Top 1200 Modern Novel Quotes & Sayings - Page 19

In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love.

A good novel is worth more than the best scientific study.

My first novel was a challenge to myself. No one had an inkling that I was working on it.

By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word.

When I was a kid, I'd go to the African-American section in the bookstore, and I'd try and find African-American people I hadn't read before. So in that sense the category was useful to me. But it's not useful to me as I write. I don't sit down to write an African-American zombie story or an African-American story about elevators. I'm writing a story about elevators which happens to talk about race in different ways. Or I'm writing a zombie novel which doesn't have that much to do with being black in America. That novel is really about survival.

The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

It's hard for me to think of writing a novel, because it takes so long.

In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.

Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you.

I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.

When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.

A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.

A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

Publishers love to compartmentalize, and Second Chance was not an easy novel to define.

I think reading a novel is almost next best to having something to do.

Music is neither old nor modern: it is either good or bad music, and the date at which it was written has no significance whatever. Dates and periods are of interest only to the student of musical history. . . . All old music was modern once, and much more of the music of yesterday already sounds more old-fashioned than works which were written three centuries ago. All good music, whatever its date, is ageless - as alive and significant today as it was when it was written

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

A novel usually begins, in my experience, with a thought or image that won't leave me alone.

I took two years away from making films to write a novel.

When I was 19, I wrote a novel, which was not very good, but I finished it.

I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character.

Novel writing is like heroin addiction; it takes everything you've got.

It's always a challenge to adapt a novel for screen, a visual medium.

You can't explain collateralized debt obligation in a novel - it's too draggy.

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

The last romantic novel I think I read was 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles.'

I wrote a novel, so now they can call me a novelist. I tell stories; that's it.

Modern man, seeking a middle position in the evaluation of sense impression and thought, can, following Plato , interpret the process of understanding nature as a correspondence, that is, a coming into congruence of pre-existing images of the human psyche with external objects and their behaviour. Modern man, of course, unlike Plato , looks on the pre-existent original images also as not invariable, but as relative to the development of a conscious point of view, so that the word "dialectic" which Plato is fond of using may be applied to the process of development of human knowledge.

How would you describe the difference between modern war and modern industry-between say, bombing and strip mining, or between chemical warfare and chemical manufacturing? The difference seems to be only that in war the victimization of humans is directly intentional and in industry it is "accepted" as a "trade-off." Were the catastrophes of Love Canal, Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Exxon Valdez episodes of war or of peace? They were in fact, peacetime acts of aggression, intentional to the extent that the risks were known and ignored.

A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.

We stink more of the world than we stink of sack cloth and ashes. A lot of contemporary churches today would feel more at home in a movie house rather than in a house of prayer, more afraid of holy living than of sinning, know more about money than magnifying Christ in our bodies. It is so compromised that holiness and living a sin-free life is heresy to the modern church. The modern church is, quite simply, just the world with a Christian T-shirt on!

If I had to write a novel, I'd start crying after three lines.

I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.

The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.

You can't take a story and just stretch it out - that does not a novel make.

It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

Expertise and judgment in the art of lending for novel ventures must be reacquired.

I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.

No one will ever write a fantasy novel better than The Hobbit.

I find coming up with a title the hardest part of writing a novel.

Ironically, writing a novel is not a way to sort out your confusion.

I never want to feel constrained by writing a novel for a specific audience.

Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.

If the novel is dying, I see no chance that dismembering it will revive it.

The devil is always discovering something novel against the truth.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

A novel - it's also a way of attacking subjects that you cannot confront in the eye.

The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.

The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life.

The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.

If there is a connection between Harry Potter and my new novel, it's my interest in characters.

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

If you read the novel, you have expectations. And, if you've seen something first, it's just hard to do.

It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel

No wonder you want to be a writer. How can you not, with all that behind you? You practically are a novel already.

In my personal life, I'm a comic novel. But then, so are we all, because we're human beings.

It was my angry, Dickensian novel, I suppose. It was cathartic - I expended a lot of frustration on that one.

I wrote my first novel when my daughter was about six months old.