Top 1200 Modern Novel Quotes & Sayings - Page 6

'Emma' is my favorite Jane Austen novel - one of my favorite novels period; a novel about intelligence outsmarting itself, about a complicated, nuanced, irresistible heroine who does everything wrong.

When I'm writing a novel, one of the things I do is get big poster boards. They're actually canvases that artists use. And I keep all the characters' names on them. If you write a big novel, there's a lot of characters.

I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say.

I feel like I've got a novel in me somewhere, but that's something... I was just talking to a buddy of mine about it, who's a writer as well, and he's nearly done with his first novel, and it's taken him 11, 12 years to do it. And I can totally understand; it's a long process.

I don't have any answers as to whether the Internet is a good or a bad thing, but it's certainly an important thing for the novel because novels are so much about communication, and when communication changes, the novel has to change.

I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn't novel.

Characters to me are like sonnets, they have limits that you obey which allow a force to enter in, an invention that makes the novel possible. Change the limits and the force leaves. The novel becomes impossible.

Some novel lovers have no interest in comics, and some comics fans would never take the time to read a novel.

Modern life would not be possible if it were not for chemicals, nor would modern natural gas production.

I call my design style rustically modern. I like to take traditional or rustic features and fuse it into a more modern design.

A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

Mythological subjects always new. Modern subjects difficult because of the absence of the nude and the wretchedness of modern costume.

I think Phil Dick was particularly interesting in that, first of all, he was a very modern man and a very modern thinker, but I don't know what demons drove him.

Writing the novel felt so private to me! I think publishing a novel is quite public and exposing, and what's a little frightening to me right now is the fact that it feels so entirely opposed to the privacy that is writing.

A large part of the appeal of this novel when I was lucky enough to stumble across the story idea for 'A Head Full of Ghosts' was that I'd finally be writing a horror novel. In a lot of ways, the book is both my criticism of and love letter to horror.

From the beginning [of the Lincoln in the Bardo], I actually had it in mind not to write a novel. I'd kind of gotten past that point where I felt bad for never having written a novel, even to where I felt really good about it, like I was a real purist.

None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia. . . have any power except over the people who choose to use them.

The novel at its nineteenth-century pinnacle was a Judaized novel: George Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant: they wrote of conduct and of the consequences of conduct: they were concerned with a society of will and commandment.

Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

The essential gesture of the contemporary novel is to get people to turn the page, to entertain them, and I hate that. I want a novel where the gesture is towards existential investigation on every page. That, to me, is thrilling.

Everywhere in the modern world there is neglect, the need to be recognized, which is not satisfied. Art is a way of recognizing oneself, which is why it will always be modern.

I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry.

I lose patience with long stories. I get people who go, "Crumb, do some long stories, do a graphic novel." Novel-schmovel.

No politician can praise unemployment or inflation, and there is no way of combining high employment with stable prices that does not involve some control of income and prices. Otherwise the struggle for more consumption and more income to sustain it-a struggle that modern corporations, modern unions and modern democracy all facilitate and encourage-will drive up prices. Only heavy unemployment will then temper this upward thrust. Not many wish to confront the truth that the modern economy gives a choice only between inflation, unemployment, or controls.

Publishers send me a lot of first novels because my first novel was the defining novel of my career, and I guess a lot of people want my benediction or something.

I read all of the nonfiction that I could find on Chechnya, and all the while, I was searching for a novel that was set there. I couldn't find a single novel written in English that was set in the period of the two most recent Chechen wars.

Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.'' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to think that what you need to write a novel is imagination, creativity and a facility with words. Yes, you need all those things, but a novel is a highly complex organism that needs to be dealt with in quite a logical manner.

Since I cant write the greatest American novel, Im going to write the longest American novel.

The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships. The novel can help us to live,as nothing else can: no didactic Scripture, anyhow. If the novelist keeps his thumb out of the pan.

Fourier's theorem is not only one of the most beautiful results of modern analysis, but it may be said to furnish an indispensable instrument in the treatment of nearly every recondite question in modern physics.

