Quotes About Novel

Writing a novel is so hard, and there are so many problems that the last thing you're thinking about is adapting this mess you have on your hands as a movie. You just want to get it to work as a novel. That's your main focus.

Even though the method of 'Harvest' was a historical novel, its intentions were that of a modern novel. I'm asking you to think about land being seized in Brazil by soya barons. It's also a novel about immigration.

Very few teachers or leaders in my small Michigan community ever discussed the issue of 'The Catcher in the Rye,' and certainly no one came to the 1951 Novel's defense.

Of course I went and got 'Breaking Dawn' at midnight the night it came out and read it instantly. I was like, 'Yes!'

My first novel - the novel I wrote before 'Midnight's Children' - feels, to me, now, very - I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I'm, you know, I'm happy for.

'Lady Chatterley's Lover' is a novel that constitutes a milestone of English literature.

I am a businessman at the end of the day. I have grown up with Excel sheets. I start out writing my novel with spreadsheets and the milestones in each chapter highlighted.

'Carol' takes place in the really early '50s, before Eisenhower has taken office. It's based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, her second and most autobiographical book and the only one outside of the crime milieu.

I did some research on cryonics and cryogenics, but I kept it to a minimum because I didn't want the science part of the novel to overshadow the fiction. Being medically accurate wasn't my main goal.

Where readers of Murdoch can begin a new novel with a quiet confidence, opening a Burgess book is an exercise in anxiety: what the devil is he up to this time?

A novel without readers is still a novel. It has meaning, since it has had at least one reader, the person who wrote it. Its range of meanings, however, is quite limited. Add readers, add meaning.

A novel is an impression, not an argument.

Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there, the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.

A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.

A novel which does moral injury to a dozen imbeciles, and has bracing results upon a thousand intellects of normal vigor, can justify its existence; and probably a novel was never written by the purest-minded author for which there could not be found some moral invalid or other whom it was capable of harming. The Profitable Reading of Fiction 1888

In reprinting this story for a new edition I am reminded that it was in the chapters of "Far from the Madding Crowd" as they appeared month by month in a popular magazine, that I first ventured to adopt the word "Wessex" from the pages of early English history, and give it a fictitious significance as the existing name of the district once included in that extinct kingdom.

Mi sia concesso ripetere che un romanzo è un'impressione, non un'argomentazione.

Thomas Harris

Nicht alles, was langwierig ist, ist langweilig.' (Thomas Mann to his prospective publisher, in reference to the MS of the novel Buddenbrooks - cited by the Thomas Mann Buddenbrookhaus in Lübeck).

Zoyd was out of smokes.

The highly moralistic and uncompromising outlook of the Puritans eventually put them and their descendants on a collision course with the institution of slavery and produced. among others, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was called by Abraham Lincoln the little lady who started the Civil War because of her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

once described fiction as a monumental lie that has to have the absolute ring of truth if it is to succeed. And that ring of truth invariably comes from research, which in turn gives a novel its authenticity. It is this kind of authenticity plus good storytelling that made Forever Amber a bestseller 56 years ago. Now