Quotes about novel
Henry Mosquera - Sleeper's Run
Truth is irrelevant what matters is what people believe.
Gabrielle Dubois -
My own heart is in my characters. My novels are my memories they are the best part of me.
Don Roff -
There is no right or wrong way to write a novel. Each journey is different for every individual work and for every writer. The first error is never to begin the second is never to finish.
Calvin W. Allison - Strong Love Church
A familiarity had been activated in a reoccurringtheme that had been ignited from a recognizable old pattern of self distancing behavior. The tone of Laura’s voice and the poise of her body language seemed to shrug at the expectations of Ed’s reconciliatory efforts. It felt to Ed as though their relationship was right back to the same rugged place that it had been at before their vacation right back to a recondite square one. It seemed like any connecting that had been accomplished had all unrav
Martin Amis - The Second Plane: 14 Responses to September 11
Novelists don't normally write about what's going on they write about what's not going on.
Jeff Lyons - Anatomy of a Premise Line: How to Master Premise and Story Development for Writing Success
Try everything listen to everyone. Follow no one. You are your own story guru!
Henri Poincaré - Science and Hypothesis
Experiment is the sole source of truth. It alone can teach us something new it alone can give us certainty.
Chris Baty - High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days
Don’t be offended if you encounter some good-natured ribbing the idea ofwriting a novel in a month deserves to be laughed at.
James M. Cain -
You have to wait for your mind to catch up with whatever it is it’s working on then you can write a novel.
Jeanette Winterson - The Passion
Perhaps all romance is like that not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life.
Jolene Tan - A Certain Exposure
For her and Nurul merely to share a meal cooked in their own kitchen was a triumph to wake up together each morning a luxury.
Aberjhani - Songs from the Black Skylark zPed Music Player
Millions cheer the warriorspilling blood across the ringwhile the one who stands for peaceis ridiculed and shamed.Must hearts forever sufferfrom ignorance and greed?Can bombs heal our soulsor set our spirits free?
Carmen DeSousa -
A great book increases my heartbeat as if I’m prey, melts my insides in anticipation of a first kiss, immerses me in its depths.
Blaque Diamond - His or Her Betrayal?
Michelle, since the first day I met you I knew you were the one for me. I knew that I would make you my wife. I love waking up to your beautiful face every morning and seeing you before I close my eyes each night. I love you with everything in me, and I promise to be the man that you need for the rest of our lifetime together. Would you do me the honor of being my wife?
Caroline George - The Vestige
You’re different, and I know that’s probably the most cliché response ever given, but it’s the truth. When I look at you, it’s as if I’m reading a novel. No matter how much time I spend studying your pages, there will always be more for me to learn, deeper layers of complexity to baffle me, and plot twists that’ll leave me speechless.
Mark Glamack -
If you surround yourself with the good and righteous, they can only raise you up. If you surround yourself with the others, they will drag you down into the doldrums of mediocrity, and they will keep you there, but only as long as you permit it.
Vivek Pereira - Indians in Pakistan
And so we continued to live in fear, hoping that we would not get caught. Fear had become our constant companion at this dreadful Lashkar-e-Taiba camp.
Vivek Pereira - Indians in Pakistan
Was it possible that the emotion of love had somehow made me more susceptible to fear? Does the noble emotion of love make us start valuing our own lives and the lives of our loved ones more so that the feeling of fear creeps into our mindset?
Anne Hines - The Spiral Garden
Someone once told me that we move when it becomes less painful than staying where we are".
Alain-Fournier - Le Grand Meaulnes
... the old Berlin – last vestige of a mysterious fête – wheeled away from the gravelled road and went lurching noiselessly across country over a grass-grown track. Beyond the hedge nothing could be seen of it but the driver's cap bobbing up and down.
Pamela Morris -
Every great novel begins with a single word. One word, followed by another and another and another. Sentences forming paths to that dream.
Sōseki Natsume - Sanshirō
The call for political freedom took place long ago. The call for freedom of speech is also a thing of the past. Freedom is not a word to be used exclusively for phenomena such as this which are so easily given outward manifestation. I believe that we young men of the new age have encountered the moment in time when we must call for that great freedom, the freedom of the mind.
