Top 1200 Great Novels Quotes & Sayings - Page 18

I read YA novels constantly, so I really want to be in a young adult rom-com, but I worry that I'm aging into the parent role, which is a little scary.

Novels are pirated all the time, but it's hard to imagine that you're at work and you open up the attachment that your brother sent you and it's the new Phillip Roth novel.

Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

I'm used to adapting my novels for feature film - it can be challenging to cut and compress three or four hundred pages into two hours of dramatic action.

I always tell my students, 'If you walk around with your eyes and ears open, you can't possibly live long enough to write all the novels you'll encounter.'

When I start writing these novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don't do that, you can't write good characters.

My entire career writing novels was wrapped up around Harry Bosch. This character was too important to me to just hand off.

We have the great fans in Detroit. We've got a great ballpark, great stadium.

It's great extremes which leads to great drama and great comedy.

When you put on the suits, when you pretend you're honest and you're robbing at a far higher level, these guys deserve to... well, to be in my novels, and I have special fates reserved for them.

I've always been interested in those Orwellian dystopian novels, like 'Fahrenheit 451,' 'Brave New World,' and obviously Orwell's '1984.'

I read too many romance novels during my formative years. I have a penchant for romantic comedies. I understand why 'Romeo and Juliet' came to such a pass.

She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.

Great people have great egos; maybe that's what makes them great.

The best crime novels are all based on people keeping secrets. All lying - you may think a lie is harmless, but you put them all together and there's a calamity.

The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.

Great crises produce great men, and great deeds of courage.

Science has great skills, great reasoning and great intelligence in combining effects. It knows HOW to do many things but it admittedly does not know the WHY of anything.

I make a rod for my own back because people see my novels as quasi documentaries. But it is never history that's the main event of my books. It's my characters.

Almost all novels are improved by cutting from the top. On their first pages, authors parade those favourite effects which disgust the impartial reader.

My novels are always in Kannada because I express myself better in Kannada.

When I began writing novels, I read Aristotle to learn how to perfect structure, Pearl Cleage to sustain tension, and Nora Roberts for characterization.

I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.

I like Jo Nesbo and Hakan Nesser. There are so many good books in the world. I don't want to spend time reading bad crime novels.

Dominant and emerging forms of interpersonal communication have to find their way into literary language somehow - think of the epistolary novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Readers of novels are a strange folk, upon whose probable or even possible tastes no wise book-maker would ever venture to bet.

I didn't read much of anything till I was 15, except Alistair MacLean and Michael Moorcock - the sword and sorcery novels - when I was about 13 or 14.

The fact is that most crime novels contain a good many punchlines. They are just rather darker than the ones you might hear in a comedy club.

I always say that, if you have great actors and great storytelling and great monsters, and you mix them together, nine times out of 10, it explodes in your face.

To the question: How do the authors of sketches, stories and novels get along in life, the following answer can or must be given: They are stragglers and they are down at heel.

I am concerned that people who admire [Ayn] Rand are not often critical enough of the extent to which she has abridged the implications of [her] novels.

Wales was great. The people were great, and I had a great time there.

I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are very few of them.

The truth is that every true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone - reading between the lines - has bcome the secret friend of their author.

My height doesn't define my skill set. To be a great quarterback, you have to have great leadership, great attention to detail and a relentless competitive nature - and I try to bring that on a daily basis.

My novels about medieval Wales were set in unexplored terrain; my readers did not know what lay around every bend in the road.

If I had the luxury of working as a full time writer, I think you would see novels appearing on a much more regular, and frequent, basis.

I have a suspicion, because if you look at the whole, all the [Star Wars ] movies, the backlog of every one of these movies, there's a lot of great stuff, but one might not be not as good with the writing in this or the acting in that or the directing in that, this has great actors, great directors, great script, and I really feel like we're gonna make the best one [movie with Young Han Solo].

Many of the comedies I had made in Sweden were slightly based on semi-autobiographical experiences, so adapting novels was a very different experience.

I think you must remember that a writer is a simple-minded person to begin with and go on that basis. He's not a great mind, he's not a great thinker, he's not a great philosopher, he's a story-teller.

Dybala only lacks the belief that he is a great footballer. After his great experience at Palermo he had a great start with Juve and he did beautiful things.

If I find great material, or a great character, or a great director that wants to do something on TV, or whether it's in film, or whatever it is, man - as long as it's good, and on the level, I'm open to it.

I like Victorian children's novels extremely a lot. If I would say I collect anything, that's what I'll hunt for now and again at old book stores.

It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.

Rejection is part of the process, so you can't let it crush you. My first three novels never made it into publication, but my fourth, 'Sheltering Rain,' was translated into 11 languages.

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

Time is truly the great enemy. It's not the great healer, it's the great stealer.

I love my wife. We've had a few slings and arrows across the room, but I'm not prepared to give in, you know? People say she saved my life, but at the same time, I saved her life, as well, I think. She's a great mother, she's a great wife, she's a great worker, she's a great manager. She's just great.

I remember how I would wait for a play idea. I wasted a tremendous amount of time. I didn't realize that ideas could be made into movies or novels.

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.

I've written something like 17 novels, which isn't bad, I suppose, but my father wrote 120 books, my mother 40. In comparison, I'm lazy.

I feel just fine about ignoring or bypassing the rights of people I have known and loved to be rendered faithfully, or to be left in peace, and out of novels.

My view is that comic books are meant to be long-form stories. They're meant to be novels.

I love grand scale. One of the things that everybody mentions is that my novels are beautiful objects in the sense that the elements of the actual book are being extruded and re-contextualized.

Even though I got a late start, first publishing an essay when I was 50 years old, I've since written eight suspense novels.

Political novels are full of pitfalls, particularly for a novelist with strong political leanings.

People assume that science is a very cold sort of profession, whereas writing novels is a warm and fuzzy intuitive thing. But in fact, they are not at all different.

I obviously would love to play with a great, great, great quarterback.