Best 1169 quotes in «novel quotes» category

You have to wait for your mind to catch up with whatever it is it’s working on; then you can write a novel.

You know what feels really fucking awesome? Loving someone so much that it's all consuming. Telling that person you love them, even though they refuse to say it back. And then finally hearing them say that they do love you, but to someone else. To someone they have slept with. Someone that isn't you. I want to forget I heard those three words. I want to dissolve the images I have in my heard of her with him. I think I'm going to throw up.

You’ll be civilized or we’ll leave your arse here.” Johan... "Vital Perception

You let this become a mess,” he cursed, as though he'd walked up to Tam and asked him to be drop dead gorgeous and vulnerable, just so that he would have his first guy crush. “I didn't let anything happen. I just…felt it. I think he feels it too,” he argued, trying to talk sense into him. Why was this a bad thing? Konnor didn't have anything to do with Tam anymore, so why did it matter? “Oh God. You're in serious shit now,” Mack bemoaned, rolling his eyes and rubbing his forehead.

You’re different, and I know that’s probably the most cliché response ever given, but it’s the truth. When I look at you, it’s as if I’m reading a novel. No matter how much time I spend studying your pages, there will always be more for me to learn, deeper layers of complexity to baffle me, and plot twists that’ll leave me speechless.

You're not just an assistant — you're mine, Winnie. You're my woman. You're the one I want in my life. I want you at my side, in my home and in my bed

You’re thinking, maybe it would be easier to let it slip let it go say ”I give up” one last time and give him a sad smile. You’re thinking it shouldn’t be this hard, shouldn’t be this dark, thinking love could flow easily with no holding back and you’ve seen others find their match and build something great together, of each other, like two halves fitting perfectly and now they achieve great things one by one, always together, and it seems grand. But you love him. Love him like a black stone in your chest you couldn’t live without because it fits in there. Makes you who you are and the thought of him gone—no more—makes your chest tighten up and maybe this is your fairytale. Maybe this is your castle. You could get it all on a shiny piece of glass with wooden stools and a neverending blooming garden but that’s not yours. This is yours. The cracks and the faults, the ugly words in the winter walking home alone and angry but falling asleep thinking you love him. This is your fairy tale. The quiet in the hallway, wishing for him to turn around, tell you to stay, tell you to please don’t go I need you like you need me and maybe it’s not a Jane Austen novel but this is your novel and your castle and you can run from it your whole life but this is here in front of you. Maybe nurture it? Sweet girl, maybe close the world off and look at him for an hour or two. This is your fairy. It ain’t perfect and it ain’t honey sweet with roses on the bed. It’s real and raw and ugly at times. But this is your love. Don’t throw it away searching for someone else’s love. Don’t be greedy. Instead, shelter it. Protect it. Capture every second of easy, pull through every storm of hardship. And when you can, look at him, lying next to you, trusting you not to harm him. Trusting you not to go. Be someone’s someone for someone. Be that someone for him. That’s your fairy tale. This is your castle. Now move in. Build a home. Build a house. Build a safety around things you love. It’s yours if you make it so. Welcome home, sweet girl, it will be all be fine.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

A great novel is worth one thousand films.

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

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

All novels are experimental.

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 sequels; influence is bliss.

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

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

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.

A Marxist has never written a good novel.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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