Novels Quotes
-
The best crime novels are not about how a detective works on a case; they are about how a case works on a detective.
-
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.
-
I think that novels are one of the best means that we have to communicate both with the past and with the future.
-
If politicians can't do it, I want to do it. We have to do it. Artists, put it in paintings. Poets, put it in poems, novels. That's what we have to do. And I think it's so important to save the world.
-
Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.
-
I'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things. My first three novels were all about families. Things that happen in a house within a family, because you're a child or because you want to keep the family together, you suffer things you might not have had to suffer if you weren't in that situation.
-
Many great novels have shown a world torn to shreds by the brutality of war. To do so, their authors ground their texts in the details of destruction and decay.
-
You tempt me to telephone Matron and ask her to let you have the afternoon off.’ He spoke lightly and Sarah felt a surprising regret that he couldn’t possibly mean it. ‘That sort of thing happens in novels, never in real life. I can imagine Matron’s feelings!
-
I don't trust novels with points, do you? If a novel is only about a point, the writer should just say it in as few words as possible so we can take it in and go back to watching 'The Bachelor' on television.
-
I think, above all, the characters in my novels feel universal to the readers.
-
Graphic novels might really speak to one child who's struggling with the other kinds of reading and might help them discover that storytelling is joyful and personal and illuminating. They might find your way in auditorily by listening to audio books in the car instead of playing Game Boys or watching DVDs.
-
When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.
-
There are many reasons I love novels with multiple narratives. In novels where the events are filtered through the consciousness of a single 'reliable' narrator, I often wonder, is this the whole story? What could be missing here?
-
I read many wonderful novels, though I now find the idea of literary fiction obsolete.
-
Historians turning their hands to fiction are all the rage. Since Alison Weir led the way in 2006, an ever-growing number of established non-fiction writers - Giles Milton, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Harry Sidebottom, Patrick Bishop, Ian Mortimer and myself included - have written historical novels.
-
The whole 'starting with stories, ending with novels' thing, it's probably too ingrained in the industry and the psyche to change it.
-
All my life I have been reading romance novels. Those stupid books ruined me. I've always wanted that fire that every book I ever read talks about.
-
I don't think I'm interested in writing women's novels anymore.
-
I often feel happier, after putting down some of my own experiences in my journal, than I do in reading much. Novels, even if they are good, pass out of my memory very rapidly. I enjoy it as I should a scene at the theatre; but am not essentially benefited by the incidents or morals. What more desirable at this period of my life than to find sources of daily peace and joy from within; that I think is true life.
-
We like to look out on the world and see ourselves, so we have many, many novels, memoirs, and short stories in Iraq that are largely about Americans in Iraq, doing what Americans do.
-
My novels tend to take a long time to become exactly what they're going to be. They're fluid messes until I've done a ton of editing and refining and rewriting. When I write novels, I always make related scrapbooks to help me organize and test my intentions.
-
My novels about medieval Wales were set in unexplored terrain; my readers did not know what lay around every bend in the road.
-
If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.
-
Because I think of novels as collaborative enterprises between the writer and the reader, all of my novels so far have ending with endings that maybe point in more than one direction, and that seems important to me because it seems important to me that after you've invested twenty or thirty hours of your imaginative life into this narrative that you have some stake in how it ends.
