Quotes About Novels

In Pakistan, many of the young people read novels because in the novels, not just my novels but the novels of many other Pakistani writers, they encounter ideas, notions, ways of thinking about the world, thinking about their society that are different. And fiction functions in a countercultural way as it does in America and certainly as it did in the, you know, '60s.

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.

The writer I feel the most affinity with - you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they're 18th century novels - is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he's the guy who does it for me.

I 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.

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.

I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the supreme expressions of story is the novel. Novels are not content. Nor are they are a mirror to life or an explanation of life or a guide to life. Novels are life, or they are nothing.

I like to know the places I write about. I feel like it helps me ground the novel. My novels are 'realistic novels,' but they can also be fantastical, so it's nice to have a setting that grounds them a little bit.

I'd probably still be a financial journalist now if it weren't for writing novels. Mmm. Fun! I'm much happier writing novels!

Novels 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.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

One of the things that's exciting for me about this novel is that, to me, Brookland and The Testament of Yves Gundron were both, in certain regards, crypto-steampunk. They're both books that are interested in an alternate technological past that in fact didn't historically come to pass. If you were to ask me what my novels were about, I would say, well, these are novels about technology and how we relate to technology and what technology means.

This is another thing which I really like investigating in my novels: what is it that makes an intimate society, that makes a society in which moral concern for others will be possible? Part of that I think are manners and ritual. We tried to get rid of manners, we tried to abolish manners in the '60s. Manners were very, very old-fashioned and un-cool. And of course we didn't realise that manners are the building blocks of proper moral relationships between people.

For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. But I don't intend my novels as puzzles. I intend them as invitations to dance.

Novels definitely come more naturally to me. When I write short stories, it's always a fight against it expanding.

If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: 'What's great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!' It will be about how the whole thing stands up.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.

In ordinary detective novels you never see the consequences of what happens in a story in the next book. That you do in mine.

It's a given that we exist in a world where we have to live in continuity every day; no one is immune to that, in life or romance novels. By the same token, it's not something I find terribly important.

And I didn't grow up wanting to be a director. I grew up wanting to be a writer, so for me, that was always the goal - to be a novelist, not a screenwriter. And I think, again, if I didn't have the novels, maybe I'd be much more frustrated by not having directed yet.

There's something really nice about writing something on Wednesday and watching it being performed live for a studio audience on Tuesday. You never really get that with novels.

I really believe that readers are smart and sophisticated enough to realize that the author is not the narrator of his novels.

Readers of novels are a strange folk, upon whose probable or even possible tastes no wise book-maker would ever venture to bet.

I don't write romance novels.

The bourgeoisie is very fond of so-called practical types and novels with happy endings, since they soothe it with the idea that one can both accumulate capital and preserve innocence, be a beast and at the same time be happy...

I have written two medical novels. I have never studied medicine, never seen an operation

Notice how every science fiction movie or television show starts with a shot of the location where the story is about to occur. Movies that take place in outer space always start with a shot of stars and a starship. Movies that take place on another world always start with a shot of that planet. This is to let you know where you are. Novels and stories start the same way. You have to give the reader a sense of where he is and what's happening as quickly as possible. You don't want to start the story by confusing the reader.

I am pretty interested in hybrid forms. I love graphic novels and I think there should be more graphic poems in the world.

The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.

All novels are experimental.

I've been told by people who write historical novels that you just sort of write the emotional truth first, the story at the core, and then you go back and research it at the end.

The truth about being a writer is you do not choose the stories you tell, but stories choose you. You do not choose, therefore, characters either. Novels are like dreams you dream with your eyes open; they are books which appear in your head with the same apparent immediateness as they appear in your dreams at night. A writer always writes their obsessions and the truth is that all throughout life we end up writing the same thing in different ways.

I would like to write a novel, or at least try to write one, although my motives are not entirely pure. For one thing, I get asked about writing novels so much that I feel guilty about never having written one. And although I have no strong desire to write a novel, I would hate not to try. That would just be silly. On the other hand, I hate the idea of slogging through something that turns out to be not good.

At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.

I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

All 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.

I sometimes think it ironic for an ex-seaman, longshoreman, truck driver, policeman, bus driver, etc... to find success writing children's novels.

The Sookie Stackhouse novels were selling well before the TV show, but the TV show led to a lot more exposure and readers. And a lot went on to read my other work. It was a wonderful thing for my bank account.

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels

Jim Harrison is someone I always enjoy, one of the great contemporary writers. I like Tim Ferris' Big Boom Theory. I'm getting into a different kind of reading, not straight novels.

The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old.

I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe.

Often 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.

My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

We are all inspired by the incredible stories of handicapped people who write novels with their toes, cancer victims who run marathons for cancer research, bereaved parents who set up memorial funds for their lost children. How much easier is it for most of us to be small heroes simply by taking responsibility for our daily lives and transcending our ordinary obstacles?

Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih, is an eloquent and restrained portrait of one man's exile. It is a rare narrative in that it charts a life divided between England and Sudan. Without a doubt it is one of the finest Arabic novels of the 20th century, and Denys Johnson-Davies' translationdoes the original justice.

[on going to Sunday school:] It looks like rain, and I hope it will rain cats and dogs and hammers and pitchforks and silver sugar spoons and hay ricks and paper-covered novels and picture frames and rag carpets and toothpicks and skating rinks and birds of paradise and roof gardens and burdocks and French grammars before Sunday school time.

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

Whenever summer rolls around I begin to realize that I'm a complete and utter book snob. In relation to reading, I have absolutely no guilty pleasures at all. No graphic novels. No murder mysteries. My summer read is really no different from my winter read. I know many bookshops and magazines would have me believe that our summer forays are different, but literature is literature, and unfortunately snobbery is snobbery.