Barsetshire Novels Quotes

Structure is, for me, the most fun challenge about writing novels. ~ Heidi Julavits

It was sort of like being in one of those love-and-horror supernatural novels, the kind Mrs. Robinson in the school library sniffily called "tweenager porn." In those books the girls dallied with werewolves, vampires - even zombies - but hardly ever became those things. It was also nice to have a grown man stand up for her, and it didn't hurt that he was handsome, in a scruffy kind of way that reminded her a little of Jax Teller on Sons of Anarchy, a show she and Emma Deane secretly watched on Em's computer. ~ Stephen King

Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and Thackeray on the other, there was an immense production of novels, illustrated by not a few names which should rank high in the second class, while some would promote more than one of them to the first. ~ George Saintsbury

For all my longer works (i.e. the novels) I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on. ~ Garth Nix

Oh! No, I only mean what I have read about. It always puts me in mind of the country that Emily and her father travelled through, in The Mysteries of Udolpho. But you never read novels, I dare say?" "Why not?" "Because they are not clever enough for you - gentlemen read better books. ~ Jane Austen

A scrupulous man will never produce a great novel. ~ Julien Green

Ultimately, culture, secular and otherwise, is a collection of survival strategies. The things that look like decoration - poetry, novels, music, dancing - if you strip away all the layers, are mechanisms for coping, surviving, understanding. ~ Ben Fountain

I'm one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn't have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form. ~ Julian Barnes

Chekhov was a great writer, but not all novels have to follow his rules. Not all guns in stories have to be fired, Tamaru ~ Haruki Murakami

Having read several prize-winning novels, Fancy was confident that she now knew the recipe:
1. Write a simple narrative.
2. Make a long list.
3. Scatter the contents of your list throughout your narrative. ~ Jaclyn Moriarty

My novels are in the literature section as opposed to the romance section of bookstores because they're not romance novels. If I tried to have them published as romances, they'd be rejected. I write dramatic fiction; a further sub-genre would classify them as love stories. ~ Nicholas Sparks

Sexual desire is only the frustrated desire to eat human flesh. ~ Christopher Frayling

You're my home." -Travis Maddox ~ Jamie McGuire

The way Smith sees it, this kind of approach denotes a certain category of writer: the Micro Manager. Authors fall into one of two primary camps, she explained in her 2009 book of essays, Changing My Mind.691 Macro Planners work out the structure of their novels and then write within that structure. Micro Managers, on the other hand, don't rely on an overarching configuration (don't even conceive of one), but rather home in on each sentence, one by one, and each sentence, as they come to it, becomes the only thing that exists. If there is a spectrum starting with Macro Planners on one end and Micro Managers on the other, Smith would be somewhere to the right of the page. Smith's writing is entirely incremental and cumulative. The grand plan is that there is no grand plan; working things out ahead of time ruins everything, "feels disastrous."She prefers the writing of a novel as a process of discovery. "The thinking goes on on the page," not beforehand. ~ Sarah Stodola

If only words hadn't eluded me today, if only I yelled back at him: I do get it! I get that as long as you live no one will ever love you as much as I do - I have a heart so I can give it to you alone! That's exactly the way I feel - but unfortunately, people don't talk like that outside of Victorian novels. ~ Jandy Nelson

You can't write novels about people who are timid, risk-averse and passive. Or you can, but they're called literary novels. ~ Ken Follett

Narayan's novels did not prepare me for the distress of India. As a writer he had succeeded almost too well. His comedies were of the sort that requires a restricted social setting with well-defined rules; and he was so direct, his touch so light, that, though he wrote in English of Indian manners, he had succeeded in making those exotic manners quite ordinary. I did not lose my admiration for Narayan; but I felt that his comedy and irony were not quite what they had appeared to be, were part of a Hindu response to the world, a response I could no longer share. Narayan's novels are less the purely social comedies I had once taken them to be than religious books, at times religious fables, and intensely Hindu. ~ V.S. Naipaul

Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites. ~ Piers Paul Read

To those great geniuses now in petticoats, who shall write novels for the beloved reader's children, these men and things will be as much legend and history as Nineveh, or Coeur de Lion, or Jack Sheppard. ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

If you like my novels, I commend your good taste. ~ Rita Mae Brown

Violence is inevitable in crime novels, but there are many different ways to tell a story. I use my characters' reactions to illustrate the worst moments rather than let readers witness them at first hand. ~ Michael Robotham

That's what novels are: They're amalgams of archetypes, collections of random traits one observes in other people through life, blended into fresh characters. ~ Michael Callahan

Cinema isn't just a good medium for translating graphic novels. It's specifically a good medium for superheroes. On a fundamental, emotional level, superheroes, whether in print or on film, serve the same function for their audience as Golden Age movie stars did for theirs: they create glamour. ~ Virginia Postrel

You guys read romance novels?"
"We call them manuals. ~ Lyssa Kay Adams

When I was young, about 18 or 19, I read all the Dostoyevsky novels, which made me want to go to St. Petersburg. So I went, and I was so inspired. ~ Tadashi Shoji

Voltaire rejects all systems, and suspects that "every chief of a sect in philosophy has been a little of a quack."

"The further I go, the more I am confirmed in the idea that systems of metaphysics are for philosophers what novels are for women."

"It is only charlatans who are certain. We know nothing of first principles. It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God formed the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will."

"Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one. ~ Will Durant

He could be doing quantum physics in his head or undressing her in his mind - she'd never know the difference. ~ Kelly Moran

The root of all my ills, thought Amalfitano sometimes, is my admiration for Jews, homosexuals, and revolutionaries (true revolutionaries, the romantics and the dangerous madmen, not the apparatchiks of the Communist Party of Chile or its despicable thugs, those hideous gray beings). The root of all my ills, he thought, is my admiration for a certain kind of junkie (not the poet junkie or the artist junkie but the straight-up junkie, the kind you rarely come across, the kind like a black hole or a black eye, with no hands or legs, a black eye that never opens or closes, the Lost Witness of the Tribe, the kind who seems to cling to drugs in the same way that drugs cling to him). The root of all my ills is my admiration for delinquents, whores, the mentally disturbed, said Amalfitano to himself with bitterness. When I was an adolescent I wanted to be a Jew, a Bolshevik, black, homosexual, a junkie, half-crazy, and - the crowning touch - a one-amred amputee, but all I became was a literature professor. At least, thought Amalfitano, I've read thousands of books. At least I've become acquianted with the Poets and read the Novels. (The Poets, in Amalfitano's view, were those beings who flashed like lightning bolts, and the novels were the stories that sprang from Don Quixote). At least I've read. At least I can still read, he said to himself, at once dubious and hopeful. ~ Roberto Bolano

Novels are longer than life. ~ Natalie Clifford Barney

LIFE IS AN ENTHUSIASM. MY EXPERIENCE OF LIFE, MY VISION ALL ARE MENTION IN MY BOOKS. WRITING LANGUAGE - MALAYALAM. I BORN AND BROUGHT UP IN KERALA. MY LIFE PERIOD MORE THAN 28 YEARS WORKING IN THE MIDDLE EAST. IN MY LIFE EXPERIENCE INVOLVED IN MY ALL LITERARY WORKS - POEMS, DRAMA, NOVELS, TRAVELOGUES, SHORT STORIES & SCREENPLAY. PLEASE READ MY BOOKS AND COMMENT IN MY FACEBOOK/TWITTER/GOOD READS ETC... I REQUEST TO ALL KERALITES BUY MY BOOKS; READ AND COMMENT IT. MY BOOKS PUBLISHER IS CYBERWIT.NET - ALL MY BRIEF MENTIONED IN THAT PAGES. ~ Saravan Maheswer

All I am in private life is a literary critic and historian, that's my job ... And I'm prepared to say on that basis if anyone thinks the Gospels are either legends or novels, then that person is simply showing his incompetence as a literary critic. I've read a great many novels and I know a fair amount about the legends that grew up among early people, and I know perfectly well the Gospels are not that kind of stuff. ~ C.S. Lewis

