard to follow, and in the end, doesn't get particularly good reviews.

Gibson stepped onto a relentless treadmill, writing a full novel for each issue. Working under the pseudonym Maxwell Grant, he became one of the busiest practitioners of the pulp era. By 1932, buoyed by success, the magazine had become bimonthly, and Gibson was writing a novel every two weeks. Ultimately, he would do more than 280 Shadow books.

Ze zal Cassandra heten. - Abdis Margrit

consider yourself a functional character in someone else's novel - a background character - a person on the street - that's the perspective ...

I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.

I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme.

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

If I had my way no one should be taught to read until after he had passed his hundredth year. In that way, and in that way only can we protect our youth from the dreadful influence of such novels as 'Three Cycles, Not To Mention The Rug,' which dreadful book I have found within the past month in the hands of at least twenty children in the neighborhood, not one of whom was past sixty.

Isn't post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus ?

Max Byrd's Grant.

The Blue Book Time and again I'm asked for recommendations of must-do's while visiting Nantucket. As Lizbet Keaton says in this novel, "The world needs a Nantucket guidebook written by an island

Hamnet, by Maggie O'Farrell?

Did you ever read Bulwer's 'Eva, or the Unhappy Marriage'?

A novel flashes up for a season and does not often outlast it. For 'Mary Barton' I am a little, little disappointed, do you know. I have just done reading it. There is power and truth — she can shake and she can pierce — but I wish half the book away, it is so tedious every now and then; and besides I want more beauty, more air from the universal world — these classbooks must always be defective as works of art.

Plot might seem to be a matter of choice. It is not. The particular plot is something the novelist is driven to: it is what is left after the whittling-away of alternatives.' Elizabeth Bowen opened her Notes on Writing a Novel (1945, reprinted in Collected Impressions, Longmans, Green & Co.

Elizabeth Chadwick