Popular quotes about Novels! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
People who know and read comics know that there's a huge diversity amongst the types of stories. Nobody ever goes 'how many more of these movies based on novels are there going to be?!'. People laugh at that question and they go novels, there are all different types of novels. But there are all different types of comic books, they just happen to have drawings on the cover!
Kevin FeigeI certainly think we're going to see more and more graphic novels and more illustrated novels.
Charlaine HarrisAs to the number of novels I've abandoned... I shudder to think. I have thrown away five completed novels, and that's a gruesome enough figure. But not necessarily a waste of effort.
Mark HaddonThe structure of my novels has nothing to do with the narrative mode of cinema. My novels would be very difficult to film without ruining them completely. I think this is the area where writers need to place ourselves: from a position of absolute modernity and contemporaneity, creating a culture of objects which cinema cannot.
Agustin Fernandez MalloI do not think novels are necessarily more worthwhile than games. A novel can be a trivial waste of time, and a game can teach. Whatever the genre, I think a successful narrative allows us to participate, to try on new roles and points of view. At their best, novels and games serve as vehicles for discovery.
Allegra GoodmanI can only write one novel at a time. The author of the Perry Mason novels, Erle Stanley Gardner, often worked on four novels simultaneously, and produced a million words a year. I'm envious.
James ThayerBecause I think of novels as collaborative enterprises between the writer and the reader, all of my novels so far have ending with endings that maybe point in more than one direction, and that seems important to me because it seems important to me that after you've invested twenty or thirty hours of your imaginative life into this narrative that you have some stake in how it ends.
Emily BartonI'm not writing novels, the screenplays are my novels, so I'm gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it'd almost be okay because I did it. It's there on the page.
Quentin TarantinoMy novels tend to take a long time to become exactly what they're going to be. They're fluid messes until I've done a ton of editing and refining and rewriting. When I write novels, I always make related scrapbooks to help me organize and test my intentions.
Dennis CooperNovels need readers of a certain kind, people who are patient and enjoy immersing themselves in another perspective for uninterrupted stretches of time. Reading habits might well be changing. People who pay for novels might overlap significantly with those who engage in Twitter and Facebook.
Zia Haider RahmanMy major preoccupation is the question, 'What is reality ?' Many of my stories and novels deal with psychotic states or drug-induced states by which I can present the concept of a multiverse rather than a universe. Music and sociology are themes in my novels, also radical political trends; in particular I've written about fascism and my fear of it.
Philip K. DickGood novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites.
Piers Paul ReadNovels definitely come more naturally to me. When I write short stories, it's always a fight against it expanding.
Maggie ShipsteadWith Ibrahim al-Koni, what I figured out was - and you'll see this in his novels - if your time is limited, make the unit of the chapters small so that you can finish one a day, at least in the first draft. Once you have the first draft it's living, and you can coax it to grow and trim it and reshape it and so on. But get that first draft. I think if I'd gone to an MFA program and learned that, it would have been money well spent. But translation has been that for me.
Elliott CollaWhat I loved about romances was the character, and I think I still bring that to my novels. What romance taught me was that the 'who' will always matter more than the 'what.' It's fun to come up with plots, but I want to make sure the reader cares about who it's happening to.
Lisa GardnerWendy Doniger has spent decades collecting not only myths from ancient texts but stories of all kinds from novels, movies, newspapers about an old mystery: what has or hasn't happened in bed for centuries. Rich in insights about sex, lies, and personal identity, the result is entertaining, enthralling, and, yes, sexy.
Roberto CalassoI'd say that the question whether love still exists plays the same role in my novels as the question of God's existence in Dostoevsky.
Michel HouellebecqGreat, 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 GaimanSylvie's knowledge, like Izzie's, was random yet far-ranging, 'The sign that one has acquired one's learning from reading novels rather than an education.
Kate AtkinsonI know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.
Candace BushnellThe novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered moral if the highest values of a society are adherence to rules and traditional mores, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, and absolute ideas of right and wrong. Any society based on the latter will find novels inherently immoral and subversive.
Jane SmileyI don't like to read novels where the novelist tells me what to think about the situation and the characters. I prefer to discover for myself.
Frederick WisemanI don't do research for my novels. Obviously, in my other line of work as a reporter and a columnist, I've had the opportunity to get to know both social workers and TV talk-show hosts.
Anna QuindlenShe was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague โsheโ of all the poetry books.
Gustave FlaubertNovels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.
Joyce Carol OatesIn winter I like sprawling novels, full of conflict and intrigue, and during the bleakest, coldest days of December I holed up with Nicola Griffith 's Hild, a book of love and sex and war and religious upheaval, and I recommend it even over the warmest pair of Sorels.
Maud NewtonWhen I first thought of the idea for 'Sweet Valley High,' I loved the idea of high school as microcosm of the real world. And what I really liked was how it moved things on from 'Sleeping Beauty'-esque romance novels where the girl had to wait for the hero. This would be girl-driven, very different, I decided - and indeed it is.
Francine PascalA book is basically just symbols arranged to form this story, this world. But on the other hand, books, novels, literature in general, is what shows us at our most human.
Shane Warren JonesYou can't write a novel all at once, any more than you can swallow a whale in one gulp. You do have to break it up into smaller chunks. But those smaller chunks aren't good old familiar short stories. Novels aren't built out of short stories. They are built out of scenes.
Orson Scott CardI'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things. My first three novels were all about families. Things that happen in a house within a family, because you're a child or because you want to keep the family together, you suffer things you might not have had to suffer if you weren't in that situation.
Lily KingSome novels present a story form many points of view. Most movies tell only one person's side of the story. Sometime it's easy to use the strongest point of view, or find the character with the most dramatic experience. It depends on which themes the scriptwriter wants to explore.
Seth Grahame-SmithPeople used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.
Brian ReynoldsI could read at a very early age and I loved stories, losing myself in stories, novels.
Heather DonahueAll the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.
Jeremy NorthamBut 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. MartinNovels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them-almost all women; a vast number of clever, hardheaded men.
William Makepeace ThackerayAfter closely examining my conscience, I venture to state that in my historical novels I intended the content to be just as modern and up-to-date as in the contemporary ones.
Lion FeuchtwangerNarratives have the same power, I think. Some readers of my novels ask me, "Why do you understand me?". That's a huge pleasure of mine because it means that readers and I can make our narratives relative.
Haruki MurakamiIn the books by Ruy-Sanchez we find again the erotic conviction that allows us to read with all the skin. The erotic, in his narratives is not a subject or a phrase, it is the clay of what they are made. In his novels every experience, trivial or extraordinary, breaths through the erotic.
Alberto ManguelI wrote three novels in six months, with a clarity of focus and attention to detail that I had never before experienced. This type of sublime creative energy is characteristic of the elevated and productive mood state known as hypomania.
Ayelet WaldmanOften in gothic novels there's a large house, an estate, and it's symbolic of that culture. Usually it's sort of moldering or rotted or something, and sometimes it's a whole community.
Joyce Carol OatesWhen I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.
Haruki MurakamiAuthors, 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