Novel Quotes - Page 17

In modern novels I try to not let myself get away and to be here, and that's why I write about my life and myself. But even when I do that there's an element of disappearing to a place that's not me. It's "the selflessness of writing". It seldom happens, but when it does it's worth quite a lot.

Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.

Jane Austen was an extraordinary woman; to actually be able to survive as a novelist in those days - unmarried - was just unheard of.

A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

The novel since its origins has been the privatization of history... the history of private life ... and in that sense every novel is an historical novel.

Good travel books are novels at heart.

The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?

In most conventional novels, God is not allowed to be nuts. Nor are nuts allowed to be God.

They say great themes make great novels

As a child I was an inveterate liar. As opposed to now, I am a Novelist.

With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.

I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.

Being a novelty had its advantages.

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

Another novelty is the tea-party, an extraordinary meal in that, being offered to persons that have already dined well, it supposes neither appetite nor thirst, and has no object but distraction, no basis but delicate enjoyment.

We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published.

Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.

An urban novelist never minds a little decay.

The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer; it's possessed by the reader.

The complexion of a novelist is seldom rosy (Paul Bailey once announced to a heavy-hearted audience of novelists at PEN that we have always been an ugly tribe). We are engaged in indoor activity, haemorrhoidal, prone to chillblains, poor of circulation.

There seems almost a general wish of descrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.

If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?

The most original novelist now writing in English.

A woman filled with faith in the one she loves is the creation of a novelist's imagination.

A kitsch novel describes the world not as it really is, but as it is hoped and feared to be.