Farhat Ishtiaq Novel Quotes

From Flood, Flash, and Pheromones
coming soon:
In the torrential downpour with water swirling that threatened to pull her down, she didn't see the voice's owner. The hurricane had blessed the entire city with a surprise drenching. All weather reports had predicted it to pass over with sporadic rainfall but that didn't happen. The storm settled over Houston as if it had no intention to move on. Cassie flailed in panic as the roof of her car disappeared under the water twenty feet beyond. She prayed once more that the container in it was watertight. And that she'd see her car again. Then she concentrated on living. Where had the voice come from? ~ Shelley K. Wall

A couple of times he called the second he'd finished reading a novel and just had to tell me about it, and I know it sounds hokey and librarianish to say so, but I just swooned when he did that. ~ Sarah Vowell

We have seen that a myth could never approached in a purely profane setting. It was only comprehensible in a liturgical context that set it apart from everyday life; it must be experienced as part of a process of personal transformation. None, of this surely applies to the novel, which can be read anywhere at all witout ritual trappings, and must, if it is any good, eschew the overtly didactic. Yet the experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the mythology. It can be seen as a form of mediation. Readers have to live with a novel for days or even weeks. It prljects them into another worl, parallel to but apart from their ordinary lives. They know perfectly well that this fictional realm is not 'real' and yet while they are reading it becomes compelling. A powerful novel bcomes part of the backdrop of lives long after we have laid the book aside. It is an excercise of make-believe, that like yoga or a religious festival breaks down barriers of space and time and extends our sympathies to empathise with others lives and sorrows. It teaches compassion, the ability to 'feel with' others. And, like mythology , an important novel is transformative. If we allow it do so, can change us forever. ~ Karen Armstrong

When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks. ~ Dean Koontz

You've found that there is something that can make you feel, and make you feel present: sex. Not the routine, dusk-and-dawn sex of a trusted, established relationship, but illicit, dangerous sex. Sex that is novel and leaves you sore; that is experienced in the gaps between your mundane, moral life; that is strange and breathless and addictive. ~ Sarah Hall

Robert Sternberg is a professor of psychology at Tufts University and a past president of the American Psychological Association. He is a long-term critic of traditional approaches to intelligence testing and IQ. He argues that there are three types of intelligence: analytic intelligence, the ability to solve problems using academic skills and to complete conventional IQ tests; creative intelligence, the ability to deal with novel situations and to come up with original solutions; and practical intelligence, the ability to deal with problems and challenges in everyday life. ~ Ken Robinson

I've seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn't occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me, so I don't feel like going back and dredging them up. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

When I was at Brown, I wanted to write the great American novel, but I was too scared to take a creative course. I signed up for one, got in, and just didn't have the courage to go. I was a tremendously shy person, almost pathologically shy. The thought of peers critiquing my work - oh, God. ~ Nathaniel Philbrick

I binge write. I think it's because I started seriously writing by participating in National Novel Writing Month, an online-based challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days. ~ Erin Morgenstern

We at the Christian Writers Guild couldn't be more proud of Brandy Vallance. Let her debut novel transport you to an entirely fresh time and place where you'll soon forget you're turning pages and find yourself riveted to the destinies of characters who'll leave a lasting impression on your heart. ~ Jerry B. Jenkins

He looked just perfect to play Dorian Gray in a film version of Oscar Wilde's novel. Young, graceful, and indecently fresh and handsome, he could easily have worn a badge that said READY FOR DEBAUCHERY! ~ Sergei Lukyanenko

I suppose I also have a fondness for Cities because it was my first published novel - writing it got me over what had, up until that time, seemed like an insurmountable hurdle - the writing and completion of a novel. Oh, I'd begun several novels over the years, but never had the staying power or the faith in my own work to finish one. ~ Lucy Taylor

My father revisited Moby a lot. Maybe it's because there's no other novel in the whole world that better captures the Impossible Standard. ~ Niall Williams

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. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

The idea of labor, of hard work, leading to increased productivity was so novel, so radical, in the overall span of Western history that most ordinary people, most of those who labored, could scarcely believe what was happening to them. Labor had been so long thought to be the natural and inevitable consequence of necessity and poverty that most people still associated it with slavery and servitude. Therefore any possibility of oppression, any threat to the colonists' hard earned prosperity, any hint of reducing them to the povery of other nations, was especially frightening; for it seemed likely to slide them back into the traditional status of servants or slaves, into the older world where labor was merely a painful necessity and not a source of prosperity. ~ Gordon S. Wood

