Novel Quotes - Page 19

• The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all - in the end the vast majority of them simply aren't that great, and are destined to be forgotten.

  Lev Grossman

  Majority, Forgotten, Ends

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• Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works.

  Lev Grossman

  Book, Years, Sky

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• I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. '

  Lev Grossman

  Reading, Book, School

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

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Fiction, Preacher

  "Ursula K. Le Guin: Still Battling the Powers That Be". Wired interview, www.wired.com. July 25, 2012.

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• If you enjoy math and you write novels, it's very rare that you'll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance.

  Mark Haddon

  Writing, Math, Chance

  "The Curiously Irresistible Literary Debut of Mark Haddon". www.powells.com. October 10, 2006.

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• I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

  Mark Haddon

  Children, Book, Latter

  "B is for bestseller" by Mark Haddon, www.theguardian.com. April 11, 2004.

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• As to the number of novels I've abandoned... I shudder to think. I have thrown away five completed novels, and that's a gruesome enough figure. But not necessarily a waste of effort.

  Mark Haddon

  Thinking, Numbers, Effort

  "'I'm flattered, amazed, deeply moved and sometimes a little dizzy'". The Guardian interview, www.theguardian.com. February 2, 2004.

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• The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself.

  Robert Walser

  Book, Writing, Torn Apart

  Robert Walser (2013). “The Walk”, p.10, Profile Books

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• Once I learned, I went online and ordered every romance novel I could find. They're fairy tales for grown-ups.

  Gena Showalter

  Romance, Fairy Tale, Online

  Gena Showalter (2016). “The Darkest Night”, p.160, HQN Books

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• Here I am with you & yet not for a single moment do I forget that there's an unfinished novel waiting for me.

  Anton Chekhov

  Here I Am, Waiting, Forget

  Anton Chekhov (2007). “Chekhov Plays”, p.97, Wordsworth Editions

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• People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Long, People

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.78, Macmillan

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• What I love is how pissed off Jane Eyre is. She's in a rage for the whole novel and the payoff is she gets to marry this blind guy who's toasted his wife in the attic." -Angela Argo "Blue Angel

  Francine Prose

  Angel, Love Is, Blue

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• I read *old* novels. The reason is simple. I prefer proper endings.

  Diane Setterfield

  Simple, Reason

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.29, Simon and Schuster

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• A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Play, Scene, Chapters

  Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Anne Bronte (2009). “The Bronte Sisters: Three Novels: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.80, Penguin

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• It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel

  Roland Barthes

  Character

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• From the essay "Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again" 1. Journalists sometimes make things up. 2. Journalists sometimes get things wrong. 3. Almost all books that are published as memoirs were initially written as novels, and then the agent/editor said, This might work better as a memoir. 6. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.

  Nora Ephron

  Book, Men, Editors

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• Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader's illusion.

  Eudora Welty

  Lonely, Art, Real

  Eudora Welty (2011). “On Writing”, p.53, Modern Library

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• Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.

  John Waters

  Gay, Hands, World

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• I love to read about anger. A "feel bad" book always makes me feel good. And no other novel in the history of literature is more depressing than Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children.

  John Waters

  Depressing, Children, Book

  John Waters (2010). “Role Models”, p.161, Macmillan

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• One must be just a little crazy to write a great novel. One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one’s being to take over the work from time to time.

  John Gardner

  Crazy, Writing, Littles

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• I'm just giving you some spiel, the ludicrous plot of a novel, a story I invented to touch your heart—one-third bullshit, one-third booze, and one-third genuine tenderness, you know the kind of thing.

  Antonio Lobo Antunes

  Heart, Giving, Bullshit

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• Writing a novel is agony.

  George Orwell

  Writing, Agony

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• I wish my life was a John Grisham novel. His heroes always seem to be one step away from death but come up with a brilliant plan. Unfortunately, real life can’t be wrapped up with a nice little bow

  Simone Elkeles

  Real, Nice, Hero

  Simone Elkeles (2011). “Perfect Chemistry”, p.348, Simon and Schuster

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• A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They’re all parts of yourself.

  Janet Fitch

  Dream

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• The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

  Oscar Wilde

  Believe, People, Rose

  Oscar Wilde (1999). “De Profundis: The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Writings”, p.159, Wordsworth Editions

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