Tarnished Novel Quotes

Wow! tarnished drew me right into the diabolical world of Dale and Isabel. They are two of the most coldblooded killers the medical profession may have ever produced. --- Valerie Graves of New York - an Internationally known Advertising and Marketing Executive who also was creative consultant for the '92 Clinton/Gore campaign ~ Willie Stewart

It occurred to me that falling in love was like jumping off a cliff. You know it's gonna hurt like hell, but you do it anyway, hoping you'll sprout wings and fly. I was still waiting to see if I would plunge to an agonizing death or grow wings and soar. ~ Densie Webb

Not much to say except to warn you not to get too serious about all this, if you want to become a writer of fiction in the future. If you intend to become a critic, that is a Whale of another color ... Playing around with symbols, even as a critic, can be a kind of kiddish parlor game. A little of it goes a long way. There are other things of greater value in any novel or story ... humanity, character analysis, truth on other levels ... Good symbolism should be as natural as breathing ... and as unobtrusive. ~ Ray Bradbury

The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind. ~ W.S. Gilbert

Conspiracies and all the theories of conspiracy are a part of the canon of fakes. And I'm involved, in all of my writings, the theoretical ones as well as the novels, with the production of fakes. ~ Umberto Eco

The great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Careful you'll end up in my novel."
(Love this quote--wish I could take credit for it.) ~ Cynthia Kumanchik

One of the things about writing a novel is you can do it any way you want. It's your voice that's important and I see absolutely no reason why a screenplay can't be the same. It makes it a hell of a lot easier when you're the writer and the director. ~ Quentin Tarantino

No ... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly. ~ Octavia Butler

Unlikely truths are useful and life is full of them, far more than the very worst of novels, no novel would ever dare give houseroom to the infinite number of chances and coincidences that can occur in a single lifetime, let alone all those that have already occurred and continue to occur. It's quite shameful the way reality imposes no limits on itself. ~ Javier Marias

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

She was quit a handsome man, my sister. ~ Wataru Watari

Their conversations were often charged with an excitement out of proportion to what they talked about... Their words seemed to glimmer in the air between them, dangerous metallic threads that quickly connected both of them to books and ideas, to language itself. The jailer told Teza about the daring subject matter of the famous writer Ju's recent novel, in which a passionate young man falls in love with an older woman, but the story, as he was telling it, became a metaphor for their own deepening and forbidden association....Teza refused to act like a prisoner, which freed Chit Naing from acting like a jailer. ~ Karen Connelly

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words. ~ Orhan Pamuk

Few people in one's life ever go quite away. They turn up again like characters in a Simon Raven novel. It is as if Fate is a movie producer who cannot afford to keep introducing new characters into the script but must get as many scenes out of every actor as possible. ~ Stephen Fry

Do you plan on marrying Charles?"
She shook her head.
"Good. I wouldn't want to shoot him, but I would."
... Finding Promise ~ Scarlett Dunn

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

In a novel, on the other hand, you not only have to describe the rooms, but the clothes, the characters and what they are thinking. It's a much more in-depth process. ~ Sidney Sheldon

Many lonely people, Strike knew, found it pleasant to be the focus of somebody's undivided attention and sought to prolong the novel experience. ~ Robert Galbraith

The critic interested in a novel manifestation holds his criteria and taste in reserve. Since they were formed upon yesterday's art, he does not assume that they are ready-made for today. ~ Leo Steinberg

To talk nonsense in one's own way is almost better than to talk a truth that's someone else's ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely. ~ Don DeLillo

They put exclusively black history in the syllabus. Is there a difference between a black history of the world and a proper history? They say children must read black novels. Does a novel have a skin colour? ~ Imraan Coovadia

In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a character's and let his perceptions take over. ~ Elizabeth Moon

Writing a novel and living a life are very much the same thing. The secret is finding the balance between going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way. ~ Ann Patchett

The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time. ~ Wilkie Collins

I hope you don't mind my joining you, said Leanne. I minded. After all, she'd tried to kill me. A girl in a novel would say it was hard to believe, but it wasn't. ~ Franny Billingsley

Never engage to play with a troubled mind or excited emotions. Lucidity of mind is crucial and once once's emotions become engaged in the play all is lost ... ~ Emery Lee

I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior. I am really interested in feelings and think they are what define us as a species. When you really get it right in acting, it's an act of empathy. You feel less distant from others, and that is really exciting. ~ Claire Danes

You no longer have much in the way of knowing what to do in a big, epic novel about the future, because nobody knows what the hell is going to happen. ~ Jerry Pournelle

I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box. ~ Ellen Goodman

My illusion, the idea of a soul mate, was so entrenched in my fantasy that the thought of letting him go, wrecked me. ~ M.R. Field

The language in a comic book or a graphic novel and the cinematographic language are really not the same language. They are false brother and sister. It's not at all the same. ~ Marjane Satrapi

The image of a teenage boy dressed in a black uniform, his babyish face partly obscured by an official looking cap, paralysed every muscle and nerve in her body. The pink telegram loomed large in her line of sight... ~ Michael J. Murphy

A movie can evoke feelings, thoughts, it is all there and happening, there is no control over the images when you are watching a movie. You are transported for three hours to a world where you see real people. In a novel it is private - there's only you, and words on pages. The landscape is in your mind and in your feelings. ~ Jay Neugeboren

As it is I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I had never written Voss, which is going to be everybody's albatross. ~ Patrick White

Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder. ~ Jane Gardam

Quote taken from Chapter 1:
That's the idea. Listen, Frank, this one is different. She's a keeper." He let that part gel in me. "Get your head screwed on straight and move to Richmond. You hate it living in Pelham. ~ Ed Lynskey

I tell my students that with a 200-page novel, you are going to write 100 pages that don't make the final cut. See it as an opportunity, although it took me a while to enjoy that 'lost in the woods' feeling. ~ Joe Meno

I'm guessing you're tits deep in a horror novel. Something by Laymon, or Ketchum, or one of those sick fucks you read. ~ Kyle M. Scott

It was boring like reading a Scandinavian novel. ~ Ernst Junger

Write that novel. Start that business you've always wanted to. The ultimate high of life is the commitment to pursuing something. ~ Diana Nyad

Remember that a good football novel has to have the same ingredients as any other good novel: drama, convincing and interesting characters, a strong story-line, and some kind of magic in the writing. ~ Mal Peet

We mature not by years, but by stories…" from Cinderella In Focus:Cindy's Secret ~ H.L. Balcomb

Their world is like the one that George Orwell depicted in his novel. I'm sure you realize that there are plenty of people who are looking for exactly that kind of brain death. It makes life a lot easier. You don't have to think about difficult things, just shut up and do what your superiors tell you to do. You never have to starve. ~ Haruki Murakami

Your characters are always your children. And while you are writing, you're keeping them safe. Now they're ready to go into the world and it's sad. I'm happy with the way the novel came out but all the characters' ending really saddened me. ~ Yiyun Li

Day after day we read about them, each new man more brilliant than the last. They were not just an all-star first team, but an all-star second team as well. There were counts kept on how many Rhodes scholars there were in the Administration, how many books by members of the new Administration (even the Postmaster, J. Edward Day, had written a novel, albeit a bad one). ~ David Halberstam

This is not the proper place to begin speaking of this new passion of Ivan Fyodorovich's, which later affected his whole life: it could all serve as the plot for another story, for a different novel, which I do not even know that I shall ever undertake. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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. ~ Ashwin Sanghi

We are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves - such a friend ought to be - do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures. ~ Mary Shelley