Novel Quotes - Page 11

[My wife] liked to collect old encyclopedias from second-hand bookstores, and at one point we had eight of them. When I wrote my first historical novel---back in 1980, before I was online---I used them often as a research tool. For instance, I learned that the Bastille was either 90 feet high or 100 feet or 120 feet. This led me to formulate Wilson's 22nd Law: 'Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.'

Everything written, if it has anything in it, will offend someone, and if the mere taking of offence was to amount to a licence to kill the offender, well the world would be sadly underpopulated of novelists, columnists, bloggers, and the writers of editorials.

Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.

The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen.

The funniest things are the forbidden.

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.

Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.

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

You are the Hero of your own Story.

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.

He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.

Music, in the best sense, does not require novelty; nay, the older it is, and the more we are accustomed to it, the greater its effect.

Most novelists I know went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I certainly did.

Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.

Novelty is always welcome but talking pictures are just a fad.

The most difficult part of any crime novel is the plotting. It all begins simply enough, but soon you're dealing with a multitude of linked characters, strands, themes and red herrings - and you need to try to control these unruly elements and weave them into a pattern.

What description of clouds and sunsets was to the old novelist, description of scientific apparatus and methods is to the modern Scientific Detective writer.

For me, a good YA novel is the best kind of comfort food.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

I don't categorize myself as an 85-year-old woman who has written an erotic novel. I categorize myself as a writer who's written an erotic novel.

A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.

Travelling is like a novel: it's what happens that counts.

Nowadays games immediately appear on the Internet and thus the life of novelties is measured in hours. Modern professionals do not have the right to be forgetful - it is 'life threatening'.