Great Novels Quotes - Page 2

• They say great themes make great novels

  John O'Hara

  Theme, Novel

  John O'Hara (1977). “"An artist is his own fault": John O'Hara on writers and writing”, Southern Illinois University

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• 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.

  Norman Lock

  Believe, Adventure, Needs

  Source: therumpus.net

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• As much as I revere great writing, and am still humbled by it, literary activities are no longer esoteric to me. When I read a great novel - something that I could never have written myself - I'm still looking at it a little bit like a technician.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Littles, Esoteric

  "Music, Influence, and "Deeply Unnecessary" Art". Interview with Ben Arthur, logger.believermag.com. March 17, 2015.

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• One of the things that I love about writing novels is that it really doesn't matter what next step you take as long as you're pursuing some intuition or instinct. Of course, then, intuitions or instincts don't make for great novels, but they often make for good first drafts.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Writing, Long, Intuition

  "Extremely Dead and Incredibly Gross". Interview with Keira Butler, www.motherjones.com. November 25, 2009.

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• I'm grateful for the likes of Kundera, Murnane, Markson, Berger, and, in his recent work, Coetzee. But no matter how celebrated they are, critics still consider them askance. Elizabeth Costello, for example, is a great novel, but it got quite a critical panning when it was published. The complaint was that it was simply a book of speeches, without the machinery of conventional fiction. Markson's books are compilations of facts and alleged facts, very artfully.

  Teju Cole

  Grateful, Book, Speech

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.

  Don DeLillo

  Thinking, Literature, World

  "I don't know America anymore". Interview with Christoph Amend, Georg Diez, perival.com. October 11, 2007.

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• There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.

  Michael Stipe

  Song, Writing, Character

  2001 In the Daily Telegraph, 20 Oct.

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• I was in Los Angeles making 'Dead Again' and the producer, Lindsay Doran , asked me if I'd be interested in adapting this book, .. Austen is my favorite author and I thought, 'Well, of course, I'd be very interested, but I don't know how. I don't know where to start, A, writing a screenplay and B, sort of adapting it from a great novel.

  Emma Thompson

  Book, Writing, Los Angeles

  "Thompson plays dual roles in 'Sense and Sensibility'" by Sherry Dean, www.cnn.com. December 14, 1995.

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• As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.

  Julie Burchill

  Age, Towns, Middle

  Julie Burchill, Daniel Raven (2007). “Made in Brighton: From the Grand to the Gutter: Modern Britain as Seen from Beside the Sea”, Virgin Books Limited

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• All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

  Milan Kundera

  Bisexual, Novel

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• The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.

  Milan Kundera

  Men, Light, Discovery

  The Guardian, June 3, 1988.

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• They say great themes make great novels. but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women.

  John O'Hara

  Men, Young Writers, Theme

  John O'Hara (1977). “"An artist is his own fault": John O'Hara on writers and writing”, Southern Illinois University

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• The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.

  Andre Maurois

  Writing, Negative, Novel

  "The Art of Writing". Book by Andre Maurois, 1960.

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• All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.

  Jeremy Northam

  Drama, Events, Fiction

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• If you want to write the next great novel, but you think, No, this won't work because no one will buy it or it won't be any good, then you talk yourself out of taking a risk.

  John Tesh

  Writing, Thinking, Risk

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• Few of us write great novels; all of us live them.

  Mignon McLaughlin

  Life, Writing, Novel

  Mignon McLaughlin (2014). “Aperçus: The Aphorisms of Mignon McLaughlin”, p.87, BookBaby

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• 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.

  Azar Nafisi

  Pain, Lying, Heart

  Azar Nafisi (2003). “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books”, p.132, Random House

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• Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites.

  Piers Paul Read

  Novel, Diamond, Written

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• A great novel is worth one thousand films.

  Oscar Hijuelos

  Writing, Film, Novel

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• My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.

  Edward Abbey

  Dog, Stories, Lines

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.34, RosettaBooks

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• Sometimes, as in a great novel, you cannot see until you get to the end that God was leaving clues for you all along.

  Lauren F. Winner

  Leaving, Sometimes, Clue

  Lauren F. Winner (2002). “Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life”, p.58, Algonquin Books

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• The rise of the dramas in the thirteenth century, and the rise of the great novels in a later period, together with their frank glorification of love and the joys of life, may be called the Third Renaissance.

  Hu Shih

  Drama, Joy, Together

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• Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.

  Michael Cunningham

  Book, School, Virginia

  "The Pulitzer for Fiction". "PBS NewsHour" with Elizabeth Farnsworth, www.pbs.org. April 19, 1999.

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• 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.

  Lev Grossman

  Thinking, Firsts, Strange

  Interview with Jason Heller, www.avclub.com. August 26, 2009.

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• A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters, as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.

  Richard Schickel

  Character, Fate, Exercise

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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