The ride to Alicante had been like something out of a dream, or a cheesy romance novel. The two of them astride white stallions, galloping across the countryside, charging across emerald meadows and through a forest the color of flames. Isabelle's hair streamed behind her like a river of ink, and Simon had even managed not to fall off his horse--never a foregone conclusion. ~ Cassandra Clare

My more tenderhearted daughter, Becka, said to me during this time, Mom, when you write a novel you get to rewrite it, but when you live with someone for twenty years, that is the novel, and you can never write that novel with anyone again! ~ Elizabeth Strout

I believe the most important thing you can do in any kind of novel is to make your reader want to go on with it and want to know what happens next. ~ Ruth Rendell

Overnight Success Happens Only in Fairy Tales, Trashy Novels, and Bad Movies. ~ Ernie J Zelinski

With 'Darkly Dreaming Dexter,' we as a group of writers had to take a rather thin novel and spread it out over the course of 12 episodes, and not only 12 episodes, but lay in story for everyone that's going to take you through five years. ~ Melissa Rosenberg

I'm interested in the Gothic novel because it's very much a woman's form. Why is there such a wide readership for books that essentially say, 'Your husband is trying to kill you'? ~ Margaret Atwood

Life is not a romance novel ~ Meg Cabot

All novels are experimental. ~ Anthony Burgess

Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, our lives. Is that why we're fascinated by the steadfastness of stars? The water reaches my calves. I begin the story of the Pleiades, women transformed into birds so Swift and bright that no man could snare them. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

I had finished a book yesterday and was in that annoying phase of still being so involved in its storyline that I was unable to commit to a new novel, although I had several waiting to be read. ~ Penelope Haines

A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve. ~ Salman Rushdie

What could there be in this document written by a young girl in 1917? ~ Peter J. Tanous

Early in his writing career Michael Lincoln expected he would look up from his word processor, out through his window and be able to take in the flat calm of the Pacific Ocean, or the choppy Atlantic. The North Sea, even, maybe the Thames river. Some body of water, surely. He glanced up from the first draft of his third crime novel and beheld the magnificent vista of Garrand's Scrap Yard in Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside. ~ GB Hope

Every happy moments looks perfect till it gets messy ~ Sheeja Jose

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life. ~ George Sand

I consciously try to end my novels at a point where I won't have to wonder about my characters ever again. ~ Anne Tyler

What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths. ~ Julian Barnes

Do you understand the meaning of the soil beneath your feet? ~ P.J. Parker

I have survived by representing these sufferings of mine in the form of the novel. ~ Kenzaburo Oe

F.R. Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel
for theeighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions
did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment. ~ Angela Carter

Radio, or at least the kind of radio we're proposing to do, can cut through that. It can reach people who would otherwise never hear your work, and of course I find that very notion inspiring. Radio stories are powerful because the human voice is powerful. It has been and will continue to be the most basic element of storytelling. As a novelist (and I should note that working my novel is the first thing I do in the morning and the very last thing I do before I sleep), shifting into this new medium is entirely logical. It's still narrative, only with different tools. ~ Daniel Alarcon

The novel ceases to be looked at as a novel. Such is the overwhelming power of motion pictures. Gore Vidal pointed out that the movies are the only thing anybody's really interested in. The association with movies and movie money can, and certainly did in my case, occlude a novel as a novel. ~ William Monahan

It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn. ~ Annie Dillard

The most important basis of any novel is wanting to be someone else, and this means creating a character. ~ Antonio Tabucchi

I've always longed to turn the last page of a romantic novel but it seems my life is destined to remain a book of short stories. ~ Michael Faudet

I met a man at a party. He said "I'm writing a novel" I said "Oh really? Neither am I. ~ Peter Cook

If you read the novel, you have expectations. And, if you've seen something first, it's just hard to do. ~ Chloe Grace Moretz

How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel! ~ Dodie Smith

For a moment, I wondered how different my life would have been had they been my parents, but I shook the thought away. I knew my father had done the best he could, and I had no regrets about the way I'd turned out. Regrets about the journey, maybe, but not the destination. Because however it had happened, I'd somehow ended up eating shrimp in a dingy downtown shack with a girl that I already knew I'd never forget. ~ Nicholas Sparks

I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read . The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy , and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again. ~ James A. Baldwin

I don't categorize myself as an 85-year-old woman who has written an erotic novel. I categorize myself as a writer who's written an erotic novel. ~ Gloria Vanderbilt

That was a lot of skin for a Tuesday. ~ Erin McCarthy