Novel Quotes - Page 5

Life is a very bad novelist. It is chaotic and ludicrous.

Any man's life, told truly, is a novel.

The novelist must be his own most harsh critic and also his own most loving admirer and about both he must say nothing.

I read novels but I also read the Bible. And study it, you know? And the more I learn, the more excited I get.

All I'm saying is that I understand if the novelty's worn off and you want to get off the carousel ride now before it kills you.

I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

We are mere journeymen, planting seeds for someone else to harvest.

The ordinariness of living to be old is too novel a thing to appreciate.

The devil is always discovering something novel against the truth.

Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.

God is a novelist. He uses all sorts of literary devices: alliteration, assonance, rhyme, synecdoche, onomatopoeia. But of all of these, His favorite is foreshadowing.And that is what God was doing at the Cloisters and with Eudora Welty. He was foreshadowing. He was laying traps, leaving clues, clues I could have seen had I been perceptive enough.

Didn't they realize that the only way to change things was to act?

I think Melbourne is by far and away the most interesting place in Australia, and I thought if I ever wrote a novel or crime novel of any kind, I had to set it here.

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

The more the schemata are differentiated, the smaller the gap between the new and the familiar becomes, so that novelty, instead of constituting an annoyance avoided by the subject, becomes a problem and invites searching.

Newness hath an evanescent beauty.

I don't set trends. I just find out what they are and exploit them.

Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote.

You always have to be very aware that the audience is extremely ruthless in its demand for newness, novelty and freshness.

If you're happy in a dream, does that count?

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Every Observer writer wants to be a novelist.