Novel Quotes - page 49

Continuous present is all we have, and stream of consciousness - which in a novel is arguably just as artificial as the stilted dialogue that you get in most conventional novels. They're all stratagems to try to get closer to the texture of lived life. (Will Self)
A romance novel should leave readers joyous. My books all have happy endings. View quote
Judith McNaught
Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up. View quote
Joan Didion
I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing. View quote
Joan Didion
You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel. View quote
Chuck Palahniuk
If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions. View quote
David Mamet
I usually start writing a novel that I then abandon. When I say abandon, I don't think any writer ever abandons anything that they regard as even a half-good sentence. So you recycle. I mean, I can hang on to a sentence for several years and then put it into a book that's completely different from the one it started in. View quote
Kate Atkinson
I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel. I showed her four or five chapters of what would become 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' and to my surprise she auctioned them off. View quote
Kate Atkinson
Everyone said, 'Well, you're very old for a first novel,' and I said, 'How do you write when you haven't lived? How do you write when you have no experience? How do you write straight out of university? View quote
Kate Atkinson
Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture. View quote
Johan Huizinga
Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was 26, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was a star-struck impulse. (Anne Lamott)
His fiction – radical, satirical, polyvalent, sexually courageous, global – extended the mainstream novel, and led it somewhere else. Still not fully recognized, he was one of Britain's greatest late-twentieth-century writers. View quote
Angus Wilson
When I started working on 'Stay With Me,' I thought it would take two years to complete the novel. View quote
Ayobami Adebayo
Co-written with John Byrum based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham. View quote
Bill Murray
A novel is a conversation starter, and if the author isn't there for the after-party, both the writer and the reader are missing a lot. View quote
Maggie Stiefvater
I have a really good idea for a novel and would like to just kind of try my hand at fiction. I'm starting to kind of get a really good body of work going from a literary standpoint. As long as the audience is there, man, I'll keep cranking them out. View quote
Corey Taylor
In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety. View quote
Julian Barnes
Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones? View quote
Julian Barnes
The "Lucifer Effect” describes the point in time when an ordinary, normal person first crosses the boundary between good and evil to engage in an evil action. It represents a transformation of human character that is significant in its consequences. Such transformations are more likely to occur in novel settings, in "total situations,” where social situational forces are sufficiently powerful to overwhelm, or set aside temporally, personal attributes of morality, compassion, or sense of justice and fair play. Evil is the exercise of power to intentionally harm (psychologically), hurt (physically), or destroy (mortally or spiritually) others. View quote
Philip Zimbardo
The "Lucifer Effect" describes the point in time when an ordinary, normal person first crosses the boundary between good and evil to engage in an evil action. It represents a transformation of human character that is significant in its consequences. Such transformations are more likely to occur in novel settings, in "total situations," where social situational forces are sufficiently powerful to overwhelm, or set aside temporally, personal attributes of morality, compassion, or sense of justice and fair play. View quote
Philip Zimbardo
When I was writing 'The White Tiger' I lived in a building pretty much exactly like the one I described in this novel, and the people in the book are the people I lived with back then. So I didn't have to do much research to find them. (Aravind Adiga)
Most first novels are disguised autobiographies. This autobiography is a disguised novel. View quote
Clive James
Perhaps the novel evolved in order to deal with man's growing awareness that behind the facade of social organisations, manners, customs, myths, rituals and religions of the post-Christian era lies chaos. View quote
Ralph Ellison
We cannot live, as someone has said, in the contemplation of chaos, but neither can we live without an awareness of chaos, and the means through which we achieve that awareness, and through which we assert our humanity most significantly against it, is in great art. In our time the most articulate art form for defining ourselves and for asserting our humanity is the novel. Certainly it is our most rational art form for dealing with the irrational. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature. View quote
Oscar Wilde