Top 1200 Novels Quotes & Sayings - Page 19
Explore popular Novels quotes.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
All great novels are great fairy tales.
More than 3,500 hardcover novels are published each year. Even the most avid reader buys fewer than one a week.
I sometimes think it ironic for an ex-seaman, longshoreman, truck driver, policeman, bus driver, etc... to find success writing children's novels.
I would only read the novels that people classify as 'beach books' if I were being held prisoner and the only alternative was the 'Book of Mormon.'
The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens.
I myself am pathetically impressed when I meet writers of very long novels. How can they spend so many hundreds of hours at the miserable, lonely pastime of creating fiction?
I write novels about women, except for one: 'Rococo', about a man, a New Jersey decorator. But even that book had a woman on the cover.
Novels are more difficult simply because they are longer and require more juggling, but short stories are closer to perfection, if you can get the language right.
I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.
Carver's best book yet! FROM A CHANGELING STAR combines deft characterization and fascinating extrapolation into a complex, compulsively readable thriller. I wish all science fiction novels could be this good.
As new technology emerges as the greatest challenge to novels since the advent of film, it may be that the fragmentation of storytelling into installments key to Dickens's era will be recreated in some way.
I'd love to adapt more contemporary novels. But there isn't really enough story and character to make a really satisfying serial, so they tend to be single dramas.
Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.
I'm afraid that eating in restaurants reflects one's experiences with movies, art galleries, novels, music - that is, characterized by mild amusement but with an overall feeling of stupidity and shame. Better to cook for yourself.
At one point I intended to write precursor and sequel novels, about the establishment of the Web and its next evolution, but I am very unlikely to now; they would take place in a different universe.
I like to believe my suspense novels marry the strong characters from my romance writing past, with the twisty, clever plots of my mystery writing present.
Despite the volatile mixture of family, politics and past misdeeds darkening the present, 'Hardball' doesn't have the sharp tang of the early novels or the expansive reach of more recent series installments.
My high school did not offer courses in philosophy, so the books that initially stimulated philosophical reflection in me were novels by Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
The actual Blue Rose murders, which lie at the core of the three novels, yield various incorrect solutions which assume the status of truth.
Post-apocalyptic novels tell you that in the future there is some great war. I would tell you that most cops say that it's going on right now.
I do not travel. I am not much of an extrovert, and I'm not much interested in extroverted objects. I do not care for the 'ideas' of novelists. Novels are wonderful, of course, but I prefer newspapers.
As for the military or service professionals, I have nothing but respect for them, but come on, when it comes to romance novels, we all know it's really about the uniforms and how the guys look in them!
I had a story-telling mother; she's written novels and short stories. So I feel like maybe I'm staying alive by telling tales.
I find 'True Grit' to be one of the very best American novels: It is a rousing adventure story and deeply perceptive about the makeup of the American character.
The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.
A novel and its writer are inseparable: you are your books. A play's not like that at all. 'Abandonment's not mine - it's everyone's. I wanted it to be a co-operative thing because I was tired of that anal control that I have over novels.
When I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.
The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.
After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.
There are two different forms of storytelling: Novels tend to come from the inside of a character, and movies tend to look at them from the outside in relation to others in their world.
Here's the thing about romance novels: The moment when the hero and heroine discover that they're perfect for each other is often the moment when it's them against the world.
In all my stories and novels, no one ever escapes Louisiana. Maybe that is because my soul never left Louisiana, although my body did go to California.
Six books after the surprises of 'Full Dark House,' the Bryant and May novels continue to stay within the bounds of formula by straining against them in new ways.
First, people don't read novels off screens, and they don't have a tendency to shell out real money for books when they don't retain anything physically for their money.
'Game of Thrones' is taking dense novels and trying to shrink it all down to a slightly manageable series in the sense that there are so many characters and so many locations.
I think books, novels and autobiographies have a power to touch people far more personally than films do, so there's a bit more of a responsibility when you then dramatise it.
Within the sphere of steampunk, there seems to be a rapidly growing subsphere of gadgetless 'neo-Victorian' novels, most of which attempt to recapture the romance of the era without all the sociopolitical ugliness.
Someone wrote a piece about Henry Green in The Partisan Review that was so intriguing that I got one of his novels, Loving, I believe, which was the first that came to attention in the United States.
There are a lot of very good New York novels, but there's no single all-encompassing novel, the way you could look at any number of Dickens books and say we know London as a result of that.
I think of my books now as suspense novels, usually with a love story incorporated. They're absolutely a lot harder to write than romances. They take more plotting and real character development.
To tell you the truth, I'm not unhappy about it. I'm not even sure that I like the idea of adapting novels into films. It's very difficult to do, and it usually doesn't work. There are exceptions, but generally speaking, one feels disappointed with the result.
I do think novels are overlooked. I did write one some years ago that I think is quite good, called 'The End of the Story,' not to blow my own horn.
I am glad it's [California novel] resonated with people because, for me, most apocalyptic novels aren't scary, because they feel so very far off.
While the subject matter of my novels could not be further removed from the stuff I used to trot out at the Comedy Store, the delivery of the material employs many of the same techniques.
I love my life, my family and my friends, and I'm drawn to 'relationship' novels because of their affirming focus on the power of love to heal wounds and transform lives.
Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.
I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.
Although many of his other novels are brilliant there is a power in 'Oliver Twist' that I believe Dickens never managed to retrieve. It is as if he was sent to this earth with the sole purpose of writing this book.
I had always been literary, in the sense of loving poetry and discovering novels, but I found my voice, as they say, in an office full of elderly people who looked after blind ex-servicemen.
Novels should be judged rigorously. Either a book works or it doesn't. The fact that something is true in the real world should not lend authority to it in fiction.
I just reached the point where plot-driven novels don't hold my interest because I don't care about the fate of characters anymore - whether Emily marries Tom or not, that kind of thing.
Books and novels in particular that grapple with quite a few things are difficult to explain, so I think that first line can come in a substitute for trying to form a longer sense of what the book is about.
I do think that sports is really rich dramatically that, and this is kind of a self-serving thing to say, but I wonder why there aren't more, better sports novels.
You're able to do things in novels: introduce subplots, other characters, thematic layers and so on, in a way that you simply can't in a movie. A movie really has to choose its battles.
Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels-the biggest sin is to be blind to others problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.
I've always felt that the comic strip medium stands equally beside all the other story telling mediums: novels, movies, stage plays, opera, you know, you name it.
I love James Baldwin essays, but also his novels. I recently read "Another Country." I couldn't believe how ahead of his time he was.
Great novels are maps of complication, leading nowhere in particular, taking stances only provisionally and obliquely, happy to be tangled and to lack as many answers as the people they seek to depict.
My mother would like me to start all interviews by stating that she and my father are perfectly normal. They are proud of me, and as perplexed as anyone by my novels.
Jim Harrison is someone I always enjoy, one of the great contemporary writers. I like Tim Ferris' Big Boom Theory. I'm getting into a different kind of reading, not straight novels.
