A Quote by Emma Healey

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

Emma Healey

Quote Topics

Explaining Novels Representing Things

Quote Author

Emma Healey
British - Novelist
Born: February 27, 1985

Writers of novels and romance in general bring a double loss to their readers; robbing them of their time and money; representing men, manners, and things, that never have been, or are likely to be.

Mary Wortley Montagu

Humor is a terrific tool for explaining things, especially when what you're explaining is frightening or dull and complicated.

P. J. O'Rourke

I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way.

Dana Spiotta

I always knew that whenever you go out there, you're not just representing yourself. You're representing a heritage that's behind you, your culture, so you always have to do things, like, bigger, badder, better.

Joan Smalls

All things in my novels are real for me. Some western critics said that Garcia Marquez's novels are magic realism. However, I believe that Marquez must have experienced everything in his novels.

Haruki Murakami

The difference does not lie in the things that news does that novels do not do, but in the things that novels do that news cannot do. In other words, this basic technique of news - just one among many - is something a novel can use, but a novel can deploy a multitude of other techniques also. Novels are not bound by the rules of reportage. Far from it. They're predicated on delivering experience.

Zia Haider Rahman

The Neapolitan novels have a lot of references to things outside, to things of the world, to culture, politics, the city of Naples. People have mentioned that Naples is like a character in the novels.

Ann Goldstein

Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.

Alice McDermott

Instead of explaining the sober facts of mechanics and electricity, I want to say a few words about the debt which we owe to youth; and with your permission I shall consider you as representing here not only the academic youth of Sweden nor even of Europe but also of America.