Novel Quotes - Page 35

• Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?

  Milan Kundera

  Hero, Traps

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• The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.

  Wilkie Collins

  Reading, Writing, Years

  Wilkie Collins (2014). “My Miscellanies”, p.60, The Floating Press

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• Seminaked men!” Jacky trilled. “With swords,” Kat purred. “It is a romance novel!

  P. C. Cast

  Men, Romance, Romance Novel

  P. C. Cast (2008). “Warrior Rising”, p.106, Penguin

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• I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.

  E. M. Forster

  Long, England

  "E. M. Forster: A New Life". Book by Wendy Moffat, p. 174, April 4, 2011.

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• Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels.

  Jose Saramago

  Writing, Past, Men

  "The History of the Siege of Lisbon" by Jose Saramago, (p. 47), 1989.

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• The problem isn't finding out where you are gonna go-its figuring out what you are gonna do once you get there that is! (Jamie Sullivan)

  Nicholas Sparks

  Problem, Jamie, Where You Are

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• A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They’re all parts of yourself.

  Janet Fitch

  Dream

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• The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

  Oscar Wilde

  Believe, People, Rose

  Oscar Wilde (1999). “De Profundis: The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Writings”, p.159, Wordsworth Editions

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• If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?

  Jane Austen

  Protection, Heroines, Regard

  Jane Austen (2009). “Northanger Abbey”, p.20, Wild Jot Press

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• I had an American journalist say to me, "Is it true you wrote the whole of the first novel on napkins?" I was tempted to say, "On teabags, I used to save them.

  J. K. Rowling

  Firsts, Napkins, Used

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• Secrets. Need to disguise. The novel was born of this.

  Anais Nin

  Secret, Needs, Born

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• The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing, while the true traveler knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory.

  Gregory Maguire

  Accessories, World, Traveler

  Gregory Maguire (2013). “The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked, Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz”, p.73, Harper Collins

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• Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die.

  Margaret Drabble

  Fate, Birth, Abandoned

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• I always write a draft version of the novel in which I try to develop, not the story, not the plot, but the possibilities of the plot. I write without thinking much, trying to overcome all kinds of self-criticism, without stopping, without giving any consideration to the style or structure of the novel, only putting down on paper everything that can be used as raw material, very crude material for later development in the story.

  Mario Vargas Llosa

  Writing, Thinking, Self

  Mario Vargas Llosa (2013). “A Writer's Reality”, p.48, Faber & Faber

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• I won't talk to you about my family and you won't talk to me about yours. Family talk is either boring or self-pitying. Or it's Gothic, like a Faulkner novel. Who needs to talk about it? It's enough to live it.

  Chaim Potok

  Self, Needs, Gothic

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• Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn't be.

  Anna Godbersen

  Diana, Felt

  "The Luxe (Luxe, Book 1)". Book by Anna Godbersen, November 20, 2007.

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• My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before,—a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Philosophy, Feet, Discovery

  Henry David Thoreau (2015). “Walking”, p.26, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.

  Stephen Fry

  Writing, Reality, Effort

  Stephen Fry (2011). “Moab Is My Washpot”, p.343, Soho Press

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• If you don't like my book, write your own. If you don't think you can write a novel, that ought to tell you something. If you think you can, do. No excuses. If you still don't like my novel, find a book you do like. Life is too short to be miserable. If you do like my novels, I commend your good taste.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Life, Book, Writing

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

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• Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella." (spoken by character in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa)

  Mario Vargas Llosa

  Art, Character, Life Is

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• I have died and gone to the land of bad novels.

  Gail Carriger

  Land, Gone, Died

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• We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.

  John Steinbeck

  Evil, Stories, Contests

  John Steinbeck (2002). “East of Eden”, p.325, Penguin

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• I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poet, historians, or pamphleteers.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Song, Believe, Character

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.102, Ultramarine Publishing

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• Mirabelle replaces the absent friends with books and television mysteries of the PBS kind. The books are mostly nineteenth-century novels in which women are poisoned or are doing the poisoning. She does not read these books as a romantic lonely hearts turning pages in the isolation of her room, not at all. She is instead an educated spirit with a sense of irony. She loves the gloom of these period novels, especially as kitsch, but beneath it all she finds that a part of her indentifies with all that darkness.

  Steve Martin

  Lonely, Book, Heart

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• I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was constantly by my side while I was writing it, who was the good fairy of my equilibrium, who banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of certainties.

  Salvador Dali

  Writing, Doubt, Lions

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