Novel Quotes - Page 6

Chance is the only source of true novelty.

The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists - even of the fact he is reading a book.

Don't be a novelist --- be a statistician. Much more scope for the imagination.

Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists called a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake.

A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.

I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read.

"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg." Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.

The major novelty of my theory was its claim that the most rapid evolutionary change does not occur in widespread, populous species, as claimed by Most geneticists, but in small founder populations.

I could see now that a literary education did not fit one for the popular novelist's trade.Once you had started using words like flavicomous or acroamatic, because you liked the sound of them, you were lost.

There're no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels, and then I read them again, and it's the best thing.

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'

A writer should bury his thoughts deep and convey them through the characters in his novel.

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?

Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.

An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

Life is not like a novel, but a novel can be like life. The best ones always are.

Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.

You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don't already believe it.

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

After closely examining my conscience, I venture to state that in my historical novels I intended the content to be just as modern and up-to-date as in the contemporary ones.