True love is what makes life worth living. ~ D.F. Jones

I'm always astonished when readers suggest that I must write my novels while high on pot or (God forbid!) LSD. Apparently, there are people who confuse the powers of imagination with the effects of intoxication. Not one word of my oeuvre, not one, has been written while in an artificially altered state. Unlike many authors, I don't even drink coffee when I write. No coffee, no cola, no cigarettes. There was a time when I smoked big Havana cigars while writing, not for the nicotine (I didn't inhale) but as an anchor, something to hold on to, I told myself, to keep from falling over the edge of the earth. Eventually, I began to wonder what it would be like to take that fall. So one day I threw out the cigars and just let go. Falling, I must say, has been exhilarating
though I may change my mind when I hit bottom. ~ Tom Robbins

Is it not superfluous to write more than one novel if the writer has not become, say, a new man? Obviously, all the novels of an author not infrequently belong together and are to a certain degree only one novel. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels. ~ Julia Cameron

Like a lot of what happens in novels, inspiration is
a sort of spontaneous combustion
the oily rags of the head and heart. ~ Stanley Elkin

Is it that time of the month?" Vlad asked.
Some feeling blew through her. It might have been embarrassment, but she suspected it was closer to rage. "What?"
He studied her. "Is that not an appropriate question to ask?"
"No!"
"Odd. In many novels I've read, human males often ask that question when a female is acting…" Puzzlement as he continued to study her face. "Although, now that I consider it, they usually don't make that observation to the female herself. ~ Anne Bishop

[Patricia Highsmith] was a figure of contradictions: a lesbian who didn't particularly like women; a writer of the most insightful psychological novels who, at times, appeared bored by people; a misanthrope with a gentle, sweet nature. ~ Andrew Wilson

A certain class of novels may with propriety be called fables. ~ Richard Whately

I abhor crime novels in which the main character can behave however he or she pleases, or do things that normal people do not do, without those actions having social consequences. ~ Stieg Larsson

Apart from such chaotic classics as these, my own taste in novel reading is one which I am prepared in a rather especial manner, not only to declare, but to defend. My taste is for the sensational novel, the detective story, the story about death, robbery and secret societies; a taste which I share in common with the bulk at least of the male population of this world. There was a time in my own melodramatic boyhood when I became quite fastidious in this respect. I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was. But we all lose a little of that fine edge of austerity and idealism which sharpened our spiritual standard in our youth. I have come to compromise with the tea-table and to be less insistent about the sofa. As long as a corpse or two turns up in the second, the third, nay even the fourth or fifth chapter, I make allowance for human weakness, and I ask no more. But a novel without any death in it is still to me a novel without any life in it. I admit that the very best of the tea-table novels are great art - for instance, Emma or Northanger Abbey. Sheer elemental genius can make a work of art out of anything. Michelangelo might make a statue out of mud, and Jane Austen could make a novel out of tea - that much more contem ~ G.K. Chesterton

No man deserves a woman like that. He mortgages his very soul to win her and spends his life paying off the debt. ~ Tessa Dare

I reckoned they had probably begun to pour out their hearts and entrust each other with the subjects of the plays and novels they had written or planned to write. It was customary after serious drinking. ~ Ismail Kadare

The corner of the witch's mouth twitched. "My remedy can bring a soul back into the body, but it won't work if the soul doesn't want to stay. Do you understand? ~ Lina J. Potter

I've been an avid consumer of young adult literature since I was one, and I think some people leave that stuff behind when they become old adults, but I never did. I was always interested in the fantasy world created in those novels. ~ Diablo Cody

Although I now spend most of my time writing novels for teenagers and adults, 'readaloudability' is still a criterion I try to adhere to. ~ Mal Peet

The idea of the writer who writes nineteen novels, with various ups and downs and levels of experimentation, isn't around so much now. There's a focus, I think, on fewer books, with more pressure on each book to succeed. With that there comes, I think, a certain pressure towards shapeliness in fiction. Towards neatness. And I think writers feel that, and it can effect how they write. ~ Chad Harbach