Novel Quotes - Page 37

• It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel

  Roland Barthes

  Character

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• From the essay "Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again" 1. Journalists sometimes make things up. 2. Journalists sometimes get things wrong. 3. Almost all books that are published as memoirs were initially written as novels, and then the agent/editor said, This might work better as a memoir. 6. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.

  Nora Ephron

  Book, Men, Editors

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• Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader's illusion.

  Eudora Welty

  Lonely, Art, Real

  Eudora Welty (2011). “On Writing”, p.53, Modern Library

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• Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.

  John Waters

  Gay, Hands, World

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• I love to read about anger. A "feel bad" book always makes me feel good. And no other novel in the history of literature is more depressing than Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children.

  John Waters

  Depressing, Children, Book

  John Waters (2010). “Role Models”, p.161, Macmillan

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• I'm just giving you some spiel, the ludicrous plot of a novel, a story I invented to touch your heart—one-third bullshit, one-third booze, and one-third genuine tenderness, you know the kind of thing.

  Antonio Lobo Antunes

  Heart, Giving, Bullshit

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• One must be just a little crazy to write a great novel. One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one’s being to take over the work from time to time.

  John Gardner

  Crazy, Writing, Littles

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• Writing a novel is agony.

  George Orwell

  Writing, Agony

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• I wish my life was a John Grisham novel. His heroes always seem to be one step away from death but come up with a brilliant plan. Unfortunately, real life can’t be wrapped up with a nice little bow

  Simone Elkeles

  Real, Nice, Hero

  Simone Elkeles (2011). “Perfect Chemistry”, p.348, Simon and Schuster

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• Yes. To write a novel is to risk my sanity. The deeper I get into the suffering and conflict of the characters, into the very situations and thoughts and feelings that make the novel worthwhile, the worse I feel, and the more likely I am to be severely depressed when the book is finished. There is no avoiding this: it is the result of attempting to tell all you know, to reach for the stars, to write what matters.

  Anne Rice

  Stars, Book, Character

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• Pluralism matters because life is not worth living without new experiences - new people, new places, new challenges. But discipline matters too; we cannot simply treat life as a psychedelic trip through a series of novel sensations.

  Tim Harford

  New Experiences, Discipline, People

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• The most important thing in business is a persona, Nico,' he was fond of saying. 'People want to know immediately what they're dealing with. And when they think about you, you've got to stand out in their minds--like one of those characters in a novel.

  Candace Bushnell

  Business, Character, Thinking

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• In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane from the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.

  Milan Kundera

  Book, Eye, Numbers

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• Has all the trappings of a mystery novel, doesn't it?

  Patricia Cornwell

  Mystery Novels, Mystery

  Patricia Cornwell (2009). “The Scarpetta Collection Volume I: Postmortem and Body of Evidence”, p.468, Simon and Schuster

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• The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, “To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls.” Another one said, “To describe blow-jobs artistically.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Jobs, Wall, Blow

  KURT VONNEGUT, JR (1969). “SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE”

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• She was like a heroine in a novel that she herself was writing the character kept protesting that she was too strong for love and yet the narrator went on describing her desire.

  Anna Godbersen

  Strong, Writing, Character

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• She found herself longing for home-not just for the hotel but for New York and all the real novels that she could lose herself in there.

  Anna Godbersen

  New York, Real, Home

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• But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.

  George R. R. Martin

  Philosophy, Reading, Advancement

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• I am the suburb of a non-existent town, the prolix commentary on a book never written. I am nobody, nobody. I am a character in a novel which remains to be written, and I float, aerial, scattered without ever having been, among the dreams of a creature who did not know how to finish me off.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Book, Character

  Fernando Pessoa, Iain Watson (1991). “The book of disquiet: a selection”, Quartet Encounters

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• He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.

  Julian Barnes

  Art, Mean, Insulted Him

  "Homage To Hemingway" by Julian Barnes, www.newyorker.com. July 4, 2011.

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• Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader's imagination as the characters in their books. Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.

  Alan Bennett

  Kindness, Reading, Book

  Alan Bennett (2008). “The Uncommon Reader”, p.22, Faber & Faber

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• The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

  Billy Collins

  Memories, Phones, Fishing

  2000 Taking off Emily Dickinson's Clothes: Selected Poems, 'Forgetfulness'.

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• This was my one brush with love. Was it love? It felt awful enough. I spent another two years crawling around in the skin of it, smoking too much and growing too thin and having stray thoughts of jumping from my balcony like a tortured heroine in a Russian novel.

  Paula McLain

  Jumping, Years, Two

  Paula McLain (2012). “The Paris Wife (Random House Reader's Circle Deluxe Reading Group Edition): A Novel”, p.33, Ballantine Books

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• I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.

  Natalie Goldberg

  Dream, Writing, Thinking

  Natalie Goldberg (2016). “Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within”, p.12, Shambhala Publications

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• But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel — independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.

  David Nicholls

  Character, Independent, Sparks

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