Modern Novel Quotes

• Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.

  Philip Larkin

  Writing, Ends, Muddle

  'New Fiction' no. 15, January 1978 (the 'classic formula' for a novel)

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• In modern novels I try to not let myself get away and to be here, and that's why I write about my life and myself. But even when I do that there's an element of disappearing to a place that's not me. It's "the selflessness of writing". It seldom happens, but when it does it's worth quite a lot.

  Karl Ove Knausgard

  Writing, Trying, Doe

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• I read a lot of detective stories because they always deliver. They give you a beginning, a middle, and an end - a resolution. The modern novels I read don't always deliver because I'm looking essentially for a story. As in Shakespeare, "The play's the thing." In particular I read detective stories for pacing, plot and suspense.

  Robert Cormier

  Play, Giving, Plot

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• At the emergence of the modern novel with Rabelais and Cervantes, all kinds of things were possible in a long-form prose work. Within a couple of hundred years, most of those possibilities were abandoned in favor of a text that efficiently transmitted sentiments.

  Teju Cole

  Couple, Years, Long

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• For being able to use language was a critical skill that could carry one far. One could use it professionally, as a crafter of everything from political speeches to modern novels. One could use it personally, as a tool of discovery or a means of staying connected to others. One could use it as an outlet that would feed the artistic spirit of the creator, which existed in everyone.

  Elizabeth George

  Mean, Skills, Discovery

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• Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is: what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problems of the modern novel is: what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Hero, Book, Mean

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• Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.

  Charles Lamb

  Book, Eye, Kind

  Charles Lamb, Thomas Noon Talfourd (1838). “Essays of Elia. Rosamund Gray. Recollections of Chirst's hospital. Essays on the tragedies of Shakspeare [etc.] Letters under assumed signatures published in the Reflector. Curious fragments. Mr. H”, p.192

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• Modern novels have become part of the do-it-yourself business, and they come in a very small number of standard kits. (...) In this wilderness cries the voice of Patrick White, Australian extraordinary, who has quite other, more austere and indeed prophetic ambitions. (...) (H)is failures are certainly the equivalent, and perhaps the measure, of other men's success.

  David Pryce-Jones

  Ambition, Men, Small Numbers

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• The great modern novel of the comic-pathetic illusion of freedom is Confessions of Zeno .

  Italo Svevo

  Illusion, Confession, Comic

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• I also read modern novels - I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize.

  Kate Adie

  Orange, Judging, Fiction

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• A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

  Chaim Potok

  Book, World, Way

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• Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.

  Umberto Eco

  Hero, Character, Oedipus

  "The art of creating a legend" by Umberto Eco, www.theguardian.com. July 19, 2002.

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