Quotes About Novel

Music is the art that comes closest to Dionysian beauty in the sense of intoxication. No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Beethoven's Ninth, Bartók's Sonata for two pianos and percussion, or the Beatles' White album?

For it is clear immediately: human life as such is a defeat. All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That - that is the raison d'être of the art of the novel.

The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. . . . the novel's spirit is the spirit of continuity. . . . a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future.

What is a novel if not a trap for catching a hero?

La tension dramatique, c'est la véritable malédiction du roman parce qu'elle transforme tout, même les plus belles pages, même les scènes et les observations les plus surprenantes, en une simple étape menant au dénouement final, où se concentre le sens de tout ce qui précède. Dévoré par le feu de sa propre tension, le roman se consume comme une botte de paille

The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have cirumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own I ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.

I don't know whether my nation will perish and I don't know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means i ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

Le roman n'est pas une confession de l'auteur, mais une exploration de ce qu'est la vie humaine dans le piège qu'est devenu le monde.

I ponovno ga vidim onako kako sam ga vidio na samom po?etku romana. Stoji kraj prozora i gleda preko dvorišta u zid stambene zgrade. To je slika iz koje se rodio. Kao što sam rekao, likovi se ne ra?aju kao živi ljudi iz maj?inog tijela, ve? iz situacije, re?enice, metafora u kojoj je kao u orahovoj ljusci skrivena neka osnovna ljudska mogu?nost, mogu?nost o kojoj autor misli da je još nitko nije otkrio ili da o njoj još nitko ništa bitno nije rekao.

o essencial no romance é aquilo que não pode ser dito senão por um romance, em toda adaptação só fica o que não é essencial

Man can not jump out of his life, but perhaps a novel has more freedom.

Milan Kundera

novel: the realm where moral judgement is suspended. Suspending moral judgement is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. the art of the novel, which teaches the reader to be curious about others and to try to comprehend truths that differ from his own.

Una novela no es una confesión del autor, sino una investigación sobre lo que es la vida humana dentro de la trampa en que se ha convertido el mundo.

Is it wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

Suspending moral judgement is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel's wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity. Not that the novelist utterly denies that moral judgement is legitimate, but that she refuses it a place in the novel.

Dramatic tension is the real curse of the novel, because it transforms everything, even the most beautiful pages, even the most surprising scenes and observations merely into steps leading to the final resolution, in which the meaning of everything that preceded is concentrated.

Crafted with care and with love, this beautifully constructed novel reveals hard truths and difficult secrets. Diana Davidson is a writer of great honesty and integrity, a writer to trust.

Writing a first novel takes so much effort, with such little promise of result or reward, that it must necessarily be a labour of love bordering on madness.

She was like a heroine in a novel that she herself was writing the character kept protesting that she was too strong for love and yet the narrator went on describing her desire.

Publishers love to compartmentalize, and Second Chance was not an easy novel to define.

I was in love with a whirlwind, so when the girl threw me over, I went home and finished my novel.

If we're going to kiss, it has to be book-worthy.

MANY YEARS AGO I REALIZED THAT A BOOK, a novel, is a dream that asks itself to be written in the same way we fall in love with someone: the dream becomes impossible to resist, there's nothing you can do about it, you finally give in and succumb even if your instincts tell you to run the other way because this could be, in the end, a dangerous game—someone will get hurt.