Novel Quotes - Page 12

It is well to start by distinguishing the few really great - the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.

Our past is a novel that we are constantly revising.

A lot of why I do something is just the novelty of the experience.

We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?

As far as he can achieve it, readability is as important for the scientific writer as it is for the novelist.

What is valuable is not new, and what is new is not valuable.

I don't read that many novels, I'm more of a nonfiction fan.

I'm more influenced by novelists than I am by filmmakers.

I am. I think. I will.

Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.

All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

I would say that, in the future, the book will be reserved for things that function best as a book. So, if I need a textbook that's going to be out of date because of new technological inventions, you're better off having it where you can download the supplements or the update. If you're going to read a quick mystery novel to keep you amused while you're traveling, it's fine.

If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.

Today I began the novel that I determined to be great.

If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a 'movie version' of a novel?

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

All novelty in faith is a sure mark of heresy.

Most contemporary novelists, especially the American and the French, are too subjective, mesmerized by private demons; theyre enraptured by their navels and confined by a view that ends with their own toes.

It's an unusual way to write a crime novel, to have these lingering, fairly large story points, but it's something I knew I had to do if I wanted to write a sequel...but, you know, people still have to read and enjoy this book, or it's a moot point.

Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks.

When you write a novel, you make other people see your imaginary friends.

We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: The more connected we become, the lonelier we are.

Sometimes someone will tell me about an author I've never heard of before and that will send me to that person. That's how I discovered Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian novelist whose novels tend to be one long rant.

I'm working on a new novel, in its 3rd draft, but it's hard to write while doing 7th Heaven.