Epics Versus Novels Quotes

If we think of the novel and the epic ... The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero
a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

If it's only a kiss you want, I can kiss you with my clothes on." Katie O'Reilly to Captain Lord Blackthorn in "Titanic Rhasody. ~ Jina Bacarr

Different narrative forms naturally lend themselves to different aspects of existence. The novel is ideal for presenting the inner lives of its characters, the play is ideal for showing people in a room talking and movies are ideal for showing large metal objects hurtling through the air. ~ Todd Alcott

One could not but play for a moment with the thought of what might have happened if Charlotte Brontë had possessed say three hundred a year - but the foolish woman sold the copyright of her novels outright for fifteen hundred pounds; had somehow possessed more knowledge of the busy world, and towns and regions full of life; more practical experience, and intercourse with her kind and acquaintance with a variety of character. In those words she puts her finger exactly not only upon her own defects as a novelist but upon those of her sex. at that time. She knew, no one better, how enormously her genius would have profited if it had not spent itself in solitary visions over distant fields; if experience and intercourse and travel had been granted her. But they were not granted; they were withheld; and we must accept the fact that all those good novels, VILLETTE, EMMA, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, MIDDLEMARCH, were written by women without more experience of life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman; written too in the common sitting-room of that respectable house and by women so poor that they could not afford to, buy more than a few quires of paper at a time upon which to write WUTHERING HEIGHTS or JANE EYRE. ~ Virginia Woolf

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

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described. ~ John Irving

Some TV shows are like really good novels in that there are enough episodes that you start to have your own feelings about how the characters should act. When the scriptwriters go slightly wrong, when they make the character make a left turn that he or she wouldn't do, you know enough about the characters to say, "No, that's not what she would do there. That's wrong." You can actually argue with a TV show in a way that you can't do as much with movie - you inhabit a TV show in the way you inhabit a novel. ~ Nicholson Baker

I write what I want to write. Period. I don't write novels-for-hire using media tie-in characters, I don't write suspense novels or thrillers. I write horror. And if no one wants to buy my books, I'll just keep writing them until they do sell
and get a job at Taco Bell in the meantime. ~ Bentley Little

Tightly-plotted, well-researched and beautifully drawn, this book is a real delight. Garen Ewing's mix of engaging characters, exciting old-school adventure, attractive ligne claire artwork and fluid storytelling makes The Rainbow Orchid easily one of the best graphic novels of the year. ~ Bryan Talbot

When you don't have, or feel that you don't have, an extra moment to read philosophy, history, or science, when great literature, plays, and novels are as foreign to you as hieroglyphics, do you have any cahnce of seeing your work, career, or life in a new light? You might be doing well in the race, but it's the same race essentially down the same track with the same opponents that may prove to be less than sufficient in enabling you to get those kinds of things done that you want to have completed. ~ Jeff Davidson

I've just finished a series of Olivia Manning novels. She's best known for two trilogies: Balkan Trilogy and Levant Trilogy. The six novels are continuous and contain the same set of characters. They are based on Manning's experiences in Eastern Europe and Egypt during the Second World War. Each novel is a wonderful picture of the peculiar British expatriate culture and what was happening during the war. She's one of those brilliant women who write very well about domestic relationships. All the books are slim, and it's easy to gallop through them. ~ Sarah Waters

It is my contention that a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen. A novelist must have the intestinal fortitude to cut out even the most brilliant passage so long as it doesn't advance the story. ~ Frank Yerby

This thing between them, this bond - it wasn't just passion,
and it wasn't wicked.
It was love, and it was divine. ~ Julia Quinn

We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is. ~ John Steinbeck

As I tried to rub away the goose bumps, I noticed a door that looked different from the others. The door looked older than the rest and had a plaque that read: Mistress Lillie White, Head of Paranormal Societies. I hesitated before opening the door. Paranormal Societies? I'd been a fan of the paranormal for years, had even written extensively about werewolves and vampires in my urban fantasy novels, but even I didn't believe much of what I researched about the paranormal. ~ Cora Maxine

Well, that explains the dreamy accent. And why transvestites would make him feel homesick.
- SINGLE-MINDED ~ Lisa Daily

There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels. ~ Paul Auster

If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer? ~ Jennifer Weiner

So, in some ways, the political songs tend to be a bit more like reportage, whereas the love songs tend to be like novels, you can pick them up off the shelf and go into them any time. ~ Billy Bragg

When they returned to Filigree Street, Mori refused even to go upstairs. Instead he hid under a quilt in the parlour with Thaniel's never-read copy of Anna Karenina. The Russians, he said, knew how to write genuinely boring novels, and he would only stop being afraid when he was bored enough. They were all the more boring because he could remember reading the end in the recent future. ~ Natasha Pulley

In the end I write the novels I need to write when I need to write them. ~ Steve Erickson

