Novel Quotes

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Quotes About Novel

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The historical novel gives us perspective on our modern lives and helps us connect with the story, which we are continuing ourselves. ~ Mary Pope Osborne
Novel quotes by Mary Pope Osborne
And below, the notebook filled with fine cursive script, laying out in strict order conclusion and delusion, mingling myth and science, drawing from learned men and legends, all of it based on the power of dreams. To any casual observer, it could be either a muddle of half-thought-out nonsense or, at best, the outline for a clever-silly novel. Only to me did it have the look of a careful, deliberate plan. In ~ Diana Gabaldon
Novel quotes by Diana Gabaldon
I'm sick of the foodies who need every morsel that goes into their mouth to be a Picasso painting, a Giacometti sculpture, a Proust novel, evoking the world with each crumb. ~ Jessi Klein
Novel quotes by Jessi Klein
Isn't that how all romantics are, give love a chance? That was the sole basis of every romance novel out there; give love a chance. ~ Meghan Quinn
Novel quotes by Meghan Quinn
She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she'd read, novels, biographies, occasional books, about music and art - she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were things people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did. Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight, as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a passing vehicle; looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene; a man in an office looking over Regent's Park, rain in the street outside - a little blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the past thirty years. ~ Alan Hollinghurst
Novel quotes by Alan Hollinghurst
I can never forget that Chinese student I knew in Paris - Mr. Tcheou, I think it was. One day, upon asking him if he had ever read Hamlet, he answered: "You mean that novel by Jack London? ~ Henry Miller
Novel quotes by Henry Miller
I wrote a graphic novel called 'Soul Stealer' with big, beautiful, epic artwork by Chris Shy. It grew into a trilogy. ~ Michael Easton
Novel quotes by Michael Easton
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. ~ Anna Godbersen
Novel quotes by Anna Godbersen
Oh, oh. My heart starts that quivering, fluttering thing it does whenever he hints at his desire for me. Lacing his fingers through mine, he moves to close the gap between us. I know he's only holding my hand, but it's the manner in which his fingers curl around mine, and the way his eyes bore into me that makes it seem much more intimate. ~ Siobhan Davis
Novel quotes by Siobhan Davis
You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire - that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realise, no, it's just this book. ~ Michael Cunningham
Novel quotes by Michael Cunningham
I think that setting a novel in a small town taps into a sense of nostalgia among readers. People tend to believe life is different in small towns, and frankly, it is different. ~ Nicholas Sparks
Novel quotes by Nicholas Sparks
Life is like a thunderstorm, Sunny. You will lay in happiness one second, be torn asunder the next. What makes you who are is what you do when that thunderstorm arrives. You must gaze into that thunderstorm and stand up to it no matter where it takes you.
For they will see you as I see you, a hero. ~ Laura-Louise Slattery
Novel quotes by Laura-Louise Slattery
Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious. It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps to form us as complete human beings. It will not develop our awareness or add to the sum of our knowledge and intelligence. Read parts of a newspaper quickly or an encyclopaedia entry, or a fast-food thriller, but do not insult yourself or a book which has been created with its author's painstakingly acquired skill and effort, by seeing how fast you can dispose of it. ~ Susan Hill
Novel quotes by Susan Hill
Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was distasteful to her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people's lives. She had too great a desire to live herself. If she read that the heroine of the novel was nursing a sick man, she longed to move with noiseless steps about the room of a sick man; if she read of a member of Parliament making a speech, she longed to be delivering the speech; if she read of how Lady Mary had ridden after the hounds, and had provoked her sister-in-law, and had surprised everyone by her boldness, she too wished to be doing the same. But there was no chance of doing anything; and twisting the smooth paper knife in her little hands, she forced herself to read. ~ Leo Tolstoy
Novel quotes by Leo Tolstoy
I read Claire Messud's 'The Emperor's Children,' I read Joseph O'Neill's 'Netherland' - but to me, they're not 9/11 novels. In 'The Emperor's Children,' 9/11 felt to me like a piece of the plot; the novel wasn't wrestling with what 9/11 meant. And 'Netherland' felt the same way. I liked both books a lot but I don't see them as 9/11 novels. ~ Amy Waldman