Sōseki Natsume - Sanshirō
When I was a student, there wasn't a single thing we did that was unrelated to others. It was all for the Emperor, or parents, or the country, or society—everything was other-centered, which means that all educated men were hypocrites. When society changed, this hypocrisy ceased to work, and as a result, self-centeredness was gradually imported into thought and action, and egoism became enormously over-developed. Instead of the old hypocrites, now all we've got are out-and-out rogues. Do you see
John Bellairs - The Face in the Frost
I do not think, Prospero,' he said, 'that one should attribute a very high degree of reality to your house.
John Bellairs - The Face in the Frost
Nahum bobbed again. 'My crest is cropped by croaking cranes. I go to drown in doleful dumps, dead-drunk with drearihead.
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain
And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable,
Polkadot -
In this world there are two types of people: the ones who hurt, and the ones who are hurt. But if we all claim to be the victims, then aren't we all the criminals too?
Elizabeth Funderbirk - Love Torn Asunder
...Love can give you the most exhilarating wonderful highs at times... ...Then there will be dives that will take all you have just to hold on... Quote on the Title Page of "Love TORN Asunder
Basma Salem - The Art Of Black
She was always like this, only moves when her mind and heart tells her to move, not doing what everyone demanded her to do.
Doris Lessing -
But there is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochialism of our culture is intense. For instance, decade after decade bright young men and women emerge from their universities able to say proudly: 'Of course I know nothing about German literature.' It is the mode. The Victorians knew everything about German literature, but were able with a clear conscience not to know much about the French.
Atul Purohit -
To be honest with you, I don't have the words to make you feel better, but I do have the arms to give you a hug, ears to listen to whatever you want to talk about, and I have a heart; a heart that's aching to see you smile again.lines from Love Vs Destiny...
Bram Stoker - Dracula
Fe es aquello que nos permite creer en cosas que sabemos que no son ciertas.
Roman Payne -
We made love outdoors—without a roof, I like most, without stove, my favorite place, assuming the weather be fair and balmy, and the earth beneath be clean. Our souls intertwined and dripping with dew, and our love for each other was seen. Our love for the world was new.
John Crowley - American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now
The first inkling of this notion had come to him the Christmas before, at his daughter's place in Vermont. On Christmas Eve, as indifferent evening took hold in the blue squares of the windows, he sat alone in the crepuscular kitchen, imbued with a profound sense of the identity of winter and twilight, of twilight and time, of time and memory, of his childhood and that church which on this night waited to celebrate the second greatest of its feasts. For a moment or an hour as he sat, become one
John Crowley - Novelty: Four Stories
When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student's concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish boo
E.M. Forster -
The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.
Charles Baudelaire - Intimate Journals
Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosp
Tiffany Madison -
If the novel is dead, I'm a necrophiliac.
Janet Frame -
Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.
Melodie Ramone -
Our books are the deepest glimpses into our souls, the most raw and real anybody will ever find us.
Gore Vidal -
You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.
Doris Lessing -
Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
Doris Lessing - The Golden Notebook
I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next decade. ...)
Thomas Hardy -
A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.
Leon Uris - Mitla Pass
A novel takes the courage of a marathon runner, and as long as you have to run, you might as well be a winning marathon runner. Serendipity and blind faith faith in yourself won't hurt a thing. All the bastards in the world will snicker and sneer because they haven't the talent to zip up their flies by themselves. To hell with them, particularly the critics. Stand in there, son, no matter how badly you are battered and hurt.
Julian Gough - Juno & Juliet
The novel cannot submit to authority.
Simon Cheshire -
On my website there's a quote from the writer Anthony Burgess: "The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind." I've always found that inspiring because the written word, as an art form, is unlike any other: movies, TV, music, they're shared experiences, but books aren't like that. The relationship between a writer and a reader is utterly unique to those two individuals. The worl
Garry Douglas Kilworth -
He had a book to finish. Ten-thousand words. The other ninety thousand had been difficult. This last tenth seemed impossible. His plot had become derailed. He was unable to see his way through the smoke and coke dust of a mythical railway track that should stretch ahead. Yes, the characters were there, good and solid. Indeed, the story's engine was strong and had shunted yet forward and forward, with only one or two sharp halts. But six weeks ago he met the bumpers. R. was now stuck in a deserte
Jenny Thalia Faurine - Unplanned Love
Apa kamu tidak bisa menerima takdir kalau kita akan selalu pergi bersama?