A little more than a hundred years ago, "Tel Aviv" was not a city. It was a title of a novel written by an author. The "Return to Zion" was a name of another novel. There was a bookshelf. There was no country. There was no state. There was no nation. There was no physical Jewish reality in this country.

In the summer of 1866, as Leo Tolstoy prepared for his serialized novel 'War and Peace' to be published as a single volume, he wrote to illustrator Mikhail Bashilov, hoping to commission drawings for the new edition of the novel, which he referred to by its original title,1805.

The modern woman has a modern life, and most of us work. There's no time to change before we go out in the evening, so a dress should always look appropriate for day and night.

A Modern Mom to me is not always someone that juggles a career and family. A Modern Mom is a woman who takes care of herself on the inside and the outside.

I don't want my novel to be like Madame Bovary, finely crafted with the life edited out of it. I want my novel to be like a friend telling me a story -- so we go off on thoughts; that's the way it is.

My writing process hasn't changed - it's is the same whether I'm working on a Y.A. novel or, as now, a new novel for adults. A lot of reading, a lot of research if the subject warrants it, a lot of sticky notes and scraps of paper - and get to work.

To modern educated people, it seems obvious that matters of fact are to be ascertained by observation, not by consulting ancient authorities. But this is an entirely modern conception, which hardly existed before the seventeenth century.

They were the first Westerners. The spirit of the West, the modern spirit, is a Greek discovery; and the place of the Greeks is in the modern world.

What is the relation between Christianity and modern culture; may Christianity be maintained in a scientific age? It is this problem which modern liberalism attempts to solve.

Listening to people discussing a novel can be very interesting, if you've read whatever novel is being discussed. No one, it seems, ever says, "This is a great book but I didn't like it." Taking a little time to think about why this might be has been very liberating.

What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.

You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.

You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which, for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.

I had just begun an M.A. in Creative Writing, and I had to write a novel, so I began writing a novel that later became 'A Life Apart.'

I went abroad to Malaya and came back and tended naturally to gravitate towards the south, I suppose, near London where things seemed to be going on; but I'm still a Lancashire man, and what I want to write someday is a novel about Manchester. Very much a regional novel.

It may sound very strange, but I love the freedom that writing a novel gives me. It is an unhindered experience. If I come after a bad day, I can decide that my protagonist will die on page 100 of my novel in a 350-page story.

I know there's similar dissatisfaction in America. There's a lot of white people who come from blue collar backgrounds and who feel ill-equipped and badly served by modern economics and the modern job market.

Personally, I'd never seen a graphic novel. I knew they existed because friends of mine like Jonathan Ross collect them and some very literate and intelligent people really rate the graphic novel as a form.

At the peak of his scientific triumphs, Newton became a 'head,' a student of the inner spiritual world - or in modern terms, a neurologician. Modern physicists do not dwell on this dramatic life-change in their hero.

I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what'

In China the struggle to consolidate the socialist system, the struggle to decide whether socialism or capitalism will prevail, will still take a long historical period. However, we should all realize that the new system of socialism will unquestionably be consolidated. We can assuredly build a socialist state with modern industry, modern agriculture, and modern science and culture.

Rereading one's own novels after many years is always a fraught business, but when a novel has fallen out of print - 'The Very Model of a Man' is the only novel of mine that has - and so crops up infrequently in conversations with readers or indeed with oneself, revisiting it can be perilous.

If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals.

The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesnt want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free.

If you're a novelist, you have sort of themes that run throughout novels. You start a novel and you finish a novel. With record-making in the singer-songwriter world or whatever it is that I do, it's a little different because there is no specific arc that is necessarily, like it's not a concept record.

I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in south Louisiana. I went to a state university. I taught literature, wrote a novel that was the novel I wanted to write, and got a couple of good reviews but no real traction. I had no idea how to get a job in TV.

We live in a sea of general ideas, so that's not a novel, since there are so many general ideas. But the moment a particular idea is linked to a character, it's like an engine moves it. Then you have a novel underway.

At this point, I think I would garner a lot of hate mail if I was now on the cover of Modern Drummer seeing as I'm not a modern drummer anymore.