Quotes About Novel

The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day--a way of relating .

The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.

Actually nerve is one of the qualities it takes to tackle a first novel, the others being inflated ego and a gambler's sense of crazed bravado, all of which I felt imbued with, more or less, when I sat down to write my account of one woman's efforts to keep her ex-husband, a deranged fence jumper, out of her apartment and life.

You're never confident. You go in fear and trembling every day. It would be awfully nice to think that you know how to write a novel. But what you know is the novel you just wrote. You don't have the slightest notion how to write the one you're going to do next.

The irony is that the novel with its Pulitzer and its controversy has brought more attention to Mary Hallock Foote than she would ever have received otherwise.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

Dr. [Richard] Bentley's son reading a novel, the Doctor said, "Why read a book which you cannot quote?"

The daily life of the world is not dramatic—it is monotonous ; the novelist makes it dramatic by his silences, his suppressions, and his exaggerations.

In these days of faith-cures, and hypnotism, and telepathy, and subliminalities – why, the simple old world grows very confusing. But rarely, very rarely novel.

All useful history is antiseptic in this fashion. It enables us to know what fairy tale, what school book, what tradition, what novel, play, picture, phrase, planted one preconception in this mind, another in that mind.

I think every age has a medium that talks to it more eloquently than the others. In the 19th century it was symphonic music and the novel. For various technical and artistic reasons, film became that eloquent medium for the 20th century.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. —W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel.

The first novel I wrote was a monster - clocking in at 180 000 words - but it died a death, a death it deserved. It was called 'The Gods First Make Mad.' It was a good title, but it was the only good thing about the book. I didn't let that put me off.

Writing a novel, said Humboldt, seemed to him the perfect way to capture the most fleeting essence of the present for the future.

I've never had time to read. But no one ever kept me from finishing a novel I loved.

La vita non è un romanzo, lo so... lo so. Ma solo lo spirito del romanzo può renderla vivibile.

Si immagini da qualche parte in un romanzo, questo la aiuterà a lottare contro la paura.

Quando la vita è quello che è, il romanzo ha il dovere di essere quello che vuole.

Contate le vostre pagine, ragazzi, contate... anche i romanzieri lo fanno. [...] Contate le pagine... Si comincia meravigliandosi del numero di pagine lette, e poi si arriva a spaventarsi del poco che rimane da leggere. Solo 50 pagine! Vedrete... Non c'è nulla di più dolce di questa tristezza: Guerra e pace, due grossi tomi... e solo 50 pagine da leggere. Uno rallenta, rallenta, ma niente da fare... Natasha finisce per sposare Pierre Bezuchov, ed è la fine.

Cosicché leggere era a quei tempi un atto sovversivo. Alla scoperta del romanzo si univa l'eccitazione di disobbedire alla famiglia. Duplice incanto! Oh, il ricordo di quelle ore di lettura rubate sotto le coperte alla luce di una torcia elettrica!

Mais c'est, plus quotidiennement, le refuge du livre contre le crépitement de la pluie, le silencieux éblouissement des pages contre la cadence du métro, le roman planqué dans le tiroir de la secrétaire, la petite lecture du prof quand planchent ses élèves, et l'élève de fond de classe lisant en douce, en attendant de rendre une copie blanche...

How about a global pandemic? A novel strain of influenza for which we humans have no natural defense.

Women want love to be a novel, men a short story.