Novel Quotes

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This news was to me like the coming upon a spring of water in a dry and thirsty land. Here at last presented itself the very order of work for which in an indefinite way I was looking - namely, to extend his novel methods of research upon the sun to the other heavenly bodies.

William Huggins

I'm interested in the Gothic novel because it's very much a woman's form. Why is there such a wide readership for books that essentially say, 'Your husband is trying to kill you'?

Margaret Atwood

There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.

Only another writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It's an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself.

It cannot but be injurious to the human mind never to be called into effort: the habit of receiving pleasure without any exertion of thought, by the mere excitement of curiosity, and sensibility, may be justly ranked among the worst effects of habitual novel-reading.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.

At a very early stage of the novel's development I get this urge to collect bits of straw and fluff, and to eat pebbles. Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it.

Vladimir Nabokov

So abundant and novel are the objects of interest in a pure wilderness that unless you are pursuing special studies it matters little where you go, or how often to the same place. Wherever you chance to be always seems at the moment of all places the best; and you feel that there can be no happiness in this world or in any other for those who may not be happy there.

I ask any one who has adopted the calling of an engineer, how much time he lost when he left school, because he had to devote himself to pursuits which were absolutely novel and strange, and of which he had not obtained the remotest conception from his instructors.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Whatever our problems are, dreams can provide novel ideas and sometimes magnificent resolutions.

Patricia Garfield

In a play, certainly, the subject is of more importance than in any other work of art. Infelicity, triviality, vagueness of subject, may be outweighed in a poem, a novel, or a picture, by charm of manner, by ingenuity of execution; but in a drama the subject is of the essence of the work-it is the work. If it is feeble, the work can have no force; if it is shapeless, the work must be amorphous.

I don't think the 'what' distinguishes a good novel from a bad one but rather the 'how.'

A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.

After the first shock of recognition - a sudden sense of "this is what I'm going to write" - the novel starts to breed by itself; the process goes on solely in the mind, not on paper. I feel a kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside, and I know that the details are there already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked closer, but I prefer to wait until what is loosely called inspiration has completed the task for me.

Vladimir Nabokov

Most good novelists have been women or homosexuals. The novel is the triumphant evolved creation, one increasingly has to think, of these two groups, who have cooperated more closely in this domain than in any other.

Nicholson Baker

And why should any man who writes, even if he writes things immortal, nurse anger at the world's neglect? Who asked him to publish? Who promised him a hearing? Who has broken faith with him? Your poem, your novel, who bargained with you for it?

People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are.

W. Somerset Maugham

The novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.

One measures oncoming old age by its deepening of Proust, and its deepening by Proust. How to read a novel? Lovingly, if it shows itself capable of accomodating one's love; and jealously, because it can become the image of one's limitations in time and space, and yet can give the Proustian blessing of more life.

I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.

John Hawkes (novelist)

Harmonious words render ordinary ideas acceptable; less ordinary, pleasant; novel and ingenious ones, delightful. As pictures and statues, and living beauty, too, show better by music-light, so is poetry irradiated, vivified, glorified', and raised into immortal life by harmony.

Walter Savage Landor

I've come to realize that however blue my circumstances, if after finishing a chapter of a Dickens novel I feel a miss-my-stop-on-the-train sort of compulsion to read on, then everything is probably going to be just fine.

A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.