Novel Quotes - Page 33

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

  Rita Mae Brown

  Life, Matter, Painting

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• For a long time I found the celebrities of modern painting and poetry ridiculous. I loved absurd pictures, fanlights, stage scenery, mountebanks backcloths, inn-signs, cheap colored prints; unfashionable literature, church Latin, pornographic books badly spelt, grandmothers novels, fairy stories, little books for children, old operas, empty refrains, simple rhythms.

  Arthur Rimbaud

  Love, Children, Latin

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• France lost a great novel last night.

  Victor Hugo

  Sex, Night, Lasts

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• I'd harbored hopes that the intelligence that once inhabited novels or films would ingest rock. I was, perhaps, wrong.

  Lou Reed

  Crazy, Rocks, Mad

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• Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel.

  Carl Clinton Van Doren

  Travel, Adventure, Literature

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• There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.

  Peter Straub

  Travel, Book, Adventure

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• NOVEL, n. A short story padded.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Stories, Literature, Short Story

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.151, 谷月社

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• I know that certain minds would regard as audacious the idea of relating the laws which preside over the play of our organs to those laws which govern inanimate bodies; but, although novel, this truth is none the less incontestable. To hold that the phenomena of life are entirely distinct from the general phenomena of nature is to commit a grave error, it is to oppose the continued progress of science.

  Francois Magendie

  Life, Nature, Science

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• Economists have the correct insight that economics is a theory of choice, the key to the story is the variety of options and centralised political control limits the options. The best recipe is adaptive efficiency coping with novel uncertainty in a non-ergodic world, the maintenance of institutions which enable trial & error experiment to occur, and an effective means of eliminating unsuccessful solutions

  Douglass North

  Mean, Errors, Keys

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• 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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• [There is] one distinctly human thing - the story. There can be as good science about a turnip as about a man. ... [Or philosophy, or theology] ...There can be, without any question at all, as good higher mathematics about a turnip as about a man. But I do not think, though I speak in a manner somewhat tentative, that there could be as good a novel written about a turnip as a man.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Philosophy, Science, Men

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• Either the Earth System would undergo major phase transitions as a result of unchecked human pressure on nature's capacities and resources or a "Great Transformation" towards global sustainability would be initiated in due course. Neither transitions nor transformations will be manageable without novel forms of global governance and markets.

  Hans Joachim Schellnhuber

  Transition, Would Be, Phases

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• My first novel, 'The Tiger's Daughter,' embodies the loneliness I felt but could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man's land between the country of my past and the continent of my present.

  Bharati Mukherjee

  Daughter, Mother, Country

  "American Dreamer" by Bharati Mukherjee, www.motherjones.com. January/February 1997.

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• Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Drinking, Writing, Acting

  Interview with Dennis Widmyer, chuckpalahniuk.net. September 30, 2007.

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• Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.

  Russell Lynes

  Drinking, Writing, Excellent

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• Paleontologists had long been aware of a seeming contradiction between Darwin's postulate of gradualism, confirmed by the work of population genetics, and the actual findings of paleontology. Following phyletic lines through time seemed to reveal only minimal gradual changes but no clear evidence for any change of a species into a different genus or for the gradual origin of an evolutionary novelty. Anything truly novel always seemed to appear quite abruptly in the fossil record.

  Ernst Mayr

  Long, Population, Different

  Ernst Mayr (1991). “One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought”, p.138, Harvard University Press

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• When ambition enters, creativity disappears - because an ambitious man cannot be creative, because an ambitious man cannot love any activity for its own sake. While he is painting he is looking ahead; he is thinking, 'When am I going to get a Nobel Prize?' When he is writing a novel, he is looking ahead. He is always in the future - and a creative person is always in the present.

  Rajneesh

  Creativity, Ambition, Writing

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• She feels so contented in giving birth to a child, in helping the child to grow; and that's why she does not need any other kind of creativity. Her creative urge is fulfilled. But man is in trouble: he cannot give birth to a child, he cannot have the child in his womb. He has to find a substitute, otherwise he will always feel inferior to the woman. And deep down he does feel that he is inferior. Because of that feeling of inferiority man tries to create paintings, statues, dramas, he writes poetry, novels, explores the whole scientific world of creativity.

  Rajneesh

  Children, Drama, Writing

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• When the polar ice caps melt, my recording studio will rise up like an ark, and I'll float off into the drowned world like a character from a J.G. Ballard novel.

  Thomas Dolby

  Ocean, Character, Ice

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• ... there is ... a big aspect of play in writing novels, and making the story more and more elaborate is just more and more fun.

  Gish Jen

  Fun, Writing, Play

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• I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.

  Ellen Goodman

  Social Values, Recycling, Boxes

  "Saigon Swap". www.nytimes.com. June 10, 1990.

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• It was a great place to write a novel about book burning, in the library basement.

  Ray Bradbury

  Book, Writing, Library

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• A bank book makes good reading - better than some novels.

  Sir Harry Lauder

  Money, Book, Reading

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• Unless a writer lives with a periodic delusion of his greatness, he will not continue writing. He must believe, against all reason and evidence, that the public will experience a catastrophic loss if he does not complete his novel. The public is just clamoring to give him his fame. From the book Dare to be a Great Writer: 329 Keys to Powerful Fiction by

  Leonard Bishop

  Powerful, Believe, Book

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• The mighty steam-engine has its germ in the simple boiler in which the peasant prepares his food. The huge ship is but the expansion of the floating leaf freighted with its cargo of atmospheric dust; and the flying balloon is but the infant's soap-bubble lightly laden and overgrown. But the Telescope, even in its most elementary form, embodies a novel and gigantic idea, without an analogue in nature, and without a prototype in experience

  John Timbs

  Nature, Science, Simple

  John Timbs (2012). “Stories of Inventors and Discoverers in Science and the Useful Arts”, p.212, BoD – Books on Demand

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