Novel Quotes
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The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt. Precisely because we keep questioning everything, especially our own premises, we are always ready to improve our knowledge. Therefore a good scientist is never ‘certain’. Lack of certainty is precisely what makes conclusions more reliable than the conclusions of those who are certain: because the good scientist will be ready to shift to a different point of view if better elements of evidence, or novel arguments emerge. Therefore certainty is not only something of no use, but is in fact damaging, if we value reliability.
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Novels, like human beings, usually have their beginnings in the dark.
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Each and every novel is a world outside the world - for a reader to visit, for comfort, consolation, escape, or challenge.
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Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
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The battle with the bottle is nothing so novel.
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The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.
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Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
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Reading a good poem can give me a far bigger kick than a novel. But it's not something I can keep doing. It would be like shooting up 10 times a day.
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Very quietly, I heard a voice in my ear.It said, in a weird, cheesy, right-out-of-one-of-my-mother's-novels way, "Ah. Wemeet again." I turned my head, just slightly, and right there, practically on top of me, was theguy from the car dealership. He was wearing a red Mountain Fresh Detergent T-shirt - not just fresh: mountain fresh! - it proclaimed, and was smiling at me. "Oh,God," I said. "No, it's Dexter.
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Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list.
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As long as the reader is enjoying a story and the writing, it doesn't concern me if people don't understand why it's running backward or if it's running backward. I think disorientating a reader a bit can be really nice. Making them work and bringing their own past to play in a novel.
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I . . . am always half afraid of finding a clever novel too clever--& of finding my own story & my own people all forestalled.
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When I started writing short stories, I thought I was writing a novel. I had like 60 or 70 pages. And what I realized was that I don't write inner monologue. I don't want to talk about what somebody is thinking or feeling. I wanted to try to show it in an interesting way. And so what I realized was that I was really writing a screenplay.
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I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.
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I don't think the 'what' distinguishes a good novel from a bad one but rather the 'how.'
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Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.
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I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.
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Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history.
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Most of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do - really felt like I had to do if I was going to write another novel - was move towards something like sincerity.
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There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.
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The historical background is one of the easier aspects of writing a novel. Far more difficult is dreaming up the smaller, character-based scenes, scenes that rise entirely from one's own imagination.
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In the past, it was only in science fiction novels that you could read about ordinary people being able to go to space... But you laid the foundation for space tourism.
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Facebook is the novel we are all writing
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All writing is an act of self-exploration. Even a grocery list says something about you; how much more does a novel say?
