Novel Quotes - Page 19

• I did not know at first that it would be a series; I discovered after the first novel that I had more to say about it, so I did another. And another, and then the readers demanded yet more.

  Piers Anthony

  Writing, Would Be, Firsts

  Interview with Dag Rambraut, www.sffworld.com. June 5, 2000.

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• I do one Xanth novel a year, because at the moment that is all that publishers will accept; they don't want any other type of fiction from me, so Xanth pays my way.

  Piers Anthony

  Years, Fiction, Want

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• I hope to read a Harry Potter novel soon, to see what it's all about. I admit to being annoyed that many good light fantasy writers have had trouble getting published, in England and elsewhere, when it is obvious the readers were waiting for us all along.

  Piers Anthony

  Light, Annoyed, Waiting

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• I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

  Margaret Atwood

  Reality, Thinking, Play

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• I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.

  Margaret Atwood

  Believe, Expression, Novelists

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• Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.

  W. H. Auden

  Writing, Night, People

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• For me a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

  Paul Auster

  Integrity, Shapes, Lines

  "Paul Auster talks". Interview with Alison Flood, www.theguardian.com. October 29, 2008.

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• I started out in life as a poet, I was only writing poetry all through my 20s, it wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them.

  Paul Auster

  Reading, Writing, Detectives

  "Big Think Interview With Paul Auster". Interviewed with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 5, 2009.

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• Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can't be done.

  Paul Auster

  Long, Trying, Done

  Paul Auster, James M. Hutchisson (2013). “Conversations with Paul Auster”, p.195, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels.

  Nicholson Baker

  Thinking, Suspense Novels, Sometimes

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• Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.

  J. G. Ballard

  Writing, Thinking, Contentment

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• The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

  John Banville

  Novelists, Resilient

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• I feel like my brain is more geared towards a novel than it is to a movie.

  Kate Beckinsale

  Brain, Feels

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• At Oxford University, I studied languages so I could read the great novels as they were originally written. I took what in the United States would be a double major in Russian and French, but I have to admit that the pressure of getting through so many books spoiled reading for me.

  Kate Beckinsale

  Book, Reading, Oxford

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• Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.

  John Berger

  Struggle, Writing, Opposites

  "Q & A / John Berger / The moment of truth is now". Interview with Kenneth Baker, www.sfgate.com. January 6, 2002.

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

  Jeff Bezos

  Skeptical

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• The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Writing, Causality, Problem

  "Discussion". Book by Jorge Luis Borges, 1932.

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• I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.

  Alain de Botton

  Writing, Fiction, Uncomfortable

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Doing graphic novels is cool! It's fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

  Anthony Bourdain

  Fun, Writing, Artist

  "Interview: Anthony Bourdain Is Ready To 'Get Jiro' With His New Food Focused Graphic Novel". Interview with Alex Zalben, www.mtv.com. June 26, 2012.

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• If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Writing, Ideas, Surface

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• Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

  Anita Brookner

  Writing, Attention, Innocence

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• Because I worked as a newspaper reporter for about 14 years before attempting my first novel, I learned to write under almost any circumstances- by candle light, in longhand, in African villages where there was no power, under shelling in Kurdistan.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Writing, Light, Years

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• Hollywood called just as I crested thirty. My novels did not and still do not interest them, but my writing ability did.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Writing, Hollywood, Thirty

  "Write On" by Rita Mae Brown, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 18, 2010.

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• If you like my novels, I commend your good taste.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Taste, Good Taste, Ifs

  Rita Mae Brown (1982). “Southern discomfort”, Harpercollins

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• The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation.

  James Buchan

  Country, Dog, Men

  "Lifting the veil" by James Buchan, www.theguardian.com. November 12, 2004.

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