Quotes by Authors - Page 233

Its Vermeer"Kat turned to the boy who lingered in the doorway. "It's stolen""What can I say?" Hale eased behind her and studied the painting over her shoulder. "I met a very nice man who bet me he had the best security system in Istanbul." His breath was warm on the back of her neck. "He was mistaken.
Ally Carter
Forgive me. I continue to underestimate the breadth of your ignorance.
Ransom Riggs
Where will we go?""I hear hell is particularly nice at this time of year.
Sarah J Maas
Besides my great fashion sense? I play a mean harmonica.
James Patterson
Will you show me what you really look like? You don't sparkle, do you?
Jennifer L. Armentrout
Everyone's life, not matter how unremarkable, has a singular tragic encounter after which everything that really matters will happen. That moment is the catalyst - the first step in the equation. But knowing the first step will get you nowhere - it's what comes after that determines the result.
Robyn Schneider
Drama is very important in life: You have to come on with a bang. You never want to go out with a whimper. Everything can have drama if it's done right. Even a pancake.
Julia Child
And she did what nobody thought of doing... she consulted Anne.
Jane Austen
...you mean you don't fit characters into a plot? excatly...
John Geddes
A mysterious ability, a broken promise, a life changed forever...
Kim Hornsby
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.
Ralph Ellison
Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.
Michael Ondaatje
I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.
Martin Amis
Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.
Michael Ondaatje
I have come to understand something about novels," Tessa said."And what is that?""They are not true.
Cassandra Clare
We did photograph albums, best dresses, favourite novels, and once someone's own novel. It was about a week in a telephone box with a pair of pyjamas called Adolf Hitler. The heroine was a piece of string with a knot in it.
Jeanette Winterson
Novels include padding; I think padding may be an essential part of the novel, for all I know.
Jorge Luis Borges
What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.
Julian Barnes
Well, Mr Thomas, while I'm in favour of education, I couldn't in good conscience recommend a university career in anything but the hard sciences. As a working environment, the rest of academia is a sewer of irrationality, hate mongering, envy, and self-interest. I'm getting out the moment I earn my twenty-five-year pension package, and then I'm going to write novels...
Dean Koontz
They (the novelists) became the voice of the citizen against the ubiquitous raison d'état, which reappeared endlessly to justify everything from unjust laws and the use of child labour to incompetent generalship and inhuman conditions on warships.The themes they popularized have gradually turned into the laws which, for all their flaws, have improved the state of man.
John Ralston Saul
Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep – it can't be done abru
Colm Tóibín
Life is'nt about getting everything you want the instant you want it.Some thing are worth waiting for.
Mira Lyn Kelly
Now and then I am asked as to ‘what books a statesman should read,’ and my answer is, poetry and novels – including short stories under the head of novels.
Theodore Roosevelt
Short stories are often treated as the poor cousins of novels.
Christopher Bram
Like the roller coaster of life...novels aren't fun without ups and downs and even an occasional loop.
Carmen DeSousa
Only Those Who Take Risk, Succeed!
Latif Mercado
When I imagine changing places with her I get the feeling I do on finishing a novel with a brick-wall happy ending---I mean the kind of ending when you never think any more about the characters.
Dodie Smith
The battles may last for a long time, perhaps even years. There are powerful forces on both sides, and the war is important to both armies. It's not a battle of good against evil. It's a war between forces that are fighting for the balance of power, and, when that type of battle begins, it lasts longer than others-because Allah is on both sides.
Paulo Coelho
If I would have known I was going to leave my job that day to become a writer, I probably would have planned differently... It didn't come by way of illness per se, accident, or dismissal, but by way of sheer self-mutiny. The self I was born to be, decided to hijack the one I had created.
Dawn Kohler
Slow down to speed up. Anonymous
Melissa G. Wilson
What the best novels and novelists do is to offer a different way of seeing.
Aminatta Forna
The best plot twists are the ones you didn't expect.
Shannon L. Alder
Do you want to know how to write novels? I’ll tell you the secret: start on page one and keep going, in order, until you come to the last page. Then stop.
Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen
I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.
Oscar Wilde
Cecy, I do think it is unfair. People in novels are fainting all the time, and I never can, no matter how badly I need to.
Patricia C. Wrede
I believe, Sebastian, that novels are more important than ever. They are more important than video recorders and record players and television because they enable us to exercise our minds. They allow us to step back and see where the history is taking us.
Imraan Coovadia
Don't go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the novel and not as something tacked onto it.
