Novel Quotes - Page 15

So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.

Hitchcock had a charm about him. He was very funny at times. He was incredibly brilliant in his field of suspense.

There are three things which the public will always clamour for, sooner or later; namely: novelty, novelty, novelty.

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

History begins in novel and ends in essay.

The news is staged, anticipated, reported, analyzed until all interest is wrung from it and abandoned for some new novelty.

A good novel editor is invisible.

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value - a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity.

Reading a novel of a private experience, very, very different, the nature of it is very different.

Writing novels is the most exciting

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

The crime novel has always been my favourite genre.

The hapless wit has his labors always to begin, the call for novelty is never satisfied, and one jest only raises expectation of another.

Admiration must be continued by that novelty which first produces it; and how much soever is given, there must always be reason to imagine that more remains.

All wonder is the effect of novelty on ignorance.

To build and strengthen new connections, the brain needs the challenge of fresh and unusual stimuli. .... There's a lot of evidence to suggest that repetition is bad for brain health, and novelty is good.

I read a lot of detective stories because they always deliver. They give you a beginning, a middle, and an end - a resolution. The modern novels I read don't always deliver because I'm looking essentially for a story. As in Shakespeare, "The play's the thing." In particular I read detective stories for pacing, plot and suspense.

I sort of hate the novel when it doesn't push, restlessly, against the tradition and the traditional.

Jigsaw Lady is the working title of a science fiction novel I've had in my head for darn near 15 years. I think I'll start work on it next year (in all my spare time) but I'd like to get it finished some day.

How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?

If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.