Novel Quotes - page 16

That pompous phrase (graphic novel) was thought up by some idiot in the marketing department of DC. I prefer to call them Big Expensive Comics. (Alan Moore)
The discovery of a toy duck in the soap dish, presumably the property of some former juvenile visitor, contributed not a little to this new and happier frame of mind. What with one thing and another, I hadn't played with toy ducks in my bath for years, and I found the novel experience most invigorating. For the benefit of those interested, I may mention that if you shove the thing under the surface with the sponge and then let it go, it shoots out of the water in a manner calculated to divert the most careworn. Ten minutes of this and I was enabled to return to the bedchamber much more the old merry Bertram. View quote
P. G. Wodehouse
When I was young I longed to write a great novel that should win me fame. Now that I am getting old my first book is written to amuse children. View quote
L. Frank Baum
My first published novel, 'American Rust,' took three and a half years of full-time work to write. But I wrote two apprentice novels before that. View quote
Philipp Meyer
Terry Pratchett and I met in February 1985, in a Chinese restaurant. I was a young journalist. He was a former journalist and Electricity Board PR, and a writer who had just published his second Discworld novel. I was the first journalist who had ever interviewed him. I remember we made each other laugh a lot. We laughed at the same things. We became friends. It was easy. View quote
Neil Gaiman
I wrote the first 5,000 words of William the Antichrist. It had a demon named Crawleigh. He drove a Citroen 2CV, and was ineffectual. Proper demons like Hastur and Ligur loathed him. It had a baby swap. I sent it to a few friends for feedback. Then my graphic novel Sandman happened, and it was almost a year later that the phone rang. "It's Terry," said Terry. "'Ere. That thing you sent me. Are you doing anything with it?" "Not really." "Well, I think I know what happens next. Do you want to sell it to me? Or write it together?" "Write it together," I said, because I was not stupid, and because that was the nearest I was ever going to get to Michaelangelo phoning to ask if I wanted to paint a ceiling with him. View quote
Neil Gaiman
Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed. View quote
Neil Gaiman
The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time. View quote
Wilkie Collins
A very remarkable work... in the present state of light literature in England, a novel that actually tells a story. It 's quite incredible, I know. Try the book. It has another extraordinary merit, it isn't written by a woman. View quote
Wilkie Collins
I was obsessed with fairytales, and I was a very, very inquisitive kid, and I would ask my mom all kinds of questions. It all kind of formed a story in my head, and I really wanted to be a published author when I was 10, but I had a hard time writing a novel when I was 10. So I decided to wait until I was little bit older and then get it done. View quote
Chris Colfer
"The Lucky One" is at its heart a romance novel, elevated however by Nicholas Sparks' persuasive storytelling. Readers don't read his books because they're true, but because they ought to be true. You can easily imagine how many ways this story would probably go wrong in real life, but who wants to see a movie where a Marine leans over to pick up a photo and is blown up? And a mom trying to raise her son and feed lots of hungry dogs while her abusive ex-husband gets drunk and hangs around? That kind of stuff is too close to life. (Roger Ebert)
So OK. Let's say you know the novel, you agree with Ayn Rand, you're an objectivist or a libertarian, and you've been waiting eagerly for this movie. Man, are you going to get a letdown. It's not enough that a movie agree with you, in however an incoherent and murky fashion. It would help if it were like, you know, entertaining? View quote
Roger Ebert
The audience I joined was perhaps 80 percent female. I heard some sniffles and glimpsed some tears, and no wonder. Eat Pray Love is shameless wish-fulfillment, a Harlequin novel crossed with a mystic travelogue, and it mercifully reverses the life chronology of many people, which is Love Pray Eat. View quote
Roger Ebert
"The Lucky One" is at its heart a romance novel, elevated however by Nicholas Sparks' persuasive storytelling. Readers don't read his books because they're true, but because they ought to be true. View quote
Roger Ebert
Humans... entered the 'cognitive niche.' Remember the definition of intelligence from Chapter 2: using knowledge of how things work to attain goals in the face of obstacles. By learning which manipulations achieve which goals, humans have mastered the art of the surprise attack. They use novel, goal-oriented courses of action to overcome the Maginot Line defenses of other organisms, which can respond only over evolutionary time. The manipulations can be novel because human knowledge is not just couched in concrete instructions like 'how to catch a rabbit.' Humans analyze the world using intuitive theories of objects, forces, paths, places, manners, states, substances, hidden biochemical essences, and, for other animals and people, beliefs and desires.... People compose new knowledge and plans by mentally playing out combinatorial interactions among these laws in their mind's eye. View quote
Steven Pinker
But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the Decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction. View quote
Stephen Colbert
His great novel The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) has certainly enlarged my life – an unusual experience for a life which is well on in its eighties. Reading and rereading it has made me realize how many ways there are of being alive, how many doors there are, close to one, which someone else's touch may open. View quote
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Perhaps the greatest novel of the century. View quote
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
I still couldn't accept that this was not some nightmare, like some freak misbinding in a book, a Lawrence novel become, at the turn of a page, one by Kafka. View quote
John Fowles
It must essentially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent. View quote
John Fowles
You might with advantage take out your map of modern literature and mark on it the name of Italo Svevo...for Svevo and his novel, Confessions of Zeno...will henceforth be on other people's maps, and it is well that the atlases of the enlightened should agree. (Italo Svevo)
The best project is one that asks a novel question. View quote
Walter Gilbert
By asking a novel question that you don't know the answer to, you discover whether you can formulate a way of finding the answer, and you stretch your own mind, and very often you learn something new. View quote
Walter Gilbert
Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing. View quote
Iris Murdoch
The novel, the novel proper that is, is about people's treatment of each other, and so it is about human values. View quote
Iris Murdoch