Novel Quotes - page 55

The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel, it represented a diptych about the aftermath of Irish independence. I simply hadn't known that – and I loved the grandeur of the word "diptych." (Colm Tóibín)
The novel space is a pure space. I'm nobody once I go into that room. I'm not gay, I'm not bald, I'm not Irish. I'm not anybody. I'm nobody. I'm the guy telling the story, and the only person that matters is the person reading that story, the target. It's to get that person to feel what I'm trying to dramatize. View quote
Colm Tóibín
It's a well-known fact that no novel is taken seriously in India until a good deal of research has gone into it. This stay in the Taj will be my research. Going down the stairs will be research. So will looking out at the sea. View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
My new novel 'Red Hook Road' began many years ago as a short article in the newspaper. View quote
Ayelet Waldman
I have resolved to pick one novel and just read it over and over again for the rest of my life, because I cannot remember anything anymore. View quote
Hugh Laurie
Celebrity is absolutely preposterous. Entertainment seems to be inflating. It used to be the punctuation to your life, a film or a novel or a play, a way of celebrating a good week or month. Now it feels as if it's all punctuation. View quote
Hugh Laurie
A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road. View quote
Stendhal
A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form. View quote
Paul Theroux
I've got an idea for a modern day faerie tale that I think would made a great short novel. But I just don't have the time to work on it right now. I'm way too busy with the 'Kingkiller Chronicles' and being a new dad. View quote
Patrick Rothfuss
Poetry was a meeting of mind and heart, I felt at one with poetry itself. I like the concentrated language, the play with form, and the way you can muck around with words in a way that you can't in a novel. Poetry allows you to be intense, because to some degree people expect it. View quote
Daljit Nagra
I chose to rewrite it in poetry because the original Ramayana was in poetry- the fact is, it's sort of been corrupted into prose. In its original form it was an epic poem rather like the Iliad or works of that sort. Rather than traditional poetry, it was a verse novel, without a traditional structure. What I most wanted to do was to preserve the essential musicality of the lines. Especially as the Ramayana like so many stories, was based on a fundamentally oral tradition. (Daljit Nagra)
Moral philosophy is very largely a branch of fiction. Despite this, a philosopher has yet to write a great novel. The fact should not be surprising. In philosophy the truth about human life is of no interest. View quote
John N. Gray
The unalterable character with which Schopenhauer and sometimes Conrad believed all humans are born may not exist; but we cannot help looking within ourselves to account for what we do. All we find are fragments, like memories of a novel we once read. View quote
John N. Gray
One of the ready advantages of writing a road or quest story is that it mirrors the experience of writing a novel. View quote
Chang-rae Lee
The World of Ā. This widely-read novel began its career as a pretentious, foolish, wildly complicated and self-contradictory magazine serial. View quote
Damon Knight
My work schedule has changed over the years. The one constant is, when at work on a novel, I try to work seven days a week, so as not to lose touch with that world. Within that, I'm flexible on hours and output. View quote
Donald E. Westlake
Where the novel makes use of material from my life it does so because it's aesthetically convenient, not because of any allegiance it has to any verifiable facts. View quote
Garth Greenwell
I think of a book and a play, or a book and a movie, as two separate things - I don't think of it as my novel having a new life. View quote
Louis Sachar
The reason I never wrote a novel is that I don't have what it takes to write characters, so they would all be talking differently. I lack that ability. If I were writing, they would all talk like me, and that's no good. View quote
Wim Wenders
In the novel, the memory hole is a slot into which government officials deposit politically inconvenient documents and records to be destroyed." View quote
Rachel Maddow
When I was young, I knew William Burroughs really well. And William's secret desire, which he never quite did, was to write a straightforward detective novel. (Patti Smith)
A final argument for broad freedom of expression is its effect on the character of individuals in a society. Citizens in a free society must have courage - the courage to hear not only unwelcome political speech but novel and shocking ideas in science and the arts. View quote
Anthony Lewis
People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. View quote
Anthony Powell
You no longer have much in the way of knowing what to do in a big, epic novel about the future, because nobody knows what the hell is going to happen. View quote
Jerry Pournelle
It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel. View quote
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe