Novel Quotes - Page 22

• Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: You have to learn the rhythms of respiration - acquire the pace. Otherwise you stop right away.

  Umberto Eco

  Mountain, Pace, Entering

  Umberto Eco (2014). “The Name of the Rose”, p.559, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel.

  Umberto Eco

  Fall, Writing, Years

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• My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.

  Umberto Eco

  Book, Home, School

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• Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.

  Umberto Eco

  Country, Special, Quality

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• To me any given story has its appropriate form. There might be some story I get involved with that's begging to be a graphic novel, so that will have to be that way.

  Dave Eggers

  Stories, Might, Way

  Interview with Justine Sharrock, www.motherjones.com. March/April 2009.

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• Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Philosophy, Writing, Criticism

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• Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.

  Lion Feuchtwanger

  Writing, Historical Novels, Asking

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• Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.

  Leslie Fiedler

  Book, Gray Area, Memoir

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• Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present.

  Leslie Fiedler

  Past, Magic, Lines

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• There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Block, Writing, Two

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• The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

  E. M. Forster

  Friendship, Writing, Finals

  E. M. Forster (2010). “Aspects of the Novel”, p.42, RosettaBooks

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• Personally, I'd never seen a graphic novel. I knew they existed because friends of mine like Jonathan Ross collect them and some very literate and intelligent people really rate the graphic novel as a form.

  Stephen Fry

  Intelligent, People, Comedy

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• 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.

  Neil Gaiman

  Funny, Writing, Fate

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• I kept starting 'Anansi Boys' as a movie and stopping, and eventually wrote the novel and was happy.

  Neil Gaiman

  Boys, Stopping, Starting

  "Neil Gaiman: Literary Rock Star and Me". Interview With Jeffrey Berman, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 6, 2010.

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• I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

  Neil Gaiman

  Art, Thinking, Stories

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• The short story is still like the novel's wayward younger brother, we know that it's not respectable - but I think that can also add to the glory of it.

  Neil Gaiman

  Brother, Thinking, Add

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• Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.

  Neil Gaiman

  Writing, Effort, Today

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• I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

  Neil Gaiman

  Book, Writing, Thinking

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• It's a given that we exist in a world where we have to live in continuity every day; no one is immune to that, in life or romance novels. By the same token, it's not something I find terribly important.

  Neil Gaiman

  Romance, Important, World

  "Neil Gaiman Writes a Final 'Love Letter to Batman'". Interview with Scott Thill, www.wired.com. April 21, 2009.

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• I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.

  William Gibson

  Writing, Shopping, Lists

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• I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.

  William Gibson

  Living My Life, Good Things, Ifs

  Interview with Noel Murray, www.avclub.com. August 22, 2007.

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• Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss!

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Color, Romance, Taste

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• Back in high school, I wrote a novel about a character named Bart Simpson. I thought it was a very unusual name for a kid at the time. I had this idea of an angry father yelling "Bart," and Bart sounds kind of like bark - like a barking dog.

  Matt Groening

  Dog, Father, School

  "Matt Groening Reveals the Location of the Real Springfield". Interview with Claudia De La Roca, www.smithsonianmag.com. May 2012.

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• A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving.

  Lev Grossman

  Book, Forgiving, Habit

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• The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all - in the end the vast majority of them simply aren't that great, and are destined to be forgotten.

  Lev Grossman

  Majority, Forgotten, Ends

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