Chérie De Sues -
WEST SALEM ~ October 2011A sudden vision, fraught with malevolence and darkness, obscured her sight. The face of a menacing figure turned from the shadows of his grisly handiwork and stared at Sorcha.Her muscles tensed. By the Goddess, could he see her?Please! No!She wanted to scream, to run, but the vision ensnared her into the horrific moment like a fly in a spider's web.
hlbalcomb -
Surround yourself with what matters.
Hermann Hesse - Demian. Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend
Novelists when they write novels tend to take an almost godlike attitude toward their subject, pretending to a total comprehension of the story, a man's life, which they can therefore recount as God Himself might, nothing standing between them and the naked truth, the entire story meaningful in every detail. I am as little able to do this as the novelist is, even though my story is more important to me than any novelist's is to him - for this is my story; it is the story of a man, not of an inve
Ernest Hemingway - Death in the Afternoon
Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will
Anthony T. Hincks -
An excerpt from:“Hypothetically Speaking”ByAnthony T. Hincks(A book about you and the world – coming soon!)If I was a savvy person, I would watch, and study mankind in order to find out where his weaknesses lay.Greed, for sure; vanity; mistrust; a tendency towards violence; fanaticism, and many other less than honorable traits and even some honorable ones which could also be used, and capitalized on.Then, once I had found his weaknesses I would act.I and some friends or family, not terms that I
Charles Bukowski -
Sometimes things are just what they seem to be and that's all there is to it.
Polkadot -
Everything around us is made up of matter so small, its mass cannot be written down. You're either an atom, or a cell. These things are super small, but they join and function together to create something powerful. It reminds me of love; its always the small things that are done that makes a person feel like they're made of something.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes.
Basma Salem - The Art Of Black
You draw characters speaking loud and clear but you’re not hearing them.” her mother told her, then she kissed her forehead and mumbled how she liked her art and went downstairs. Cecilia wrote these words on her bedroom wall, just behind her headboard for no one to see it but herself to know that it exists.
Nicholas Sparks - The Guardian
The world is a better place when you smile.
Henry Mosquera - Sleeper's Run
There’s no better way to get to know a city than to walk its streets. A place will reveal its soul through its sights, sounds and smells, and eventually, it’ll teach you its rhythm.
Henry Mosquera - Sleeper's Run
Any self-defense class worth its salt will tell you thatyou don’t pull out a weapon unless you intend to use it.The same should apply to ballsy remarks.
Henry Mosquera - Sleeper's Run
I don’t care what Einstein said about God not playing dice; If he exists, he’s addicted to craps.
Yen - Yen's World: Are you afraid to dream? Do you have the courage to believe your dream?
Inside the scrawny adolescent was a soul that defied extinction.
Henry Mosquera - Sleeper's Run
Some things are just like riding a bicycle; you jump on, pedal, and hope you don’t fall.
Henry Mosquera - Sleeper's Run
People have incredible nerve to do terrible things, but never actually admit to them.
Henry Mosquera - Sleeper's Run
I think all artists struggle to represent the geometryof life in their own way, just like writers deal witharchetypes. There are only so many stories that you cantell, but an infinite number of storytellers.
Herman Melville - The Whale
One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the science
Brit Trogen - Margaret and the Moth Tree
If this were a proper world, beautiful faces would belong to beautiful people. Good people with kind hearts and clever minds would always have bright eyes and dazzling smiles, and bad people would have scraggly hair and warty noses. That way if you saw one of them coming, you could cross to the other side of the street and avoid them altogether. But this is not a proper world. In our world, many bad people look quite nice, and many good people are not beautiful at all. Many good people aren't pr
Carl Henegan -
There is a brilliant novel in all of us. Some imagine it…others live it. Authors dwell in an auspicious life by having the ability to fuse the two.
