Novel Quotes
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Any novel of importance has a purpose. If only the "purpose" be large enough, and not at outs with the passional inspiration.
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While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them. And there was a period when I read many of them. I absorbed the form, and I liked it, it was a good one, mostly the hard-boiled school, you know, Chandler, Hammett, and their heirs. That was the direction that interested me most.
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When I adapt a novel, I don’t really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.
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The most beautiful novel is the one that starts with a sentence wholly unexpected by the reader who has lived through our storms and norms, and who might once have been the cause of our changing moods.
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Life's like a novel with the end ripped out.
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In some ways I'm a frustrated scientist or mathematician. The amount of times I've thought I'd go back to university and do theoretical physics because I like the big questions, but really I know now that that's not quite me. What's me is to do it in novels.
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Each novel is harder than its predecessor because I must work harder at not repeating myself. However, I enjoy the challenge. This is the greatest job in the world.
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The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.
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These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.
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A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.
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Arabs don't do crime fiction. I read crime fiction and I read Arabic literature, and I wish this was a novel I could have read in Arabic.
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In adopting the form of the adventure novel, Wells deepened it, raised its intellectual value, and brought into it elements of social philosophy and science. In his own field - though, of course, on a proportionately lesser scale - Wells may be likened to Dostoyevsky, who took the form of the cheap detective novel and infused it with brilliant psychological analysis.
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If you like my novels, I commend your good taste.
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The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.
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There's a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain.
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I have never read a really good novel written by a man where women are portrayed as they truly are. They can be portrayed externally very well - Stendhal's Madame de Renal, for example - but only as seen from the outside.
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Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry.
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I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.
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Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in a novel and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash.
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Everyone deserves to be the hero of a novel.
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I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.
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I knew from previous books not to count on anything in terms of sales. My first novel - -The Raven's Bride, about Sam Houston's disastrous first marriage - -sold well and got attention, but my second book - -Promised Lands, about the Texas Revolution - -didn't.
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There's a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog - and that was Eric also, what a little monster he was! - in a novel, even if I took it directly from life, it would be fiction.
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It's difficult for me to have a large story, a very large story - a novel is a large story. I'm used to writing and doing these little miniature paintings.