I had left the music industry at the end of 2001, after 10 years, and had spent three years writing every single day - producing two unpublished novels, one abandoned novel, and three unproduced screenplays. The word 'no' and I were on more than nodding terms. The word 'no' and I were talking about going on holiday together. ~ John Niven

How dare that arrogant prick come in here and ruin her perfectly good day? And not to mention the miserable judge, who should have called in sick this morning if he thought the world was such an awful place. ~ Tanya Thistleton

Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand. ~ Virginia Woolf

Only the middle distance and what may be called the remoter foreground are strictly human. When we look very near or very far, man either vanishes altogether or loses his primacy. The astronomer looks even further afield than the Sung painter and sees even less of human life. At the other end of the scale the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist pursue the close-up – the cellular close-up, the molecular, the atomic and subatomic. Of that which, at twenty feet, even at arm's length, looked and sounded like a human being no trace remains.
Something analogous happens to the myopic artist and the happy lover. In the nuptial embrace personality is melted down; the individual (it is the recurrent theme of Lawrence's poems and novels) ceases to be himself and becomes a part of the vast impersonal universe.
And so it is with the artist who chooses to use his eyes at the near point. In his work humanity loses its importance, even disappears completely. Instead of men and women playing their fantastic tricks before high heaven, we are asked to consider the lilies, to meditate on the unearthly beauty of 'mere things,' when isolated from their utilitarian context and rendered as they are, in and for themselves. Alternatively (or, at an earlier stage of artistic development, exclusively), the nonhuman world of the near-point is rendered in patterns. These patterns are abstracted for the most part from leaves and flowers – the rose, the lotus, the acanthus, palm, papyrus – an ~ Aldous Huxley

And then I realized that my sister was trying to LIVE a romance novel.
Man, that takes courage and imagination. Well, it also took some degree of mental illness, too, but I was suddenly happy for her.
And a little scared. Well, a lot scared. ~ Sherman Alexie

I'd tell you not to swoon, but he'd catch you, so never mind. ~ Kelly Moran

For the last fifty years or so, The Novel's demise has been broadcast on an almost weekly basis. Yet it strikes me that whatever happens, however else the geography of the imagination might modify in the future in, say, the digital ether, The Novel will continue to survive for some long time to come because it is able to investigate and cherish two things that film, music, painting, dance, architecture, drama, podcasts, cellphone exchanges, and even poetry can't in a lush, protracted mode. The first is the intricacy and beauty of language - especially the polyphonic qualities of it to which Bakhtin first drew our attention. And the second is human consciousness. What other art form allows one to feel we are entering and inhabiting another mind for hundreds of pages and several weeks on end? ~ Lance Olsen

One UniVerse for the Living

While palaces attest to the power of men,
And monuments mark their wars,
Little remains of the women who've been-
Except for the sons that they bore.
But the voices of women were baked into bread
And later buttered with epics
While the souls of their daughters
Stitched with fine thread
Became tapestries stored in attics.
And all through the ages
Men boasted like beasts
Erecting pillars of marble and stone,
But still they found themselves only to be
Sculpted of flesh and bone.
Philosophers pondered the nature of gods
Outlawing temptations that plagued them
And earning themselves, against all odds,
The power to punish the pagans.
By writing themselves into sacred books
The clergymen sealed our fate
To follow decrees that have their roots
In nothing but misguided hate.
So, children of Adam and invisible Eve,
challenge the wisdom of sages.
Don't be so sure sacred scrolls that you read
Aren't filled with human pages.
Walk in the wilderness.
Eat of the fruit.
Don't let them buy you with wages.
Plant your own garden.
Drink of the wine.
Learn how to be courageous.
Hearts that are hardened
To what is divine
Have honored the dead too long.
Search for the stories
Baked into bread
And eat until you are strong. ~ Nancy Boutilier

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book. In adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness ... The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They're embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them. We all need stories, but children are more frank about it. ~ Philip Pullman

Crazy girls did this, girls who walked like zombies through YA novels.
But.
Trixie felt the sting of the skin as it split, the sweet welling rise of blood.
It hurt, though not as much as everything else idd. ~ Jodi Picoult

Didn't see you coming, Kylie. ~ Jill Shalvis

I have always loved to read, and now that I have penned 10 novels and a few magazine articles, I have fallen seriously in love with writing stories and seeing them go out into the world. It's magical, you know? ~ Dorothea Benton Frank

It took me thirty-six years; and, in some fifty stories, ranging in length from short-shorts to novels, I think I must have touched, in one way or another, on every aspect of computers and computerization. And (mark this!) I did it without ever knowing anything at all about computers in any real sense. To this day, I don't. I am totally inept with machinery ... on my typewriter I turn out books at the contemptible rate of one a month ~ Isaac Asimov

Our hearts belong together. And without yours, mine will stop beating. ~ Morgan Parker

I sort of half read Thomas Hardy's 'The Mayor of Casterbridge.' It was assigned in 10th grade, and I just couldn't get into it. About seven years later, I rediscovered Hardy and consumed four of his novels in a row. ~ Suzanne Collins