Quotes About Novel

A novel is not an allegory...it is a sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel; you inhale the experience. So start breathing. I just want you to remember this. That is all; class dismissed.

He has demonstrated his own weakness: an inability to read a novel on its own terms. All he knows is judgment

A] great novel will allow you to transcend the social, racial and political limitations imposed by the vicissitudes of life and to find a deep fraternity based on empathy.

Don't go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the novel and not as something tacked onto it.

And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop--there are echoes and reverberations that seem to leap off the pages and mischievously leave the novel tingling in our ears.

Is it possible to write a reverent novel," said Nassrin, "and to have it be good? Besides, the contract with the reader is that this is not reality, it's an invented world. There must be some blasted space in life," she added crossly, "where we can be offensive, for God's sake.

A good novel is one that shows complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all those characters to have a voice, in this way a novel is called democratic - not that it advocates democracy but that by nature is is so.

A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing. I just want you to remember this.

The class's favorite book was Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. In this novel, Nabokov differentiates Cincinnatus C., his imaginative and lonely hero, from those around him through his originality in a society where uniformity is not only the norm but also the law.

A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.

A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil . . .

We have been talking about what Gatsby is all about and we've mentioned some themes, but there is an overall undercurrent to the novel which I think determines its essence and that is the question of loss, the loss of an illusion.

A novel is not an allegory . . . It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.

I don't worry about the survival of the novel. We're a storytelling species.

A novel has to entertain -- that's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page.

Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life

It is widely rumored, and also true, that I wrote my first novel in a closet.

The young New York immigrant woman from Mexico sitting in a college class in contemporary literature can ask herself, as class discussion of a novel begins, whether she's going to express her identity as the Latina, the Mexican, the woman, the immigrant, or the teenager as class discussion unfolds.

I'd read a book called A Reliable Wife not too long before leaving on the world's strangest trip, and as I climbed into bed, a line from the novel crossed my mind: 'He had lost the habit of romance.

And, you know, I hope you have some fun with this book. Nosh and nibble at the corners or read the mother straight through, but enjoy. That's what it's for, as much as any of the novels. Maybe there will be something here to make you think or make you laugh or just make you mad. Any of those reactions would please me. Boredom, however, would be a bummer.

Their attitudes crossed anything-goes California bi-sexuality with edgy Brit-punk sneer, a combination that led to a completely novel form of rebellion: Wet-kissing strangers on the street.

Can't recognize the organization of a novel? Assume there isn't one. Baffled by arcana — i.e., stuff you don't already know? Call the author pretentious. Find a book hard-going? Assume the author is deliberately torturing you.

It's both an alternative history of the novel and a history of the alternative novel.