Best 1169 quotes in «novel quotes» category

The Holocaust is not a cheap soap opera. The Holocaust is not a romantic novel. It is something else.

The ideal kitchen-sink novel: Throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Then add the kitchen sink.

The incredible stability in inflation is really a novel human experience. And the inflation is being the result of money.

The ingredients that make a good poem often differ from those that make a good essay and from those that make a good novel.

The love of novels is the preference of sentiment to the senses.

The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer; it's possessed by the reader.

The new novel is sought more eagerly, and devoured more greedily, the New Testament.

The novel is never really in the first draft. The novel really happens in the revisions.

The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.

The novel's not organized like a screenplay. If you shot the novel, you'd have a twelve-hour movie.

The novel ceases to be looked at as a novel. Such is the overwhelming power of motion pictures. Gore Vidal pointed out that the movies are the only thing anybody's really interested in. The association with movies and movie money can, and certainly did in my case, occlude a novel as a novel.

The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.

The novel moves like all the arts. It's transforming itself all the time.

The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.

The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.

The novel remains a very special form for me.

The novel is a penetrating study of morals and ethics.

The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

The novel will never die, but it will keep changing and evolving and taking different shapes.

The novels were an escape from reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection. Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.

The novel tradition is the closest thing I have to a religion, and being a part of that tradition means a lot to me. I don't really see - I never have seen - why I should have to forfeit that feeling, or hope, of belonging, just because the stories I want to tell are close to my own experience.

The Pacific Northwest, and particularly Whidbey Island, is extremely suited to be a location in a novel.

The opening novel of the 'Bayou Trilogy' was the first one I finished.

The ordinariness of living to be old is too novel a thing to appreciate.

The problem isn't finding out where you are gonna go-its figuring out what you are gonna do once you get there that is! (Jamie Sullivan)

The plot is not very important to me, though a novel must have one, of course. It's just a line to hang the washing on.

The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?

There are few punishments too severe for a popular novel writer.

There are some short essays that are very grave, and most contemporary novels are lighter than air.

The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.

There is no better way of elevating the novel than by making it into a construct which contains ideas.

There are many things behind a good novel, but in particular there is a lot of work - a lot of patience, a lot of stubbornness, and a critical spirit.

The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.

There're no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels, and then I read them again, and it's the best thing.

There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, "Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth." It's funny.

There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better.

There's never a false note in a Berg novel.

'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.

the slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon

There's something really nice about writing something on Wednesday and watching it being performed live for a studio audience on Tuesday. You never really get that with novels.

The smallest quantity of alcohol scares away novel ideas.

The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.

"The State of the Jews" was not a title of a country. It was a title of a futuristic novel.

The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel.

The truth is, I wrote a novel when I was 23. It's hideously bad. Truly rotten.

The writer's job is not to write a novel, hold it up and say, “Here I am,” but to write a novel, hold it up and say, “Here YOU are.

There isn't, unfortunately, any way of discovering whether you can write a publishable novel except by writing it.

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