Quotes About Novels

All things in my novels are real for me. Some western critics said that Garcia Marquez's novels are magic realism. However, I believe that Marquez must have experienced everything in his novels.

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!

Novels with a "thesis" don't interest me. They just don't - novels that want to "show" something, that want to "argue" something specific. I don't read novels that are looking to convince me of anything.

I certainly think we're going to see more and more graphic novels and more illustrated novels.

I don't really consider any of my novels 'crime' novels.

There are lots of authentic, moving characters in so-called systems novels, just as there are certainly deep structural ideas in some character-driven novels.

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.

My 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.

Lately I've been thinking about the idea that all novels are, at least in some way, about the process of writing a novel - that the construction of the book and the lineage of people constructing novels are always part of the story the author is telling. I think the equivalent for memoir should be that all memoirs are, in some way, about the process of memory. Memoirs are made out of a confusing, flawed act of creation.

I don’t like to make strong statements. I want to write strong novels … I keep my deep radical things for my novels.

I read a lot of detective stories because they always deliver. They give you a beginning, a middle, and an end - a resolution. The modern novels I read don't always deliver because I'm looking essentially for a story. As in Shakespeare, "The play's the thing." In particular I read detective stories for pacing, plot and suspense.

She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.

I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.

Men and women make their own beauty or their own ugliness. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton speaks in one of his novels of a man "who was uglier than he had any business to be;" and, if we could but read it, every human being carries his life in his face, and is good-looking or the reverse as that life has been good or evil. On our features the fine chisels of thought and emotion are eternally at work.

Maybe someone's who's a different kind of writer [would think otherwise] - someone who'd be just as comfortable writing essays on what their novels are about. Sometimes you feel like certain novelists are like that.

[ Adult novels] was the world of grownups. There was nothing about teenagers.

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

We have to diversify, we have to find work we can do that helps other people while helping ourselves, work that has to do with writing that isn't necessarily just writing saleable novels or getting huge advances.

I work seven days a week, from 9 in the morning till 8 at night. I have the titles of the next eight novels I want to write. I feel myself pitiable, degraded on a day that I don't write.

Really interesting novels, they always are so demanding of you on some level that you don't fall asleep.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books ... I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life.

I've always felt that the writing I responded to most - the novels and stories that compelled me, that felt like they described the world I live in, with all of its subjectivity, irrationality, and paradox, were those which made free use of myths and symbols, fantastic occurences, florid metaphors, linguistic experiments, etcetera - to depict the experiences of relatively 'realistic' characters - on the level of their emotions and psychology, rather than in terms of what kinds of lives they led or what kind of events they experience.

I think reading has got so many more enemies now that graphic novels have kind of flipped over to that side.

If you like my novels, I commend your good taste.

Writing is akin to method acting. Before the writer can render a fully convincing world, he or she must inhabit that world, and every major character who lives there. I'm not suggesting that one always has to go this far. But I truly believe what makes the setting for my novels come alive is that I've lived there first.

The possibility of the impossible, dreams and illusions, are the subject of my novels.

I think of my books now as suspense novels, usually with a love story incorporated. They're absolutely a lot harder to write than romances. They take more plotting and real character development.

Whether you look at Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, wherever a distinction of sex is made, it is to the advantage of men. If you think of religions as if they were novels, the authors are men, and so are the major characters.

After 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.

Maybe it goes without saying that if you want to become a famous writer before you’re dead, you’ll have to write something. But the folks in my classes with the biggest ideas and the best publicity shots ready to grace the back covers of their best-selling novels are also usually the ones who aren’t holding any paper.

No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.

Atticus Lish is a true original and this is a tremendous book, relentless, moving, written in prose of marvelous integrity. Now that America and the novel are dead, I hope we can have more great American novels as alive as this one.

Sometimes I - I try not to read too many fiction or novels.

I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be, written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.

I started out in life as a poet, I was only writing poetry all through my 20s, it wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them.

I think one of the good things about writing novels is that you always start from scratch.

Sometimes someone will tell me about an author I've never heard of before and that will send me to that person. That's how I discovered Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian novelist whose novels tend to be one long rant.

In the past, it was only in science fiction novels that you could read about ordinary people being able to go to space... But you laid the foundation for space tourism.

Lonesome Dove is a great book that had the rare fortune of being made into a great movie. And now, through Bill Wittliff's photographs, we have a third generation of Lonesome Dove artistry. The same creative power and conviction that allowed Larry McMurtry to transform a workaday scenario for an unproduced screenplay into one of the greatest novels of our time, and that transformed that novel into the greatest western movie ever made, are on display in this collection. A Book of Photographs from Lonesome Dove is a masterpiece begot by a masterpiece begot by a masterpiece.

Historical novels, in particular, allow us to relive the past without the neatness of history, and with all the complexity of the present.

I'd like to think that my films are personal enough to exist without hearkening back to their respective novels.

In general, I think every novel is a political novel, in that every novel is an argument about how the world works, who has power, who has a voice, what we should care about. But political novels can be boringly polemical if they end up being too black and white, too one dimensional, like war is bad, killing people is wrong.

I wanted to be a writer, but the idea of writing novels or movies seemed really intimidating. I never got more than a few pages into one.

Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

Wherever I am, I take books, not novels.

Movies are explorations; they take you on a path, and I think it's always better if it's a path that you don't know, that takes twists and turns that you can't predict. That's what's entertaining about movies. That's what's entertaining about novels.

However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.