Novel Quotes - Page 8

I do not know what to say in a case so surprising, so unlooked for and so novel.

The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

Children are dying." Lull nodded. "That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words.

There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better.

Dreams cannot be tamed. Dreamers cannot be ruled.

We can sell our time, but we can't buy it back.

If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it.

I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don’t interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.

Few of us write great novels; all of us live them.

I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.

I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.

The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.

Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.

I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'

It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language

I never plan my novels because if I know what is going to happen, it bores me rigid. I let the story tell itself.

A Marxist has never written a good novel.

We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works

The few really great-the major novelists ... are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

Our fascination with weather: its caprices and changes as an antidote to the eternal repetition of daily life; a helpful illusion of novelty

No matter how little a man has he will find that he will always settle for less.

I love only extreme novelty or the things of the past.

Great novelists are philosopher novelists - that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.