Best 1169 quotes in «novel quotes» category

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.

Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.

To be a classic, a novel should be original.

Today I began the novel that I determined to be great.

To have her meals, and her daily walk, and her fill of novels, and to be left alone, was all that she asked of the gods.

Vampire? Such a provocative word, wrapped in too many clichés and girly novels.

We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works

We are not telling Tudor history; we are creating ' Wolf Hall ' from novels, which are already a rereading of Tudor history.

Though my short stories are the more readable, my novels do have more to say; and they will, if anyone has the patience for it, repay a rereading.

Typically in my novels the narrator tells a story by remembering, and the memories are colored by this and colored by that. So the whole universe of the novel tends to be framed by the narrator's memories and thoughts.

Watergate is an immensely complicated scandal with a cast of characters as varied as a Tolstoy novel.

We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?

We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.

We have to diversify, we have to find work we can do that helps other people while helping ourselves, work that has to do with writing that isn't necessarily just writing saleable novels or getting huge advances.

We're all just animals. That's all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That's where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.

We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: The more connected we become, the lonelier we are.

What you can do with a short story that you can't do with a novel is punch someone in the gut, in the best of ways.

What do you do when Mom leaves you alone like this? (Kat) I write romance novels. (Acheron)

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

When I'm filling notebooks I'm trying to pin down what I'm really interested in and to find those details that are so hard to come by, details that I can look at and believe are right on the mark. Things which bring a novel to life. They can take a while to come.

When I write, I get glimpses into future novels.

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.

When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks.

When I worked as an editor, I read new novels being published in India every few days. They excited me tremendously for the first fifty pages or so, and boasted some true linguistic genius at times, but none of those writers could occupy more than one mind at once.

When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.

When you read a novel, you know what to expect because you've been reading novels for a long time.

When someone asks me to list the 10 best novels ever written, I always refuse to answer.

With Ibrahim al-Koni, what I figured out was - and you'll see this in his novels - if your time is limited, make the unit of the chapters small so that you can finish one a day, at least in the first draft. Once you have the first draft it's living, and you can coax it to grow and trim it and reshape it and so on. But get that first draft. I think if I'd gone to an MFA program and learned that, it would have been money well spent. But translation has been that for me.

Whether early or late, the Parker novels are all superlative literary entertainments.

Why did people ask "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing.

Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.

Working on an essay versus a novel is like the difference between seeing to that curtain and seeing to New Jersey.

Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.

Writing a novel, I am making is an object that has a life and identity of its own, apart from me.

Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational.

Writing novels is the most exciting

You are accidentally leaving your DNA all over everything in a novel because it's all coming from you.

You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.

You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.

You write your first novel with the desperation of the damned. You're afraid that you'll never write anything else, ever again.

A girl without braids is like a city without bridges.

A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.

A great book increases my heartbeat as if I’m prey, melts my insides in anticipation of a first kiss, immerses me in its depths.

A história de todas as grandes civilizações galácticas tende a passar por três fases distintas e identificáveis: a da Sobrevivência, a da Interrogação e a da Sofisticação, também conhecidas pelas fases Como, Porquê e Onde. Por exemplo, a primeira fase é caracterizada pela pergunta "Como vamos comer?", a segunda pela pergunta "Por que comemos?" e a terceira pela pergunta "Onde vamos almoçar?".

With relatively few exceptions, the novel sacrifices too much, for me, on the altar of plot.

You know, the point of a novel - or to me, the point of a novel, the gift of a novel is to go really deeply inside people's lives and inside their personal experiences.

You need a theme in a picture book just as much or maybe even more than you need it in a novel.

About some books we feel that our reluctance to return to them is the true measure of our admiration. It is hard to suppose that many people go back, from a spontaneous desire, to reread 1984: there is neither reason nor need to, no one forgets it. The usual distinctions between forgotten details and a vivid general impression mean nothing here, for the book is written out of one passionate breath, each word is bent to a severe discipline of meaning, everything is stripped to the bareness of terror. Kafka's The Trial is also a book of terror, but it is a paradigm and to some extent a puzzle, so that one may lose oneself in the rhythm of the paradigm and play with the parts of the puzzle. Kafka's novel persuades us that life is inescapably hazardous and problematic, but the very 'universality' of this idea helps soften its impact: to apprehend the terrible on the plane of metaphysics is to lend it an almost soothing aura.

A couple hours went by, and the storm began to turn back to the sea. The dark clouds rolled away, leaving white, fluffy ones in their place. We were safe, and the rock in the distance was still there. We stepped out of the car and walked over to the rock, noticing the families of seals were back again. The seals were strong and ready to make it through any storm that would fall their way. My parents’ love was still there; that is what love means. I envy that love, and I hoped to find it someday... and I did.

A familiarity had been activated in a reoccurring theme that had been ignited from a recognizable old pattern of self distancing behavior. The tone of Laura’s voice and the poise of her body language seemed to shrug at the expectations of Ed’s reconciliatory efforts. It felt to Ed as though their relationship was right back to the same rugged place that it had been at before their vacation; right back to a recondite square one. It seemed like any connecting that had been accomplished had all unraveled into a recoiled heap of uncertainty.