Novel Quotes - page 22

Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella." (spoken by character in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa) (Mario Vargas Llosa)
Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair. View quote
Stephen King
Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that. On occasion? Sure. As relaxation? Great. But not full time- And a lot of people are doing that. And while they're doing that, I'll go ahead and write another novel. View quote
Ray Bradbury
Don't tell me how to write my novel. Don't tell me you've got a better ending for it. I have no time for that. View quote
Ray Bradbury
Only six months ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place. View quote
Ray Bradbury
As soon as I get an idea, I write a short story, or I start a novel, or I do a poem. So I have no need for a notebook. I do keep files of ideas and stories that didn't quite work a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago. I come back to them later and I look through the titles. View quote
Ray Bradbury
The problem of the novel is to stay truthful. The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours. View quote
Ray Bradbury
I took a Greyhound bus to New York and stayed at the YMCA, fifty cents a night. I took my stories around to a dozen publishers. Nobody wanted them. They said, We don't publish stories. Nobody reads them. Don't you have a novel? View quote
Ray Bradbury
The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don't know - Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel - the quality of philosophy. View quote
Doris Lessing
I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; "the things people don't say. View quote
Virginia Woolf
In the past, the virtue of women's writing often lay in its divine spontaneity ... But it was also, and much more often, chattering and garrulous ... In future, granted time and books and a little space in the house for herself, literature will become for women, as for men, an art to be studied. Women's gift will be trained and strengthened. The novel will cease to be the dumping-ground for the personal emotions. It will become, more than at present, a work of art like any other, and its resources and its limitations will be explored. (Virginia Woolf)
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them. View quote
Virginia Woolf
The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist. View quote
Wole Soyinka
There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, 'Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth.' View quote
Douglas Adams
To paraphrase Truman Capote, finishing a novel is like taking a child out behind the house and shooting it. To which I would hasten to add, that makes critics a bit like stranger who come along later to piss on the corpse. View quote
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Creativity is not limited to people practising one of the traditional forms of art, and even in the case of artists, creativity is not confined to the exercise of their art. Each one of us has a creative potential, which is hidden by competitiveness and success-aggression. To recognize, explore and develop this potential is the task of the School. Creation – whether it be a painting, sculpture, symphony or novel – involves not merely talent, intuition, powers of imagination and application, but also the ability to shape material that could be expanded to other socially relevant spheres. View quote
Heinrich Böll
Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know. View quote
C. S. Forester
He was one of the first explorers of the human heart, and is therefore rightly to be numbered among the fathers of the novel of sentiment. View quote
Chrétien de Troyes
Light in tone, the novel [Murphy] is Beckett's response to the therapeutic orthodoxy that the patient should learn to engage with the larger world on the world's terms. View quote
J. M. Coetzee
And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out. View quote
Sandra Cisneros
The so-called obscurity of modernist literature has, of course, a lot to do with the new stress on exegesis. When the overt meaning of a work can no longer be taken for granted, criticism is forced - or seems forced - to undertake the explication of the text of the work before doing anything else. But experience has shown us by now that the drift and shape of an "obscure" poem or novel can be grasped for the purposes of art without being "worked out." Part of the triumph of modernist poetry is, indeed, to have demonstrated the great extent to which verse can do without explicit meaning and yet not sacrifice anything essential to its effect as art. Here, as before, successful art can be depended upon to explain itself. (Clement Greenberg)
Readers of histories and novels can hardly fail to be struck by their similarities. There are many histories that could pass for novels, and many novels that could pass for histories, considered in purely formal (or, I should say, formalist) terms. Viewed simply as verbal artifacts histories and novels are indistinguishable from one another. We cannot easily distinguish between them on formal grounds unless we approach them with specific preconceptions about the kinds of truths that each is supposed to deal in. But the aim of the writer of a novel must be the same as that of the writer of a history. View quote
Hayden White
People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author. View quote
Alison Bechdel
I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business. The day you die. View quote
Yasunari Kawabata
That spirit, that feeling for one's comrades in the snow, the moonlight, under the blossoms, is also basic to the tea ceremony. A tea ceremony is a coming together in feeling, a meeting of good comrades in a good season. I may say in passing, that to see my novel Thousand Cranes as an evocation of the formal and spiritual beauty of the tea ceremony is a misreading. It is a negative work, and expression of doubt about and warning against the vulgarity into which the tea ceremony has fallen. View quote
Yasunari Kawabata