Top 1200 Suspense Novels Quotes & Sayings - Page 20

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes I don't know whether I'm real or whether I'm a character in one of my novels.

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 read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I think will subsequently be recognized as one of the first great novels of the 21st century.

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

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.

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.

But I have always - ever since The Accidental Woman - written novels about individuals attempting to make choices in the context of situations over which they have no control.

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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

I've read about eight or ten of the original novels, and one of them is where Maigret's in bed for the entire story! His wife is running around and solving the case!

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.

I had 'Push' and 'The Paperboy' next to my bed for many years. Those are some of the great, great novels.

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.

Suspense is like a woman. The more left to the imagination, the more the excitement. ... The conventional big-bosomed blonde is not mysterious. And what could be more obvious than the old black velvet and pearls type? The perfect ‘woman of mystery’ is one who is blonde, subtle and Nordic. ... Although I do not profess to be an authority on women, I fear that the perfect title [for a movie], like the perfect woman is difficult to find.

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 can write three novels in the time it takes to write one novella. I'm probably not going to go with that form again.

We are living in an era of such interesting new forms, and certainly narrative non-fiction has emerged as a major form. People who are great writers don't have to write novels anymore.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.

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!'

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

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 often heard that the novel is dead. But I see novels produced, I don't know how many a week, in France. I have the impression it's carrying along quite well.

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

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.

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

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

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 write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself.

So, I installed a CCTV system to tape what's going on inside my mind. Thousands of hours of drama, confusion, discussion, huge special effects and futuristic scenarios. Also a lot of chatter, drama and suspense. Is like to go to the movies for free, every day. The CCTV technology used is the SSM-X45. Whose initials stand for: Sit down, Shut up and Meditate (X45 is just to sound more hi-tech)

I haven't the stature to critique one of our literature's great novels, Tobias; and I'm not one of those who believe The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn needs critiquing for literary or social reasons.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Trollope wrote so many novels and other works that they tend to crowd each other out.

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.

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

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.

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