Quotes About Novel

But the slice-of-life novel is really not so much a world apart as an interlude - like the conference or the film set, the holiday hotel or the voyage by sea or air. You enter it, you live there for a while, you leave again. Perhaps it will alter you; usually it will not. I suspect that the book which takes you into a world apart must also _trouble_ you, at least a little. And the troubling stays with you, like the grit in the oyster, and afterwards you are changed.

The business was beginning to sound like something from a Victorian novel, with a reclusive old woman having hidden a lot of ancient documents somewhere in the depths of her cluttered house.

Eucalyptus. Murray Bail. Someone told me that this was a great novel so I bought it, but then I discovered that it was great Australian novel so I put it away. I find it difficult to get to grips with Australian novels. Difficult, but not impossible.

Well, it does educate us about life. I wouldn't be the person I am, I wouldn't understand what I understand, were it not for certain books. I'm thinking of the great question of nineteenth-century Russian literature: how should one live? A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.

It [Ashfair House] was an old fashioned house—the sort of house in fact, as Strange expressed it, which a lady in a novel might like to be persecuted in.

Did you ever look into an English novel? Well, do not trouble yourself. It is nothing but a lot of nonsense about girls with fanciful names getting married.

If fast-paced entertainment is not among the pleasures generally offered by the literary novel, other pleasure often abound: a richness of language, a heart-breaking depiction of difficult emotions, and an exploration of interesting ideas.

I shift the dozen roses I've bought along with a copy of a spy novel—Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews— to shake her hand.

A novel wants to befriend you, a short story almost never.

As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.

Pero todos comparten la misma falla trágica; todos tuvieron la opción de salvarse y tomaron el camino de la catástrofe; y sus novelas son dedicados estudios de ese largo error y de sus consecuencias.

Nunca ha dejado de extrañarme, por eso, que el vínculo más cercano del boom latinoamericano, dentro de la tradición de nuestra lengua, se remonte a esas narraciones que surgieron del Descubrimiento, y en muchos casos —pensemos en la lealtad que Vargas Llosa y García Márquez siempre le han jurado a la novela de caballerías, uno a Tirant le Blanc, y el otro a Amadís de Gaula— a momentos anteriores.

Las literaturas nacionales como bien señaló Borges ( que tan bien señalaba tantas cosas), son un invento de los nacionalismos europeos del siglo XIX, pero hay que decir que sus imitadores latinoamericanos tuvieron mucho éxito: durante la primera mitad del siglo XX, éste fue el mayor esfuerzo de la novela escrita del otro lado del océano.

He hablado en muchas partes de la impresión que me produjo esa lectura (el Ulises), pues la novela de Joyce fue algo mucho más importante y decisivo que una mera influencia: fue la Epifanía a de una vocación.

Joyce llevó a la prosa de ficción la precisión y la riqueza de recursos retóricos de la poesía. Supo, como había sabido Flaubert, que la poesía es lo que rescata y eleva el lenguaje de la novela.

El único modo posible para el novelista de rescatar la novela consiste en abstenerse de escribirlas

esta hermosa ciudad. Abgaro estaba impaciente.

He looks like a man.' 'How descriptive,' Susan said in a droll tone. 'Remind me never to advise you to seek work as a novelist.

Knowing that their moments together would form a short poem and not a long and lusty novel.

He had fallen in love with his wife, and now the thought of dying, of leaving her, of knowing that their moments together would form a short poem and not a long and lusty novel—it was more than he could bear.

I am trapped in a bad novel," Iris announced, to no one in particular.

And you sound like the heroine of a very poorly written novel," he said

Of course there is no denying the possible pleasure of holing up with a fat, slow-moving, mediocre novel; still, we all know that we can indulge ourselves in that fashion only so much. In the end, we read not for reading's sake, but to learn.

'J' is a novel. A story about what it is like for people after a terrible event. And it is a love story, because I feel a novel is inevitably a love story.