Best 1169 quotes in «novel quotes» category

Your passions don’t have to connect to one another and no one needs to sign off on them. Passion isn’t logical… it’s only the fuel which keeps our souls alive. Let it be that simple.

You said my name and my heart went rogue

You shouldn’t have done that, Dave.

You’ve lied to me. You’ve hid things from me. How dare you talk to me like we’re still friends, like we ever mattered to you at all?--Sydney Field

[ Adult novels] was the world of grownups. There was nothing about teenagers.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

After writing each novel, I would spend days poring over suggestions from my editor.

A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market - it knows nothing about target markets.

A good novel editor is invisible.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

All my novels are rooted in their time and in their place.

All novels are experimental.

Almost without exception, my novels are rooted in Israel because that's the place I know well.

A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.

Am I worried people will say I'm repeating myself? Sure. One thought I had was to publish it as a novel but eventually I just decided to do what I wanted to do.

Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

A novel is a conversation starter, and if the author isn't there for the after-party, both the writer and the reader are missing a lot.

A novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.

A novel should be as like life as a painting, but not as like life as a piece of waxwork.

A novel is like a window, open to an infinite landscape.

A novel is really like a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.

A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.

Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.

Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.

Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel

Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.

As a student in England, I studied French and English literature. I read L'Etranger and the rhythm of the novel felt familiar to me - very African.

A scrupulous man will never produce a great novel.

As for writing about temptation, there's no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.

At a certain point my novels set. They set just as hard as that jam jar. And then I know they are finished.

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.

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

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.]

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.

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.

You taste injustice, even if it’s fictional, really taste it,it has a way of doing that. Sometimes, you can never put the shoe on the other foot. We can’t go back in time and know what it was like to be a black person then. Even today, when things are supposed to be so much better, not one of you can understand what it’s like to be black, to live with the knowledge of what happened to your ancestry and still face injustice. But that book makes us taste it and, reading it, we know how bitter that taste is and we know we don’t like it. But that bitter wakes you up, and when you wake up, you open your mind to things in this world, you make yourself think. Then you’ll decide you don’t like the taste of injustice, not for you and not for anyone, and you’ll understand that even though all the battles can’t be won, that doesn’t mean you won’t fight.

About writing I learned that always, always, always it's necessary to haunt your settings. I'm a big researcher. All my fiction is based on tons of digging. But the vital importance of actually traveling to the settings of a novel really hit me. And it's not just the setting details, not just the visuals and other sensory data, that will pop. You'll find surprising clues that swerve your story in whole new, deeper, surprising, more organic ways.

A good novel cannot be too long or a bad novel too short.

A great novel is worth one thousand films.

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

All my novels are rooted in their time and in their place. The place of my novels is Israel, almost without exception. Almost without exception, my novels are rooted in Israel because that's the place I know well. And, that's my gutsy advice to any young writer: write only about what you know well. Don't write about that which you don't know.

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.

All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.

A Marxist has never written a good novel.