Novel quotes by Amy Waldman
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
Novel quotes by Jorge Luis Borges
A bookworm in bed with a new novel and a good reading lamp is as much prepared for pleasure as a pretty girl at a college dance. ~ Phyllis McGinley
Novel quotes by Phyllis McGinley
Unfortunately, the story wasn't a novel, and it wasn't fiction. ~ Aleatha Romig
Novel quotes by Aleatha Romig
Whenever you have two characters in a book, whether it's a novel or nonfiction, you run the risk that the reader is going to like one more than the other. They're going to read one chapter and say, 'I can't wait to get back to the other guy.' ~ Mitch Albom
Novel quotes by Mitch Albom
I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out of me with steel pipes. ~ Patton Oswalt
Novel quotes by Patton Oswalt
I think, we can only write very personal matters through our experience. When I named my first novel about my son A Personal Matter, I believe I knew the most important thing: there is not any personal matter; we must find the link between ourselves, our personal matter, and society. ~ Kenzaburo Oe
Novel quotes by Kenzaburo Oe
My first novel was rejected by some of the most eminent publishers in the world. Starting again was a real wrench. ~ Wilbur Smith
Novel quotes by Wilbur Smith
The novel is the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered. ~ D.H. Lawrence
Novel quotes by D.H. Lawrence
I had a writing professor at Brandeis who told me I'd never make it - and when I sold my first novel a few years later, I sent him a copy! ~ Caroline Leavitt
Novel quotes by Caroline Leavitt
I'm happy when I write. I've written my first novel, my pencil is down. My last work has been written. No turning back. No more hesitation. I'm writing my future one page at a time. Inspire. Dream. Live. Breath. Happy. Succeed. ~ Missy Salick
Novel quotes by Missy Salick
Finding my way into a novel is always half the battle. ~ Kate Christensen
Novel quotes by Kate Christensen
By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast. ~ Vladimir Nabokov
Novel quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
I hadn't yet come to terms with the man my father was, or the lives he'd destroyed. But I accepted that he was part of me, and that he'd loved me once. ~ Elle Cosimano
Novel quotes by Elle Cosimano
I think graphic novels are closer to prose than film, which is a really different form. ~ Denise Mina
Novel quotes by Denise Mina
Out of an intuitive experience of the world comes a continuous flow of novel distinctions. Purely rational understanding, on the other hand, serves to confirm old mindsets, rigid categories. Artists, who live in the same world as the rest of us, steer clear of these mindsets to make us see things anew. ~ Ellen Langer
Novel quotes by Ellen Langer
But the doctors in the past, as the review of the evidence showed, branded Jenner, Semmelweis, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Pasteur, Lister, Koch and Keen as charlatans ... Napoleon said that war is too important to be left to the generals. We go on the assumption in the Senate that foreign relations are too important to be left to the diplomats ... this question (on a novel cancer cure) is too important to leave purely to doctors ... ~ Paul Douglas
Novel quotes by Paul Douglas
I don't assume, because I can write screenplays, that I know how to write a novel. It's a very different world. There's a craft involved in storytelling, and it's a different kind of craft. But yes, someday I will do that. It just might be awhile. ~ Melissa Rosenberg
Novel quotes by Melissa Rosenberg
Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it's seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I don't share that pessimism because I think it is one of the great inventions of the human spirit. ~ Richard Flanagan
Novel quotes by Richard Flanagan
It became a domino effect, as infected people took foolish risks, knowing full well they could spread the virus. ~ Jason Medina
Novel quotes by Jason Medina
Reading for me, was like breathing. It was probably akin to masturbation for my brain. Getting off on the fantasy within the pages of a good novel felt necessary to my survival. If I wasn't asleep, knitting, or working, I was reading. This was for several reasons, all of them focused around the infititely superior and enviable lives of fictional heroines to real-life people.
Take romans for instance. Fictional women in romance novels never get their period. They never have morning breath. They orgasm seventeen times a day. And they never seem to have jobs with bosses.
These clean, well-satisfied, perm-minty-breathed women have fulfilling careers as florists, bakery owners, hair stylists or some other kind of adorable small business where they decorate all day. If they do have a boss, he's a cool guy (or gal) who's invested in the woman's love life. Or, he's a super hot billionaire trying to get in her pants.
My boss cares about two things: Am I on time ? Are all my patients alive and well at the end of my shift?
And the mend in the romance novels are too good to be true; but I love it, and I love them. Enter stage right the independently wealthy venture capitalist suffering from the ennui of perfection until a plucky interior decorator enters stage left and shakes up his life and his heart with perky catch phrases and a cute nose that wrinkles when she sneezes.
I suck at decorating. The walls of my apartment are bare. I am allergic to most sto ~ Penny Reid
Novel quotes by Penny Reid
I first heard the term "meta-novel" at a writer's conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The idea is that even though each book in a series stands alone, when read collectively they form one big ongoing novel about the main character. Each book represents its own arc: in book one of the series we meet the character and establish a meta-goal that will carry him through further books, in book two that meta-goal is tested, in book three - you get the picture. ~ Carolyn Wheat
Novel quotes by Carolyn Wheat
It's a great euphoria when you reach that writing zone. ~ Paul T. Scheuring
Novel quotes by Paul T. Scheuring
Dracula can sustain many interpretations and exists in many phantasmal forms ... and Johnny Alucard is my attempt to explore the multiplicity of Draculas unloosed on the world in the long wake of Stoker's novel. ~ Kim Newman
Novel quotes by Kim Newman
Joaquin Jackson's frank and colorful account of his long career as a modern-day Texas Ranger thrills like an action novel, yet the stories are true, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, but always gripping. I could hardly put the book down ... The writing is superb. ~ Elmer Kelton
Novel quotes by Elmer Kelton
There are some short essays that are very grave, and most contemporary novels are lighter than air. ~ Fran Lebowitz
Novel quotes by Fran Lebowitz
In modern novels I try to not let myself get away and to be here, and that's why I write about my life and myself. But even when I do that there's an element of disappearing to a place that's not me. It's "the selflessness of writing". It seldom happens, but when it does it's worth quite a lot. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard
Novel quotes by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Novels must have verisimilitude, and truth has little enough of that. ~ Louis Auchincloss
Novel quotes by Louis Auchincloss
I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks. ~ Jeanette Winterson
Novel quotes by Jeanette Winterson
Last week I was just someone who had had a first novel published. ~ Jon McGregor
Novel quotes by Jon McGregor
It's not just the books Alba craves, it's standing inside a place that houses millions of them. Libraries are Alba's churches, and the university library, containing one edition of every book ever published in England, is her cathedral. ~ Menna Van Praag
Novel quotes by Menna Van Praag
[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived. ~ Richard Peck
Novel quotes by Richard Peck
Bet on technical insights that help solve a big problem in a novel way, optimize for scale, not for revenue, and let great products grow the market for everyone. ~ Eric Schmidt
Novel quotes by Eric Schmidt
Successful fiction does not need to be validated by 'real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is 'real'. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Novel quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any. ~ Jean Rhys
Novel quotes by Jean Rhys
I actually started trying to be a professional writer with novels, and I wrote two that exist and are around ... kind of. But they never really went anyplace in particular. I still like them both. What it showed me was that you can spend years on a novel, and then it could just be, like, OK, you spent that time and that's that. ~ Charles Soule
Novel quotes by Charles Soule
It's always the ones we're not supposed to have who are the most irresistible. ~ E.M. Denning
Novel quotes by E.M. Denning
As always with the greatest works, the novel is so many-sided that over time it mirrors back the shifting concerns of those who read it, and that is the definition of a classic. ~ Carl F. Hovde
Novel quotes by Carl F. Hovde
Worker bees can leave.
Even drones can fly away.
The Queen is their slave. ~ Chuck Palahniuk
Novel quotes by Chuck Palahniuk
I had read a Tale of Two Cities and found it up to my standards as a romantic novel. She opened the first page and I heard poetry for the first time in my life ... her voice slid in and curved down trough and over the words. She was nearly singing. ~ Maya Angelou
Novel quotes by Maya Angelou
I'd never beat you black and blue. I aim for pink.
Christian Grey ~ E.L. James
Novel quotes by E.L. James
In 'Open City,' there is a passage that any reader of Joyce will immediately recognise as a very close, formal analogue of one the stories in 'Dubliners.' That is because a novel is also a literary conversation. ~ Teju Cole
Novel quotes by Teju Cole
At Oxford University, I studied languages so I could read the great novels as they were originally written. I took what in the United States would be a double major in Russian and French, but I have to admit that the pressure of getting through so many books spoiled reading for me. ~ Kate Beckinsale
Novel quotes by Kate Beckinsale
The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens. As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved, it's the citizen who changes things. I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. ~ Jose Saramago
Novel quotes by Jose Saramago
If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea. ~ Elizabeth Bowen
Novel quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
It was an old fashioned house
the sort of house in fact, as Strange expressed it, which a lady in a novel might like to be persecuted in. ~ Susanna Clarke
Novel quotes by Susanna Clarke
Though I didn't quite plan it that way, I had my two sons at just about the same ages my mother saw me and my sister off to college, and my first novel was published when I was 46. This 'tardiness' isn't something I'm proud of, but I'm happy to be an inspiration to others who arrive at these milestones later than most of us do. ~ Julia Glass
Novel quotes by Julia Glass
It is often too easy to explain a novel idea to a few enlightened persons with a few words. But to enlighten about the same to many people, too many words are often required ~ Anuj
Novel quotes by Anuj
I kept starting 'Anansi Boys' as a movie and stopping, and eventually wrote the novel and was happy. ~ Neil Gaiman
Novel quotes by Neil Gaiman
I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing. ~ Joan Didion
Novel quotes by Joan Didion
I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels. ~ Tobias Wolff
Novel quotes by Tobias Wolff
Whatever our problems are, dreams can provide novel ideas and sometimes magnificent resolutions. ~ Patricia Garfield
Novel quotes by Patricia Garfield
Lately, because computer technology has made self-publishing an easier and less expensive venture, I'm getting a lot of review copies of amateur books by writers who would be better advised to hone their craft before committing it to print. The best thing you can do as a beginning writer is to write, write, write - and read, read, read. Concentrating on publication prematurely is a mistake. You don't pick up a violin and expect to play Carnegie Hall within the year - yet somehow people forget that writing also requires technical skills that need to be learned, practiced, honed. If I had a dollar for every person I've met who thought, with no prior experience, they could sit down and write a novel and instantly win awards and make their living as a writer, I'd be a rich woman today. It's unrealistic, and it's also mildly insulting to professional writers who have worked hard to perfect their craft. Of course, then you hear stories about people like J.K. Rowling, who did sit down with no prior experience and write a worldwide best-seller...but such people are as rare as hen's teeth. Every day I work with talented, accomplished writers who have many novels in print and awards to their name and who are 'still' struggling to make a living. The thing I often find myself wanting to say to new writers is: Write because you love writing, learn your craft, be patient, and be realistic. Anais Nin said about writing, "It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it bre ~ Terri Windling
Novel quotes by Terri Windling
Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? ~ Mary Shelley
Novel quotes by Mary Shelley
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little ... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
Novel quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
He wanted to know about day-to-day life in America, what people ate and what consumed them, what shamed them and what attracted them, but he read novel after novel and was disappointed: ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Novel quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
It is a mistake to think of the expatriate as someone who abdicates, who withdraws and humbles himself, resigned to his miseries, his outcast state. On a closer look, he turns out to be ambitious, aggressive in his disappointments, his very acrimony qualified by his belligerence. The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and illusions become. I even discern some relation between misfortune and megalomania. The man who has lost everything preserves as a last resort the hope of glory, or of literary scandal. He consents to abandon everything, except his name. [ . . . ]

Let us say a man writes a novel which makes him, overnight, a celebrity. In it he recounts his sufferings. His compatriots in exile envy him: they too have suffered, perhaps more. And the man without a country becomes - or aspires to become - a novelist. The consequence: an accumulation of confusions, an inflation of horrors, of frissons that date. One cannot keep renewing Hell, whose very characteristic is monotony, or the face of exile either. Nothing in literature exasperates a reader so much as The Terrible; in life, it too is tainted with the obvious to rouse our interest. But our author persists; for the time being he buries his novel in a drawer and awaits his hour. The illusion of surprise, of a renown which eludes his grasp but on which he reckons, sustains him; he lives on unreality. Such, however, is the power of this illusion that if, for instance, he works in some factor ~ Emil M. Cioran
Novel quotes by Emil M. Cioran
Naturalness onstage is just as much an artifice as naturalism in the novel ~ Julian Barnes
Novel quotes by Julian Barnes
Not getting bored of my own story and/or character is one of the main struggles I have had with novel writing, and I have put to bed big chunks of work that just didn't sustain my interest. ~ Aimee Bender
Novel quotes by Aimee Bender
My Eyes Are Open But I'm Hardly Looking In The Front ... Everything's Passing Me, Some Are Staring But My Eyes Are Blank, I'm Seeing But Not Seeing As My Mind Is Not Sending The Message To My Brains To Produce Images ... I'm Walking Alone Yet Full of People Around Me ... I'm Walking Forward ... There's No Feeling As I'm Numb ... Only Thing I Know, I Have To Finish My Ride Before My Time Expires ... So I'm Walking With Blank Emotion In My Eyes ...
