Quotes About Novel

Mia Thermopolis, 1005 Thompson Street, #4A

Bel Kaufman (1911–2014) was a writer, teacher, and lecturer best known for her classic, bestselling novel Up the Down Staircase (1965).

About Anna Faktorovich's Romances of George Sand: "What a read! Not lacking in action and very imaginative.

We managed to prepare a cell-free system which was active when suitably supplemented, and this was a novel result since the process of oxidation was believed to require the integrity of the cells.

A brief short story may require only a few paragraphs after the climax. On the other hand, in his massive novel 'The World According to Garp,' John Irving's denouement consisted of 10 separate sections, each devoted to an individual character's fate and each almost a story in itself.

Writers cannot simply have a go, imagining it's easier to produce a story than a novel because fewer words are required. Have a go by all means; be intrepid, but be equipped.

The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.

'Rescue Me' is the first book in a three-book series. Although, like all my series, the books are purposely written so that readers do not have to read them in order.

Well, the research into it affected me. And the novel, it very much strengthened my faith.

Nantucket was a Quaker-based culture, so they were not readers. There's a great Nantucket-based novel from the 19th century that Melville read for his research for 'Moby-Dick': 'Miriam Coffin' by Joseph Hart.

I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.

I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose.

I decided to write a crime novel. That genre was at the height of its popularity in Poland, so I thought it might earn me a bit of cash to go on with my work on 'The Books of Jacob.' I shut myself away for a few months and devoted myself entirely to 'Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.'

One of my desert island books, 'The Leopard' is not so much a novel as a eulogy for a way of life and a Sicily that was already lost by the time Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was writing.

You can't sign on for a romance novel adaptation and then get prudish.

In Baltimore, I was walking with a friend who was playing at a pub he kept referring to as the Horse. But when I saw the sign 'The Horse You Came In On' - I thought, 'My God.' I had no intention of ever setting a Jury novel in the U.S., but when I saw that, I thought, 'That's it.' The names are very important.

I can't imagine writing a novel without some sound. When you're facing a few hundred blank pages, silence can be cold.

Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.

My own novel, 'The Silver Bough,' about the inhabitants of a remote town at risk of being overwhelmed by Scotland's mythological past, was once criticised by a disgruntled fan as 'fantasy for people who don't read fantasy.'

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

'Simon' was such a charmed experience.

Many readers know my work first through 'Housekeeping,' simply because it was my only novel for a pretty long time.

I was too ashamed of myself, of being a bad husband, a failure as a provider, of bailing out on my would-be novel after almost two years of being supported by my loving wife, that I could no longer stand her seeing me the way I was.

It had felt liberating to acknowledge this to himself and others, to shed his painful sense of the obligation to be somehow remarkable; but it left him with the unanswered question of what to do with his life, and simultaneously the realization that working on the novel endlessly had been a way to avoid facing that question.