Quotes About Novel

RAVENPAW: A small black loner

I don't want what we're doing to just end up as notes for a novel.

There were the usual exhortations to purity – think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form – exhortations poets don't have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.

I'd become the unreliable narrator of my first novel.

Graham Greene, a wartime intelligence officer in West Africa, based his novel Our Man in Havana, about a spy who invents an entire network of bogus informants, on the Garbo story.

Our emergency liquidity lending took many novel forms.

INTRODUCTION The very acute and lively Spanish critic who signs himself Clarin, and is known personally as Don Leopoldo Alas, says the present Spanish novel has no yesterday, but only a day-before-yesterday.

Benito Pérez Galdós

Another circumstance of note was the fact that they never spoke about the past: that particular novel, they both seemed to agree, was over and done with, doubtless because it seemed so improbable and false, rather like the books we were mad about in our youth and which, in our maturity, seem somewhat paltry.

Working in 'Mian Maqbool' was a refreshing experience.

I went through a phase in my 20s when I was overdosing on self-help books, so it was really refreshing to read 'The Alchemist' because it was a novel, but it still had the same wisdom, wasn't patronising and didn't tell you how you should live your life.

I usually start writing a novel that I then abandon. When I say abandon, I don't think any writer ever abandons anything that they regard as even a half-good sentence. So you recycle. I mean, I can hang on to a sentence for several years and then put it into a book that's completely different from the one it started in.

For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know.

I've had a lot of books rejected in my time. My first novel, which didn't get published, was, with hindsight, crashingly dull.

The impulse of the journalist is to be novel, yet to relate his curiosities to the urgencies of the moment; the philosopher seeks what he conceives to be true, regardless of the moment.

For 'The Bestseller'... there was hardly any research, but I had to give each person a quirk and develop their stories so that it would relate to who they are.

The button-down empirical and deductive fields, including all the hard sciences, have lived side by side with 'critical theory,' postmodernism and its perception-based relatives. Since the creation in 1960s and '70s of novel, justice-oriented fields, these incompatible worldviews have repelled one another.

A historical romance is the only kind of book where chastity really counts.

I still find the idea of a research-heavy or historical novel daunting. That's something I've had in mind for a while: like, would you research for a year and then start writing? I sit down, and I just don't know how to write it.

I have just finished my novel (rough draft). It is to be called 'Anacoluthon.' This will make the public think it is an historical romance.

For me, writing a historical novel was really hard. I love history as a subject and majored in it in college. I think, in a way, my training made it worse for me because I knew how important it was to focus on document-based analysis, and I really didn't want to get stuff wrong.

I'd never heard of Robert Hellenga; I didn't think a book with the name 'Snakewoman of Little Egypt' would hold any appeal for me at all.

I don't know that I read more than the average person. I don't think I do very much. I tend to read more when I'm on holiday. That's when I can go through books like you wouldn't believe. I read a bit of everything, but the novel has always been very important to me.

Holy cow - everything about writing a novel is hard for me.