Novels Quotes
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If I had my way no one should be taught to read until after he had passed his hundredth year. In that way, and in that way only can we protect our youth from the dreadful influence of such novels as 'Three Cycles, Not To Mention The Rug,' which dreadful book I have found within the past month in the hands of at least twenty children in the neighborhood, not one of whom was past sixty.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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I think that novels are one of the best means that we have to communicate both with the past and with the future.
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I think, above all, the characters in my novels feel universal to the readers.
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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.
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Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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I read many wonderful novels, though I now find the idea of literary fiction obsolete.
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The whole 'starting with stories, ending with novels' thing, it's probably too ingrained in the industry and the psyche to change it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My novels about medieval Wales were set in unexplored terrain; my readers did not know what lay around every bend in the road.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think people who share my dreams can enjoy reading my novels. And that's a wonderful thing. I said that myths are like a reservoir of stories, and if I can act as a similar kind of "reservoir," albeit a modest one, that would make me very happy.
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I don't think I'm interested in writing women's novels anymore.
