Novel Quotes - Page 6

• There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.

  Zadie Smith

  Perception, Details, Attention

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.

  Zadie Smith

  Talking, Taste, Ghost

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.

  Zadie Smith

  Pain, Problem

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• Every novel starts with a theme, and I am constantly looking for big ideas.

  Peter James

  Ideas, Theme, Bigs

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

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• I love James Baldwin essays, but also his novels. I recently read "Another Country." I couldn't believe how ahead of his time he was.

  Laila Lalami

  Country, Believe, Essays

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• With a novel, you have the reader with you a lot longer, and you owe him a lot more. Obviously you have to have a plot - I say "obviously," although I think a lot of fiction doesn't, and nothing seems to happen. But to me, there should be something that happens, and it should be at least vaguely plausible. And because the readers are going to be with these characters for a long time, you have to get to know them and like them and want to know what happens to them.

  Dave Barry

  Character, Thinking, Long

  Source: www.chicagotribune.com

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• The Holocaust is not a cheap soap opera. The Holocaust is not a romantic novel. It is something else.

  Elie Wiesel

  Holocaust, Opera, Soap

  Source: www.npr.org

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• My first book was a historical novel. I started writing in 1974. In those days, historical novels meant ladies with swelling bosoms on the cover. Basically, it meant historical romance. It was not respectable as a genre.

  Hilary Mantel

  Book, Writing, Historical Novels

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.

  Hilary Mantel

  Past, People, Historical

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• For a while Australians were desperately trying to be cosmopolitan. I think it is a pointless exercise. Australian novels are those rooted in Australia, with Australian landscapes and colours. My work has always had bits of Western Australia in it. It is always here. The world comes to us.

  Tim Winton

  Exercise, Thinking, Australia

  Source: www.compulsivereader.com

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• Everything that I write comes when it wants to, out of its own need and it dictates its form. I don't say, "I am going to write a novel."

  Sandra Cisneros

  Writing, Needs, Want

  Source: www.identitytheory.com

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• I can't do a linear novel. I'm just going to write what I need to write.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Writing, Needs, Linear

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I don't think I'll write a large novel again because it was like being in jail for me. Even though that's the funniest book I've ever written, it was the saddest period of my life.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Tradition has to be retaken by the liberal forces, so that they can show their values of tolerance and democracy not as novel western ideas but as ones indigenous to Pakistan, as a part of its very creation.

  Steve Inskeep

  Ideas, Tolerance, Democracy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Comics are stories; they're like novels or anything else. So the first thing you have to do is become a good storyteller.

  Stan Lee

  Stories, Firsts, Storyteller

  Source: www.ign.com

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• It is impossible to do a movie exactly the way a comic book is written and drawn, just as it's impossible to do a movie exactly like a novel or exactly like anything else. When you go to different forms of media, you have to adapt.

  Stan Lee

  Book, Media, Way

  Source: www.ign.com

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• At Princeton I wrote my junior paper on Virginia Woolf, and for my senior thesis I wrote on Samuel Beckett. I wrote some about "Between the Acts" and "Mrs. Dalloway'' but mostly about "To the Lighthouse." With Beckett I focused, perversely, on his novels, "Molloy," "Malone Dies," and "The Unnamable." That's when I decided I should never write again.

  David Duchovny

  Senior, Writing, Virginia

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• I would say recently I've gotten back to perusing [Samuel] Beckett's novels. Listening to the way Donald Trump speaks without saying anything has made me think about language.

  David Duchovny

  Thinking, Listening, Way

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• I'm a big Philip Roth fan. I think "American Pastoral" is the great American novel of the past 30 to 40 years. It's a novel about what happened in the 1960s, and I think America is still dealing with what happened then. It's devastatingly sad.

  David Duchovny

  Past, Thinking, Years

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• I'm not reading currently because I'm getting revisions of a novel. If I read while I'm writing I will unconsciously plagiarize and go to jail.

  David Duchovny

  Reading, Writing, Jail

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• I will read biographies or autobiographies while I'm writing, but mostly I put books in a to-read queue, like Rachel Cusk's new novel, "Outline."

  David Duchovny

  Book, Writing, Biographies

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• TV was the boogey man when I was growing up. Video games are the boogey man now. The novel was once a boogey man. Books about lowborn people doing lowborn things were once considered a real assault on people's morals. Maybe some day video games will be looked on as a good thing, but personally I don't see it.

  David Duchovny

  Growing Up, Real, Book

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• We think of the romance novel as a lesser form of literature, but I don't think that's true. Love is a very important aspect of human life and worth exploring.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Love Is, Thinking, Romance

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• In Italian, the word for novel is romanzo, "the romance." The English is "novel" - something new. Both of those elements, experimentation and love, are fundamental to the form.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Italian, Romance, Fundamentals

  "Love in the Time of Mass Migration". Interview With Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. March 4, 2017.

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• I've read the Bible. I think the Bible's a great book, but it's a novel. It's beautifully written and la-di-da, but people really took it the wrong way.

  Winona Ryder

  Book, Thinking, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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