Quotes About Novel

A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't even be worth reading.

His novel so lacks the feel and smell of barracks and of the passion of men at war that we remain unmoved, at the close, by Saunders's wistful wish "that whatever was left of the world would come to its senses and build something new and different and new and new and altogether different.

This book scratches an old itch. Despite being the level of government that is closest to the people and has so much impact on our quality of life, most people don't know too much about how their local governments operate and even less about what it's like to manage a city or county. Occasionally, a city manager character appears in a novel, movie, or TV show but almost always in a mocking or denigrating fashion that belies the professionalism that is more the norm.

The Great American Novel.

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

Writing a teen character is something I wanted to try again for a long time!

When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge; you can beef things up.

He did not seem to know enough about the people in his novel. They did not seem to trust him.

My thoughts went round and round and it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be of the 'stream of consciousness' type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink.

She saw herself perhaps as an Elizabeth Bowen heroine - for one did not openly identify oneself with Jane Austen's heroines - and 'To The North' was her favourite novel.

As for his sudden change of heart, he had suddenly remembered the end of Mansfield Park, and how Edmund fell out of love with Mary Crawford and came to care for Fanny. Dulcie must surely know the novel well, and would understand how such things can happen.

when she thought it over, Jane decided that she was really much more like Emma Woodhouse.

In order to write the novel I'm committed to, I have to pretend that it's not only separate from everything I've written before, but also separate from anything anyone in the history of the universe has written. This is a grotesque delusion and a crass vanity, but also a creative necessity.

I had wanted to write The Possessed as fiction, but everyone told me that no one would read a novel about graduate students. It seems almost uncivilized to tell someone writing a novel, "No, you have to call this a memoir."

When you're reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?

Once, I optioned a novel and tried to do a screenplay on it, which was great fun, but I was too respectful. I was only 100 pages into the novel and I had about 90 pages of movie script going. I realized I had a lot to learn.

A long, negative review I wrote of Rushdie's novel 'Fury' earned me a rebuke from the writer: He told an administrator at the college where I teach, and who had invited Rushdie to come speak, that he wouldn't share the stage with me.

The first proper mystery novel that I read was 'Murder On the Orient Express' with a gaunt David Niven and a cherubic Peter Ustinov on the cover. 'Orient Express,' you'll recall, is the one where everyone did it, which delighted me no end, and I was immediately hooked.

'The Chosen,' if you recall, was based on the Chaim Potok novel and featured Robbie Benson's persuasive performance as a Hasidic Jew.

I am nervous about how my debut novel will be received, because there's always that feeling that somebody might say something negative. I say I won't read the reviews, but I probably will. But just because somebody says something negative, I don't have to believe it.

There's no such thing as the contemporary novel. Before I seem the complete reactionary, let me add that I've happily joined in many discussions about 'the contemporary novel' where what that usually, unproblematically means is novels that have appeared recently or may appear soon.

When my novel 'Beach Music' came out in 1995, I had included a couple of recipes in the book and had tried to impart some of my love of Roman cuisine and the restaurants of Rome.

I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way. If you have confidence that you have a clear direction to take, you always have confidence to explore other ways; if they prove to be mere digressions, you'll recognize that and make the necessary revisions.

I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don't. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It's a hard way to learn to write. I don't recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.