Best Novel Quotes

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

There’s a long-term tradition of white supremacy in this country. [Donald] Trump isn’t something entirely new. But then there is the crisis for white supremacy in this country now where you have people of color standing up for themselves in ways that they’ve never stood up for themselves or at least standing up for themselves in a generational, novel way.

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

Sometimes I don’t know whether I’m real or whether I’m a character in one of my novels.

The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.

It is a novel kind of supremacy, the best that life can offer, to have as servants by skill those who by nature are our masters.

Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels-the biggest sin is to be blind to others problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.

We have seen that in certain respects operant reinforcement resembles the natural selection of evolutionary theory. Just as genetic characteristics which arise as mutations are selected or discarded by their consequences, so novel forms of behavior are selected or discarded through reinforcement.

He had learned from experience that what he succeeded in putting down on paper was only ever a pale reflection of what he had imagined, and so he had come to accept that this would only be half as good as the original, half as acceptable as the flawless, unachievable novel that had acted as a guide, and which he imagined pulsating mockingly behind each book like some ghostly presence.

I look on my life as raw material for my novels: that’s just the way I am, and it frees me from any inhibitions.

I’m not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.

Journalism can go right up to the door of the room in which the decisions are made. A novel can go inside the room – and inside the character’s heads.

Baseball is more like a novel than a war. It is like an ongoing, hundred-year work of art, peopled with thousands of characters, full of improbable events, anecdotes, folklore and numbers.

I’d harbored hopes that the intelligence that once inhabited novels or films would ingest rock. I was, perhaps, wrong.

I’ve always felt that life is a novel, and part of it is written for you, and part of it is written by you. It’s up to you to write the ending, ultimately.

The reason Saul Bellow doesn’t talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.

I’m working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas.

I bought a selection of short, romantic fiction novels, studied them, decided that I had found a formula and then wrote a book that I figured was the perfect story. Thank goodness it was rejected.

In the case of my second film The Fish Child (El Niño Pez), I had written the novel about 5 years before I made into a film. In the case of The German Doctor I had published the novel a year before I started writing the script, I even had another project to shoot. But I had this idea of the powerful cinematic language from the novel that I couldn’t let go of.

I’d like to emphasize that when a reader finishes a great novel, he will immediately begin looking for another. If someone loves your book, it increases the chance that he or she will look at mine. So there is no competition between writers. Another writer’s success helps build a larger readership for all of us.

Some authors, when starting a novel, imagine a place first. Others, a character starts taking shape in their head. I start with a hook, a situation, a ‘what if.

For readers worldwide, the attraction of romance novels seems to be that they provide hope, strength, and the assurance that happy endings are possible. Romance makes the promise that no matter how bleak things sometimes look, in the end everything will turn out right and true love will triumph — and in an uncertain world, that’s very comforting.

When I’m trying a new form- trying to do something I’m not used to doing, which was true of the novel.

I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips, but I fear it would be overly long.

One way to cope with the provocations of novel art is to rest firm and maintain solid standards… set by the critic’s long-practiced taste and by his conviction that only those innovations will be significant which promote the established direction of advanced art.

I had read [Charles] Dickens’s novels were often published serially. I thought it would be fun to write a book, just sitting down and writing a chapter every day, not knowing what would happen next. So that’s how I wrote the first draft. And then of course I had to go back and make sure everything worked and change things.

A journalist also needs to be disciplined, and so do I. I am, essentially, lazy. Without discipline I’d be just a mass of gummy bears on the sofa instead of on book tour with my eighth novel.

There have been 15 or 16 screenplays over the years, including one by me, but none of them has gotten made because Paramount is a huge studio. The Dice Man is an anti-establishment cult novel and you don’t normally make studio films from such dark comedy material.

Anthropologists are great at novelistic observations. I would be thrilled if this novel would encourage anthropologists to write what they see in fictional form.

Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don’t know what the hell is going on.

I’ve read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.

Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.

I’m not embarrassed about the novels I wrote when I was younger, but I couldn’t write them today because of my religion.

Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.

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.