Azar Nafisi
I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn't enjoy writing novels I wouldn't do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in. As it is, the immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calithenics. I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seducttive of all: the buying of stationery. That the transmogrification of my beautiful thoughts into a grossly imperfect prose is always the end result doesn't faze me: all novels are only a version- there is no Platonic ideal. But I'd go further still: fiction is my way of thinking about and relating to the world; if I don't write I'm not engaged in any praxis, and lose all purchase.
Will Self
Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can never be a sculpture. It can be elegant and very beautiful, but it can never be sculpture. Captive to facts - or predetermined form - it cannot fly.
Peter Matthiessen
Of what earthly use were novels? How did they help anybody?
Damon Galgut
When you have a grasp on eternity your eyes won't ever see the battle or the lost people that hurt you. You will see a beautiful story of hope, in every character. It is not one person god loves. He loves us all and this is his story, our story and theirs.
Shannon L. Alder
He joined Jude in the kitchen and began making a salad, and JB slumped to the dining-room table and started flipping through a novel Jude had left there. "I read this," he called over to him. "Do you want to know what happens in the end?" "No, JB," said Jude. "I'm only halfway through.""The minister character dies after all.""JB!"After that, JB's mood seemed to improve.
Hanya Yanagihara
You were like reading a good novel. The kind were you wanted to turn every page, & never put it down... And absorb every second. But for whatever reason, that novel isn't there for me to read, & so, it's endless chapters are gone from my reach. And I don't dare to pretend to be surprised. But I do dare to wonder why.And though it's gone, I smile because it was the best novel I ever read. In those brief moments the novel of you possessed me, mind, body, & soul alike. I felt joy & adoration in such a degree, that if I never do again it'll be okay. When you read a great novel, you never forget it. And you never let go of the feeling of it in your mind. The captivating nature of it. But greater than a novel, not mere words on a page, but a reality. Reality in a vivid form that can't begin to be put into words. That words, could not touch.You're the kind of novel one would desperately want to finish. To keep near at hand & close at heart. But it can't be. And though it's a mournful & somber thought, there's enjoyment in the knowledge that for a brief moment in time, it was there. The novel of her, was a novel of breathtaking wonder. And if I never get to read another page, I'll cherish those I had the privilege of reading. And you can only hope that whoever reads it next, values it in the way you so know is deserved.
Trevor Driggers
He sits at the table and reads novels, old favorites of his, the words and plots and characters comforting and lived-in and unchanged.
Hanya Yanagihara
I keep being told that my writing is getting better and better. - Now, at first I am thrilled by that, but then I think, Isn't everybody's? Do some authors grow cozy with their own style, and stay there?I think of writing fiction as an art form. As such, it's a constant exploration of new and developing ideas. If any of my books were much like my others, I don't think I'd even bother to write them.
Edward Fahey
The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know — Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel — the quality of philosophy. I find that I read with the same kind of curiosity most novels, and a book of reportage. Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness. The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means towards it.
Doris Lessing
If you read the novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really
Philip Roth
I am a novelist, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.
Teju Cole
I think after all I found a feature which is incredible and kind of mein or let's say it something which is part of my childhood in the Jack Ketchum Novels and films.
Deyth Banger
There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards. The last page is as a rule the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the dénouement one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hair-breadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved. One knows the jealously guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display.
Oscar Wilde
I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness. Life, on the other hand, is meaningless most of the time. The novel imitates life, where the short story is bony, and cannot wander. It is essential art.
William Trevor
I think: perhaps the sky is a huge sea of fresh water and we, instead of walking under it, walk on top of it; perhaps we see everything upside down and the earth is a kind of sky, so that when we die, when we die, we fall and sink into the sky.The Implacable Order of Things
José Luís Peixoto
Remember where you are and adjust yourself accordingly, not vice-versa ... otherwise, you might be toast.
Alisa Steinberg
Henry James said there isn't any difference between "the English novel" and "the American novel" since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.
Eudora Welty
One did not drink sherry before the evening, just as one did not read a novel in the morning.
Barbara Pym
Every novel is an attempt to capture time, to weave something solid out of air. The author knows it is an impossible task - that is why he keeps on trying.
David Beaty
Novels can tell us so much about life. They have the power to enrich our own lives in so many different ways. They're not just for entertaining us, although that would be enough.
Victoria Connelly
We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie.
Henry James
The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves hat we would never see, never permit ourselves to see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again
Thomas C. Foster
Mental Note #50: The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, even though it most desperately wants to. - Notes from Ellen Wasserfeldman
Alisa Steinberg