Best 1169 quotes in «novel quotes» category

A Marxist has never written a good novel.

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.

And would it have been worth it, after all, Would it have been worth while, After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor - And this, and so much more? -

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

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

Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don't know what the hell is going on.

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 captures essence that is not possible in any other form.

A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

A novel is a tricky thing to map.

A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.

A novel must show how the world truly is. Somehow, reveals the true source of our actions.

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

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.

Anyone who had ever read a novel knew that governesses were supposed to be meek and downtrodden.

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

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.