Best 1169 quotes in «novel quotes» category

Barchester Towers has become one of those novels which do not die quite at once, which live and are read for perhaps a quarter of a century.

Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.

Before trying a novel I wrote a couple of plays.

Between history and the novel stands biography, their unwanted offspring, which has brought a great embarrassment to them both.

Continuous present is all we have, and stream of consciousness - which in a novel is arguably just as artificial as the stilted dialogue that you get in most conventional novels. They're all stratagems to try to get closer to the texture of lived life.

But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel — independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.

But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it.

Comics are stories; they're like novels or anything else. So the first thing you have to do is become a good storyteller.

Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.

But are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid? [Referring to Gothic novels, fashionable in England at the beginning of the 19th century, but frowned upon in polite society.]

Daisy had known the novel was silly even as she had read it, but that had not detracted one bit from her enjoyment.

Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if "X" happened? That's how you start.

Design is about crafting an experience that is unfamiliar enough to feel novel, yet familiar enough to instill confidence.

Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: You have to learn the rhythms of respiration - acquire the pace. Otherwise you stop right away.

Ever since I was in my teens I had plans at one point in my life to write a novel.

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.

Every novel is-at the beginning-the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space.

Every novel starts with a theme, and I am constantly looking for big ideas.

Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn't be.

Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I've heard.

England offers new comforts. I could write a novel there.

Every once in a while I feel the tremendous force of the novel. But it does not stay with me.

Few of us write great novels; all of us live them.

Few novels or plays could exist without at least one troublemaker in the group, and perhaps life couldn't either.

For a bookworm like Mother, a Brontë novel sister was better than a biological one.

Fiction novels, that's my game.

For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. But I don't intend my novels as puzzles. I intend them as invitations to dance.

for me the novel is a social vehicle, it reflects society.

Ford's last Fifth Queen novel is amazing. The whole cycle is a noble conception.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.

For some it is harder to write a novel than to row a bathtub across the North Atlantic.

Getting 10,000 listeners for a free podcast novel is a lot easier than selling 10,000 hardcover novels at $25 a pop.

Glenda Adams has written a wicked and witty novel.

Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites.

Good travel books are novels at heart.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.

He brought his great hand to rest on an early edition of Bram Stoker's novel and smiled, but said nothing. Then he moved quietly away into another section.

Has all the trappings of a mystery novel, doesn't it?

Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.

He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.

He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.

He wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything except herself.

History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.

History is a novel which did take place; a novel is history that could take place.

History begins in novel and ends in essay.

I always begin [a novel] with outlines, but they change and so do my endings and beginnings.

How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel!