Quotes About Novel

When a newspaper columnist wants to write about a novel, the rule is that you're supposed to have a 'hook,' an excuse, a timely reason to bring up the book in question.

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

A couple years ago, the novelist Russell Banks told me he was reading the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. I asked why. He said, 'Because I've always wanted to and am tired of having my reading assigned.' I thought it was a marvelous declaration of independence.

As he approached his 28th birthday in February 1840, Dickens knew himself to be famous, successful and tired. He needed a rest, and he made up his mind to keep the year free of the pressure of producing monthly installments of yet another long novel.

Jigsaw Lady is the working title of a science fiction novel I've had in my head for darn near 15 years. I think I'll start work on it next year (in all my spare time) but I'd like to get it finished some day.

Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

Chechnya forms the bookends to Tolstoy's career. He began writing his first novel, 'Childhood,' while in Starogladovskaya in Northern Chechnya, and his final novel, 'Hadji Murad,' is set in the Russo-Chechen War of the 19th century.

Let's face it: the 19th century really was the great age of the novel - Melville, Hawthorne, Tolstoy. These are the people I really admire.

Fitzgerald could sense that America was poised on the edge of a vast transformation, and wrote a novel bridging his moment and ours. The Great Gatsby made manifest precisely what Fitzgerald's contemporaries couldn't bear to see, and thus it is not only the Jazz Age novel par excellence, but also the harbinger of its decline and fall.

My friend Isabel says, When you're writing even a short novel, with at least a couple of subplots, and God only knows how many characters, your brain holds the volume of it beyond the ability of your consciousness. Of course .

I studied law at Columbia, but I was more interested in why people committed crimes than I was in defending them. I finished my first novel, handed it to my roommate to read and he was up all night. I decided then that was what I wanted to do." "Keep people awake all night?" "Yes.

When you read a novel, it seems that everything is clear, trite and understandable. But when you yourself fall in love, you understand that nobody knows anything and everyone must decide for themselves.

But really it says everything that's wrong about the publishing industry, that a quarter of a million people bought and read a sex and shopping novel that wasn't even written by one of those footballer girlfriends, and yet most of the shortlisted titles on the Orange Prize, which is an award for women writers, don't even sell ten thousand copies. It's just not right.

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

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice.

Her attraction to him hadn't dulled in the least. She stared at him. He stared right back with those beautiful distant green eyes. "Guys," Pookie said, "I know yal have a bit of backstory to work out, but can we lay off the wistful gazing? This ain't a Joan Wilder novel, if ya dig what I'm saying."...

We hope you enjoy this book

Quantum Mechanics doesn't deserve the connotation of spookiness in the sense of some ineffable mystery that it is beyond the human mind to comprehend. Quantum Mechanics is amazing; it is novel, profound, mind-stretching & a very different view of reality from what we're used to.

Open Secret boasts a nifty plot and, in Coroner Fortin, a fascinating protagonist who will likely be around for a long time. Deryn Collier is a talent to watch.

I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.

I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.

I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.

There is no denying that we are suffering from a collective neurosis and the novel which does not face this is not a novel of our time.