Novel Quotes - Page 13

Novelty is indeed necessary to preserve eagerness and alacrity; but art and nature have stores inexhaustible by human intellects, and every moment produces something new to him who has quickened his faculties by diligent observation.

There are few punishments too severe for a popular novel writer.

Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.

America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.

We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper.

If I'd had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and experiences into a novel. But I didn't so I slapped it up on the Web.

No mistake is more to be deplored than the conception that a system of morals and religion should derive any portion of its authority either from the circumstance of its novelty or its antiquity, that it should be judged excellent, not because it is reasonable or true, but because no person has ever thought of it before, or because it has been thought of from the beginning of time.

In the past, it was only in science fiction novels that you could read about ordinary people being able to go to space... But you laid the foundation for space tourism.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

As far as benefits to reading historical novels, there are several! For one thing, you learn about life in another era. Secondly, these novels help us to develop a deeper understanding of the legacy of women who came before us and the strides made by our ancestors.

Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.

Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.

I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.

There are many things behind a good novel, but in particular there is a lot of work - a lot of patience, a lot of stubbornness, and a critical spirit.

I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.

A novelist must know what his last chapter is going to say and one way or another work toward that last chapter. ... To me it is utterly basic, yet it seems like it's a great secret.

The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.

Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.

In suspense novels even subplots about relationships have to have conflict.

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.

I'm a natural novelist. I'm interested in the person and the group, and how they mesh. And one of the ways I don't want them to mesh is for the person to be subsumed into the group.

I believe that I have now experienced the lifetime maximum exposure to bottom spanking in fantasy novels.

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature…literature should be left to essayists.

Every novelist has a different purpose-and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.

There is no better way of elevating the novel than by making it into a construct which contains ideas.