Top 1200 Great Novels Quotes & Sayings - Page 20

I think novels are profoundly autobiographical. If writers deny that, they are lying. Or if it's really true, then I think it's a mistake.

Various books revolutionised what I think about novels and showed me that they're not strict, formulaic things. 'Coming Through Slaughter' by Michael Ondaatje was one of them.

For a subject worked and reworked so often in novels, motion pictures, and television, American Indians remain probably the least understood and most misunderstood Americans of us all.

The omniscient narrator is a bizarre technique, when you think about it, and no one uses it much anymore. But for the novels I want to write, it's the only approach that makes sense to me.

Graham Greene's work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and 'Our Man in Havana' may be his best.

A surprising number [of novels] have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily-against which a law ought to be passed.

In 1996, when my first novel, 'Masquerade,' was published, I knew international thrillers - or spy novels, if you prefer - had been the domain of male authors for decades.

Supposedly, some writers work in rowdy coffee shops or compose whole novels to Megadeth, but when I write, I wear a pair of chainsaw operator's earmuffs.

We do seem, as a culture, to fetishize the "sweep." But I know there's room for "big" short, fierce novels, and "big" solid ones.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me.

When my novels are packaged as exclusively for women, I'm not only cut off from a vital portion of my audience but clearly labelled as an author the literary establishment is free to dismiss.

Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.

I'm a hopeful romantic who adores novels with happy endings, because there are enough sad endings in real life.

Realistic novels simply pretend that the rules of their invented worlds are identical to the rules of actual life, but that's a ruse.

For me to say that all novels in English written by Indians are all alike would be a bit like saying that all the cows in India look the same and have identical horns.

I used the pen name because I knew I wanted to write better novels under my own name someday.

With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's like having a fictitious family.

The energy necessary to create a wormhole or to wrap time into nuts is incredible. It's not for us. It's maybe for our descendants who have mastered the energy of this technology. So if one day, somebody knocks on your door and claims to be your great great great great granddaughter, don't slam the door.

A lot of people have trouble with their second novel - the dreaded sophomore jinx. I wrote three books in between the two novels, and they just weren't very good.

I was 35, had always wanted to write novels, and thought that I had better do it while I was young enough.

They say things happen in three. I won with the great Kobe, the great D-Wade and now it's my job to win one with the great LeBron James. We have everything in place. We just got to get it done.

It's a given that we exist in a world where we have to live in continuity every day; no one is immune to that, in life or romance novels. By the same token, it's not something I find terribly important.

When I was writing 'The Luminaries,' I read a lot of crime novels because I wanted to figure out which ones made me go, 'Ah! I didn't know that was coming!'

Architecture is a discipline that takes time and patience. If one spends enough years writing complex novels one might be able, someday, to construct a respectable haiku.

I've had over a dozen and a half novels published since late 1994 when my first novel, 'Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls' came out.

Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.

Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.

Modern reformers offer nebulous theories or write philanthropic novels. But your thief acts! He is as clear as a fact and as logical as a punch on the nose! And what a style he has!

I've done a lot of drama, and as a lifestyle, going to work and laughing every day is just great. It's great for your mental health, and it's great for setting up a nice year.

Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths.

A publisher saw one of my historical novels and thought I would write an admirable detective story, so she offered me a two-book contract, and I grabbed it.

I think gaming has influenced popular culture in a huge way. It's worked its way into novels, and blockbuster movies.

Nobody's made an impact like Raina Telgemeier or Kate Beaton. I think that indie creators, people making webcomics and graphic novels, are the ones to watch.

Heaven knows, I've exposed myself in my novels through the use of fantasy and imagination... now my new book is about what really happened to me... not my heroines.

Ann Taylor - great name, great real estate, shitty business. Gap -great name, great real estate, declining business. J.Crew - Hellooo? Great name, better fashion image than the Gap.

I think of myself as a softy. I think the 87th Precinct novels are very sentimental, and the cops are idealistic guys.

I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely.

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

To ask a novelist to talk about his novels is like asking somebody to cook about their dancing.

I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.

Regardless of what people think of the WWE, we're great at storylines; we're great at drawing money. We're great at causing controversy, and when the other sports do it, they usually do better. It keeps it interesting and makes it fun for the fans.

The human brain is a product of natural selection. In the face of scarcity, our hominid great-great-uncles were unable to compete against our sapient great-great-grandparents' abilities to build more elaborate mental models and orchestrate their bodies' movements in more sophisticated ways.

As an artist, my wheelhouse is 19th-century literature. I want to write realist novels in a Victorian sense, and the writers I admire in that style tend to do omniscient narration.

Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.

A lot of the novels that I've really enjoyed in my life, whether it's Tolstoy's 'Cossacks,' or 'Sons and Lovers' or 'Jude the Obscure' or 'David Copperfield' or 'Herzog,' have an autobiographical spine.

I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.

With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.

My dad goes through war novels like I go through boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

Why do we write novels or make television about real things? It's the human condition and human suffering.

I don't separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they're all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some investigation into the past.

The violence and double-talk in the Alice books probably does no harm to children, but the novels should not be allowed to circulate indiscriminately among adults who are undergoing analysis.

At a certain point my novels set. They set just as hard as that jam jar. And then I know they are finished.

I don't believe novels should carry an obvious message. I don't want to write characters you can immediately say are good or bad; as in life, most people are a mixture.

I have time to write 1-2 novels per year, and get roughly novel-sized ideas every month. I have to perform triage on my own writing impulses.

My Italian-American heritage, of which I'm very proud and with which I identify strongly, surfaces in several of my novels.

When it comes to writers, I'm a huge fan of Ian McEwan. I've never taken a writing course, but reading and deconstructing his novels has been as good a lesson as any.

I have to read comic books all first, because now when you get into graphic novels, they are definitely in deep graphic.