Roman Payne -
This was the first time I thought of S— that day. Her music was beautiful, her voice was beautiful, her body was beautiful. Even the dirty little pads of her feet were beautiful. I cursed myself then. For once, heaven had sent me Beauty in its most perfected form and I abandoned it. She might not have been a girl after all but an angel: a force to guide me on this hazardous path of life I hurry down. How can life be hazardous if it can only end in death?
Jack Chaucer - Nikki White: Polar Extremes
It's hard. Being 15, 16, 17. You get so angry. You want to do something with that anger. I guess try to find some other way to let it out. Don't kill people. Don't kill yourself. Let yourself grow up a little. Then you might to start to think differently about things. You might get new opportunities to do something with your life that you never thought possible as a teenager." -- Thomas Harvey in the upcoming novel, "Nikki White: Polar Extremes" (Nikki, #3)
Rebecca McNutt -
A lot of people who read my novel 'Smog City' ask me why I never killed off either of the two main characters. To be honest, it's because I've given them life. Not literally of course, but since I spent so much time developing and creating my characters, they've ended up with complex personalities, in fact they're almost sentient in a way, and to write them off as dead would be like killing a close friend to me.
Doris Lessing - The Golden Notebook
I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next d
Sol Luckman - Beginner's Luke
I am, as it were, the created creating—a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day in and day out, word by word and line by line, constructing a fictitious autobiography for myself in these pages.
Laurie Perez -
Bringing a novel to light - revealing the form and cadence, shadows and demeanor of a protagonist constructed from thin air - linking scenes and synchronicity across translucent time - holding up a glass brimming with chilled, never-tasted liquid, then sipping from it with intoxicated focus - allowing lovers to make a perilous mess of things, fall apart and nakedly come back together again - looking through conjured windows deep into someone else’s snow-bound solitude, feeling utterly alone yet
D.L. Given - The Elder Effect
I thought I lost you again. You couldn’t know what those four years were like. To not know where you were, who you were with, or if you were being treated well? I wasn’t sure for a long time if you were even alive. I don’t ever want to go through that again.” Vance... The Elder Effect
D.L. Given - Vital Perception
Ah brother, things will be better now. I promise.” Ronan... "Vital Perception
Santonu Kumar Dhar - Life of Love
I love you so much. Our love is eternal.
Santonu Kumar Dhar - Life of Love
Why are you behaving like this? You know how much I love you … and Ibelieve you love me as much, so why are you avoiding me?
Santonu Kumar Dhar -
The moment I close my eyes, I see you and sleep vanishes. I’m awake the entire night, revisiting ourmemories together. The night seems to stretch on forever.
Santonu Kumar Dhar - Life of Love
I know you would be watching over me all through this journey called life... whenever I look next to me, I feel like you arehere... and a part of you is within me in the form of this child... Love is like the wind... you may not see it... especially in the absence of the other... but you always feel it around...
Elaine White - Right Kind of Wrong
It had been a shitty night, so it was fitting that it should end with rain.He closed his eyes and lay where he was, ready for it to stop. The rain, the cold, the pain, the aches, the blood choking the back of his throat, the metallic taste on his tongue. He wanted an off switch to his life; to get it over with. There wasn't much point fighting; he didn't have anything to fight for. He had his family and Levi, but something in his heart said that wasn't enough anymore.He didn't want to be alone.