(* Excerpt From My Novel "Eastern Promise") ~ Muhammad Imran Hasan
Novel quotes by Muhammad Imran Hasan
Maybe they'll start making serialized movies. I watched the first couple seasons of '24' and it's really fun. I bought the DVD and watched it over a month or so and it's great. It's like reading a novel. It has a lot of possibilities that are more difficult to accomplish with a film. ~ Jeremy Sisto
Novel quotes by Jeremy Sisto
Respect can be as elusive as the unicorn. I know something of this because I write books that are set in the Middle Ages, and the historical novel is often seen as the unwanted stepchild in the fictional family. I know even more about respect - or the lack thereof - because I live in New Jersey. ~ Sharon Kay Penman
Novel quotes by Sharon Kay Penman
A gaping chasm separates what we try to be aware of and what we actually are aware of. And I don't care how long your yardstick is, there's no measuring that drop. What I can set down here in writing only amounts to a catalog. Not a novel, not literature, not even art. Just a notebook with a line ruled down the center. And maybe a lesson or two in it somewhere. ~ Haruki Murakami
Novel quotes by Haruki Murakami
Now, as a reader, you shouldn't feel the decisions the writer makes about this DNA, or it would be boring beyond belief. But, as a writer, you're struggling to make these decisions. What should the title be? What's the first line? The point of view? And the struggle with the decisions is because you're trying to figure out WHAT IS THE NOVEL, WHAT IS THE NOVEL? ~ Mary Kay Zuravleff
Novel quotes by Mary Kay Zuravleff
Even Proust - there's a famous passage where Odette opens the door with a cold, she's sulky, her hair is loose and undone, her skin is patchy, and Swann, who has never cared about her until that moment, falls in love with her because she looks like a Botticelli girl from a slightly damaged fresco. Which Proust himself only knew from a reproduction. He never saw the original, in the Sistine Chapel. But even so - the whole novel is in some ways about that moment. And the damage is part of the attraction, the painting's blotchy cheeks. Even through a copy Proust was able to re-dream that image, re-shape reality with it, pull something all his own from it into the world. Because - the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times. ~ Donna Tartt
Novel quotes by Donna Tartt
Many years from now when your children ask what New York City was like just after 9/11, this will be the book you give them in response. It's an exquisite novel full of heart, soul, passion and intelligence, and it's the one this great New York author was born to write. ~ Lee Child
Novel quotes by Lee Child
I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn't mix, don't mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don't talk about that, that itself is a political thing. ~ Mohsin Hamid
Novel quotes by Mohsin Hamid
It seems to me that one of the things that happened with a lot of literary fiction in the 1980s and 1990s was that it became very concerned with the academy and less with how people live their lives. We got to a point where the crime novel stepped into the breach. It was also a time when the crime novel stopped being so metropolitan. ~ Val McDermid
Novel quotes by Val McDermid
Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash. ~ William Faulkner
Novel quotes by William Faulkner
Many writers will get a contract by selling chapters and outlines or something like that. I wrote the entire novel, and when it was all finished, I would give it to my agent and say, 'Well, here's a novel; sell it if you can.' And they would do that, and it was good because I never had anyone looking over my shoulder. ~ George R R Martin
Novel quotes by George R R Martin
Friendship is our home, we'll go home someday. ~ Alvi Syahrin
Novel quotes by Alvi Syahrin
Dare I ask Mao and his Communist Party?
