Novel Quotes - Page 32

• From the freedom to explore comes the joy of learning. From knowledge acquired by personal initiative arises the desire for more knowledge. And from mastery of the novel and beautiful world awaiting every child comes self-confidence.

  E. O. Wilson

  Beautiful, Freedom, Children

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• Works of art are not so much finished as abandoned. Perhaps poems can be perfect. A short-short story might even be perfectible, as effective and enjoyable for one reader as the next. But novels and other book-length narratives are great rambling things that always contain some flaws. For works of any length, there comes a point when your continued tinkering won't improve the whole, but will just trade one set of problems for another.

  Bruce Holland Rogers

  Art, Book, Perfect

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• Those words are from Lynda Barry's novel 'Cruddy.' I've carried them with me for some time. There's a lot in my life I wasn't expecting. One is the realization that I stood at this pulpit and delivered a reading for my own graduation...15 years ago. Unexpectedly, I'm old.

  Jack Dorsey

  Inspirational, Reading, Years

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• The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable.

  Oscar Wilde

  Real, Character, History

  Oscar Wilde (2014). “A Critic in Pall Mall: Being Extracts from Reviews and Miscellanies”, p.143, Simon and Schuster

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• Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.

  A. S. Byatt

  History, Arise, Shortcomings

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• St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.

  Bertrand Russell

  Marriage, Views, Cake

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• Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself.

  Philip Larkin

  People, Poetry, About Yourself

  "Required Writing". Book by Philip Larkin, 1983.

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• ...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.

  William James

  Science, Abuse, Usual

  William James (2015). “Pragmatism: Human Understanding”, p.22, 谷月社

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• Reading a novel in which all characters illustrate patience, hard work, chastity, and delayed gratification could be a pretty dull experience.

  Thomas Perry

  Patience, Reading, Hard Work

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• I never really understood that massive collaboration involving hundreds of people is what makes movies possible, and it's also why I would agree that curiosity is not the most important human trait; the urge to collaborate is. Heck . . . only we have the ability to cooperate to make like online communities and space telescopes and imaginariums and movies. So the great thrill of this whole experience [my novel being made into a movie] for me was . .. .seeing humanity do what it's best at, which ultimately is not competing but cooperating.

  John Green

  Teamwork, Space, People

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• A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.

  Katherine Paterson

  Book, Kind, Changed

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• Jerusalem Maiden is a page-turning and thought-provoking novel. Extraordinary sensory detail vividly conjures another time and place; heroine Esther Kaminsky’s poignant struggle transcends time and place. The ultimate revelation here: for many women, if not most, 2011 is no different than 1911, but triumph is nonetheless possible.

  Binnie Kirshenbaum

  Struggle, Pages Turning, Thought Provoking

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• The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.

  Rex Stout

  Book, Writing, Two

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• Most beginning writers - and I was the same - are like chefs trying to cook great dishes that they've never tasted themselves. How can you make a great - or even an adequate - bouillabaisse if you've never had any? If you don't really understand why people read mysteries - or romances or literary novels or thrillers or whatever - then there's no way in the world you're going to write one that anyone wants to publish. This is the meaning of the well-known expression "Write what you know."

  Daniel Quinn

  Writing, Expression, People

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• Historical novels, in particular, allow us to relive the past without the neatness of history, and with all the complexity of the present.

  Laila Lalami

  Past, Historical Novels, Complexity

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• I work seven days a week, from 9 in the morning till 8 at night. I have the titles of the next eight novels I want to write. I feel myself pitiable, degraded on a day that I don't write.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Morning, Hard Work, Writing

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• After having produced aquatic animals of all ranks and having caused extensive variations in them by the different environments provided by the waters, nature led them little by little to the habit of living in the air, first by the water's edge and afterwards on all the dry parts of the globe. These animals have in course of time been profoundly altered by such novel conditions; which so greatly influenced their habits and organs that the regular gradation which they should have exhibited in complexity of organisation is often scarcely recognisable.

  Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

  Science, Animal, Air

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• When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.

  Daphne du Maurier

  Writing, Scary, Firsts

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• I bought a selection of short, romantic fiction novels, studied them, decided that I had found a formula and then wrote a book that I figured was the perfect story. Thank goodness it was rejected.

  Louise Brown

  Book, Fiction Novels, Perfect

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• What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use men of prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Ghost does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does not anoint plans, but men, men of prayer.

  Edward McKendree Bounds

  Prayer, Men, Organization

  Edward McKendree Bounds (2015). “Power Through Prayer”, p.5, Delmarva Publications, Inc.

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• Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

  Oscar Wilde

  Writing, Ignorance, Three

  Intentions "The Critic as Artist" pt. 1 (1891)

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• If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there is only one way to do it; and that is to make certain that they have something in their minds to attend with, when you begin to talk. That something can consist in nothing but a previous lot of ideas already interesting in themselves, and of such a nature that the incoming novel objects which you present can dovetail into them and form with them some kind of a logically associated or systematic whole.

  William James

  Philosophy, Educational, Ideas

  William James (2008). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.80, Nuvision Pubns

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• Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.

  John Irving

  Writing, Creative, Maps

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• I started writing novels while an undergraduate student, in an attempt to make sense of the city of Edinburgh, using a detective as my protagonist. Each book hopefully adds another piece to the jigsaw that is modern Scotland, asking questions about the nation's politics, economy, psyche and history ... and perhaps pointing towards its possible future.

  Ian Rankin

  Book, Writing, Asking Questions

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• Life matters more than any painting, novel, film, or great big diamond.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Life, Matter, Painting

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