Novels Quotes
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Whenever anyone declares having read a book of mine I am disappointed by the error. That’s because my books are not to be read in the sense usually called reading: the only way it seems to me to approach the novels that I write is to catch them in the same manner that one catches an illness.
Antonio Lobo Antunes
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I believe in the soul, the ****, the pussy, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.
Crash Davis
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But are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid? [Referring to Gothic novels, fashionable in England at the beginning of the 19th century, but frowned upon in polite society.]
Jane Austen
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The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable.
Oscar Wilde
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I've read enough novels to know just how much time & energy it takes to fall in love and I just don't have the time.
Alexandra Kollontai
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Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.
Erich Maria Remarque
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It would be unthinkable to have a top-ten list of multiple narrative novels that doesn't include David Mitchell. 'Cloud Atlas' is the most obvious choice, but I have opted for Mitchell's slightly lesser known debut, 'Ghostwritten.'
Susan Barker
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Life isn’t easy. Love isn’t easy. Fairy tales are books we read to children. Romance novels are books that make teenagers dream of love and happily ever afters. I’m here to tell you my story. This is my diary. This is my life. This is my truth. You can’t make this shit up.
Brenda Novak
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Filipinos are not a reading people, and despite the compulsory course on the life and works of Rizal today, from the elementary to the university levels, it is accepted that the 'Noli me Tangere' and 'El Filibusterismo' are highly regarded but seldom read (if not totally ignored). Therefore one asks, how can unread novels exert any influence?
Ambeth R. Ocampo
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Poorly written novels--no matter how pious and edifying the behavior of the characters--are not good in themselves and are therefore not really edifying.
Flannery O'Connor
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Wonderful thing about novels is that sometimes we read a novel and we know the person in the novel more than we know people in our own lives.
Edwidge Danticat
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People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.
Flannery O'Connor
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Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. "Ari" appears on the edge of this book a couple of times - but on the edge, she's never in it, even if she's a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.
Ben Lerner
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Kafka is one of my very favorite writers. Kafka's fictional world is already so complete that trying to follow in his steps is not just pointless, but quite risky, too. What I see myself doing, rather, is writing novels where, in my own way, I dismantle the fictional world of Kafka that itself dismantled the existing novelistic system.
Haruki Murakami
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Horror and supernatural novels give you a lot of what you look for in a crime novel, just with a twist that was very fresh for me as a reader.
Michael Koryta
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We have this huge discourse on family in this country, but no one deconstructs it the same way. People talk about "the American family." The right wing has this thing - Focus on the Family. What the hell is that? I don't want to just discuss the issues - I want family to be a real part of the character of the novels I write, and I don't like to write things that feel like issue books.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
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I always read a lot as a kid and I'd spend long periods of time in my room reading... I wasn't reading anything great until I got older, but I used to read Agatha Christie mysteries and all of Ian Fleming's 'James Bond' novels.
Michael Riedel
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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.
Elliott Colla