I fear my throat will be cut into two pieces.
In the name of revolution, for thought crimes,
Such questions can turn me to ashes. ~ Zoe S. Roy
Novel quotes by Zoe S. Roy
I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from. ~ Flannery O'Connor
Novel quotes by Flannery O'Connor
Novel-writing is not so much a profession as a yoga, or "way," an alternative to ordinary life-in-the-world. Its benefits are quasi-religious - a changed quality of mind and heart, satisfactions no non-novelist can understand - and its rigors generally bring no profit except to the spirit. For those who are authentically called to the profession, spiritual profits are enough.
John Gardner ~ Marcy Sheiner
Novel quotes by Marcy Sheiner
There is a novella inside every anus; there is a broken heart inside every mind; there is a bisected hug inside every arm; there is a pun inside every belly. "The Great American Novel," thinks the typographer, who at this point is severely constipated. He tries to squeeze out an 'o' but can't. "The Great American Navel," he says, then waits for a laugh. ~ Jimmy Chen
Novel quotes by Jimmy Chen
I've told youngsters not to write their autobiographical novel at the age of twenty-one; to save it for the time when they're fifty-one or sixty-one. They should write other novels first, to learn their craft; they shouldn't cut their teeth on the valuable material of childhood because they'll never have better material, ever, to work with. ~ Laura Z. Hobson
Novel quotes by Laura Z. Hobson
Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things. ~ Jonathan Raban
Novel quotes by Jonathan Raban
I am trying to imagine under what novel features despotism may appear in the world. In the first place, I see an innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, constantly circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls. Each one of them, withdrawn into himself, is almost unaware of the fate of the rest….

Over this kind of men stands an immense, protective power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment and watching over their fate. That power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle. It would resemble parental authority if, fatherlike, it tried to prepare charges for a man's life, but on the contrary, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood. It likes to see the citizens enjoy themselves, provided that they think of nothing but enjoyment. It gladly works for their happiness but wants to be sole agent and judge of it. It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasure, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, makes rules for their testaments, and divides their inheritances. Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living?

Thus it daily makes the exercise of free choice less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties. Equality has prepare ~ Alexis De Tocqueville
Novel quotes by Alexis De Tocqueville
The imperfect is the tense of fascination: it seems to be alive and yet it doesn't move: imperfect presence, imperfect death; neither oblivion nor resurrection; simply the exhausting lure of memory. From the start, greedy to play a role, scenes take their position in memory: often I feel this, I foresee this, at the very moment when these scenes are forming. - This theater of time is very contrary of the search of lost time; for I remember pathetically, punctually, and not philosophically, discursively: I remember in order to be unhappy/happy - not in order to understand. I do not write, I do not shut myself up in order to write the enormous novel of time recaptured. ~ Roland Barthes
Novel quotes by Roland Barthes
My ultimate authority would be the school librarian Mrs. Greenbacher. ~ Shawn Stewart Ruff
Novel quotes by Shawn Stewart Ruff
Etta gave Will a small, knowing smile. Will, sometimes you have to love people for who they are, not who you want them to be. ~ Deanna Lynn Sletten
Novel quotes by Deanna Lynn Sletten
If Miss Elton spoke water instead of words, then there would have been a repetition of Noah's flood. ~ Kellyn Roth
Novel quotes by Kellyn Roth
Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going. ~ Penelope Lively
Novel quotes by Penelope Lively
Anyone who had ever read a novel knew that governesses were supposed to be meek and downtrodden. ~ Lisa Kleypas
Novel quotes by Lisa Kleypas
I guess I've always been an aspiring novelist. I went to Princeton and wrote a novel for my thesis. ~ Howard Gordon
Novel quotes by Howard Gordon
Children, Hadley thinks to herself, children are more civilised than this gang on the sauce. ~ Naomi Wood
Novel quotes by Naomi Wood
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