Elaine White - Right Kind of Wrong
Tam let his hand drop to his neck and slowly circled his fingers around it. It was a free, gentle touch and Casen knew that if he asked him not to, he would remove his hand and nothing would change. He couldn't get the words out; it wasn't the touch he had a problem with, it was the far away look in Tam's eyes that said he wasn't in the room anymore. The look that suggested he was lying on the ground, as the rain fell in buckets and a stranger knelt over him, trying to keep him awake.Casen blink
Elaine White - Right Kind of Wrong
Tam looked scared, swallowing and wrapping his hands around Casen's. He slowly cupped his wrists and pulled his hands away. Then he turned to the door and unlocked it.Casen expected to have it shut in his face or be told that he'd crossed a line. After all, he didn't know Tam and he'd stupidly given him an ultimatum after meeting just a few hours ago. What had he been thinking?“Are you coming in?” Tam asked quietly, staring at his hands as he twirled his key.Casen crossed the threshold and remin
Elaine White - Right Kind of Wrong
You let this become a mess,” he cursed, as though he'd walked up to Tam and asked him to be drop dead gorgeous and vulnerable, just so that he would have his first guy crush.“I didn't let anything happen. I just…felt it. I think he feels it too,” he argued, trying to talk sense into him. Why was this a bad thing? Konnor didn't have anything to do with Tam anymore, so why did it matter?“Oh God. You're in serious shit now,” Mack bemoaned, rolling his eyes and rubbing his forehead.
Elaine White - Right Kind of Wrong
Grayson Dashwood.Those two words had just ruined what was turning into a good morning.
Elaine White - Right Kind of Wrong
He thought he could remove the Tam-façade that he put on, to convince people that he was bulletproof and strong. That was a lie, and if he expected to get through this break up, he would have to put that mask back on and toughen up.
Elaine White - Right Kind of Wrong
Tam let out a ragged breath, as he fought to reign his emotions back, while the realisation sank in.He was nothing. To Konnor. To Giovanni. To everyone.He was invisible.
Hanif Kureishi - The Last Word
My blackness is spreading, Alice. I’ve been seeing and hearing things that can’t be there or anywhere. At night, when I’m not hallucinating mad women, I can feel depression starting to burn me around the edges. If I sink into it, I’ll have to give this thing up and write a novel.
Richelle E. Goodrich -
Why certainly, words possess power. They do! But releasing their magic requires combining and arranging those words in the right order.
Milan Kundera - The Art of the Novel
A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he's capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibilit. But again, to exist mean: 'being-in-the-world.' Thus both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities.
Téa Obreht -
Knowing, above all, that I would come looking, and find what he had left for me, all that remained of The Jungle Book in the pocket of his doctor’s coat, that folder-up, yellowed page torn from the back of the book, with a bristle of thick, coarse hairs clenced inside. Galina, says my grandfather’s handwriting, above and below a child’s drawing of the tiger, who is curved like the blade of a scimitar across the page. Galina, it says, and that is how I know to find him again, in Galina, in the st
Maxwell Perkins -
I think the novel is a wonder....it has vitality to an extraordinary degree, and glamour, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality....And as for the sheer writing, it's astonishing. [About The Great Gatsby]
Truman Capote -
Fitzgerald has charm. It's a silly word, but it's an exact word for me. I like 'The Great Gatsby' and it's sad, gay nostalgia.
Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
Gilbert Sorrentino -
Outside of the dreary rubbish that is churned out by god knows how many hacks of varying degrees of talent, the novel is, it seems to me, a very special and rarefied kind of literary form, and was, for a brief moment only, wide-ranging in its sociocultural influence. For the most part, it has always been an acquired taste and it asks a good deal from its audience. Our great contemporary problem is in separating that which is really serious from that which is either frivolously and fashionably "r
Nick Hornby - Naked
Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience was an overrated quality.
Miriam Toews - Irma Voth
I was beginning to understand something I couldn't articulate. It was a jazzy feeling in my chest, a fluttering, a kind of buzzing in my brain. Warmth. Life. The circulation of blood. Sanguinity. I don't know. I understood the enormous risk of telling the truth, how the telling could result in every level of hell reigning down on you, your skin scorched to the bone and then bone to ash and then nothing but a lingering odour of shame and decomposition, but now I was also beginning to understand t
Miriam Toews - Irma Voth
Irma, she said. But I had started to walk away. I heard her say some more things but by then I had yanked my skirt up and was running down the road away from her and begging the wind to obliterate her voice. She wanted to live with me. She missed me. She wanted me to come back home. She wanted to run away. She was yelling all this stuff and I wanted so badly for her to shut up. She was quiet for a second and I stopped running and turned around once to look at her. She was a thimble-sized girl on