Novels Quotations | Page 3

If I present a boring personal life to my readers, it's going to be harder for them to think of my novels as thrilling.

Getting 10,000 listeners for a free podcast novel is a lot easier than selling 10,000 hardcover novels at $25 a pop.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner have fewer published novels combined than any number of contemporary novelists-Roberts, King, Koontz, Steel, etc.

I especially don't like the graphic violence against women and children often depicted in novels such as 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' and others. I'm not sure if it's being done just to entertain or whether it really is necessary for the characters involved.

For me, writing post-apocalyptic novels isn't so much about exploding helicopters and fifty-megaton doomsday bombs as it is about the pleasure of dealing with the best of everything that makes us human: cleverness, grit, loyalty, and self-sacrifice.

I give people 'If You Came Softly' when they demand proof that novels for teens can be as good as the best novels for adults.

If something is crucial to the plot, then I'd better be sure I've got my facts straight. Readers of crime novels are smart and savvy, and they'll waste no time letting me know if there's a hole in my plot.

I always tell my students, 'If you walk around with your eyes and ears open, you can't possibly live long enough to write all the novels you'll encounter.'

He envisions somewhere like 100 hours between Episode III and Episode IV with a lot of characters that we haven't met but have been developed in other novels and other things. So we're really excited about that because I think finally we can have the opportunity to answer everybody's questions once and for all by the time we finish the series.

What you call "the Golden Age tradition" of stringing stories together into novels was not so much a tradition as a consequence of the fact that almost no genre SF novels were published between 1926 and 1946.

Human kind will prevail. And it will prevail because, in spite of the reaction of history, novels tell that art restores right in us that was disregarded by history. History is being what was, then literature offers what history has not always been,

I actually think that short stories transfer to film much better than novels do.

The only thing that matters to me about my stories is that they're entertaining and they're funny. And I tend to get bored easily, so I generally throw something supernatural in. I would say they're humorous novels that have a supernatural bent, but that's as close as you're going to get to fitting them all in the same basket.

Jack Harvey wrote thrillers, which are very different beasts to crime novels: lavish, almost pornographic descriptions of weaponry; sex scenes; world travel. These things were closed to me in the kind of crime novels I was writing.

I wrote my first five horror novels while I was teaching.

It can be difficult workshopping novels because any questions or qualms you have as the author can be like, 'That's next chapter, don't worry about it!' I don't think the workshop is set up so well to do that for novels.

I think the public has always been fascinated by crime. Crime in American fiction dates from the 20s, 30s and 40s in potboiler novels and film noir, not to mention tabloid journalism. In the past few years, TV just figured out a way to capitalize on that in a different manner.

I think that novels are tools of thought. They are moral philosophy with the theory left out, with just the examples of the moral situations left standing.

I think books, novels and autobiographies have a power to touch people far more personally than films do, so there's a bit more of a responsibility when you then dramatise it.

I think that the style is the writing, a beautiful sense of style. And if you don't have it, it doesn't matter what you write, it doesn't really make any difference. I'm not speaking of realistic novels now, but of the pseudo-poetic novel or short story.

I think ever since I started to read, there have been favorite novels for different stages of my life. And one is never bumped out of place to yield to another. Instead, I just add to my favorite shelves.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them,

Over the past 10 years I have placed in my novels the names of more than two dozen close friends and family. The names I chose are always those of people I care for or respect.

Overpopulated fiction can be so confusing that readers put the story down. Under-populated novels can seem claustrophobic or boring. You want the right number of characters for your particular work.

Rejection is part of the process, so you can't let it crush you. My first three novels never made it into publication, but my fourth, 'Sheltering Rain,' was translated into 11 languages.

People in Terre Haute shouldn't look down on him quite so much as this cold, crass guy who wrote dirty novels all his life. Underneath, the impulse for beauty, for joy, for pleasure is in all of his characters.

'Star Wars,' 'Doctor Who,' 'Forgotten Realms,' even 'Firefly' and 'The X-Files' have shared world novels and other media. I can't help but notice these settings have large shelf space in bookstores, so their publishers and authors are getting something right.

My novels about medieval Wales were set in unexplored terrain; my readers did not know what lay around every bend in the road.

My 'Rot & Ruin' series is a post-apocalyptic adventure for teens. My 'Joe Ledger' novels are science-based action thrillers for adults. My 'Dead of Night' stories are zombie tales for adults; my 'Pine Deep Trilogy' is classic horror for adults, and I've written nonfiction books on topics ranging from martial arts to folklore.

My poems tend to be more celebratory and lyrical, and the novels so far pretty dark. Poetry doesn't seem to me to be an appropriate tool for exploring that.

My passion for that recovery began when I was in grad school. I was assigned to read the women poets that Emily Dickinson read and I was hooked. I began obsessively reading 19th-century novels by women. There was a richness, humor and a detailed portrayal of the plight of women in 19th-century America. It became a cause for me to bring the possibility of teaching these writers at the college level to the forefront.

Looking across the landscape, there were supposed to be some literary novels that blew everybody away. But for various reasons, they didn't quite perform.

I worked for many years as a writer for children and then wrote two adult novels of the kind they call 'literary' without any very great disturbance to this kind of life. Then, something went wrong. My third adult novel was rejected by the publisher of the first two. And I could not understand the criticism offered.

I still have to crack the French market, though that isn't entirely surprising considering that the Sharpe novels are endless tales of French defeat.

I think one of the few faults in Dickens is that mostly his lead characters are blanks - who is David Copperfield, who is Oliver Twist? And yet he takes such joy in populating the rest of his novels with these fantastic, grotesque people like Pecksmith and so on.

I think I would have been a writer, anyhow, in the sense of having written a story every now and then, or continued writing poetry. But it was the war experience and the two novels I wrote about Vietnam that really got me started as a professional writer.

I write historical novels that haven't happened yet,

Most novels put out by small or corporate presses don't really sell that well - usually a thousand copies or so. Working with a small press, you have to be willing to book reading tours, plan events, make contacts with other small press authors, and find new ways of getting word about your new work out there.

When it comes to writers, I'm a huge fan of Ian McEwan. I've never taken a writing course, but reading and deconstructing his novels has been as good a lesson as any.

When I first encountered the 'Sigma Force' novels - long before I became friends with Jim Rollins - a bookseller told me that these stories were about 'geeks with guns.' While not entirely accurate, that's pretty close to the mark, and that really speaks to me.

When I first began publishing, I was writing short stories and novels about subjects that only men were writing about -- violence and men's lives,

You know, I read graphic novels but not encyclopedically.

was made into an award-winning film, ''for her musical flow of voices and countervoices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's cliches and their subjugating power.

Writing this book was incredibly fun because I soaked in the bathtub, laid around eating chocolate in bed, cooked dinner for my family and read novels the whole time.

Writing novels is largely about endurance and patience. I take a lot of breaks, hit walls, and go do something else while I think things through. But I do it every day, and I try to treat it as a job, something that is not dictated by whimsy or muses.

The real origin of science fiction lay in the seventeenth-century novels of exploration in fabulous lands. Therefore Jules Verne's story of travel to the moon is not science fiction because they go by rocket but because of where they go. It would be as much science fiction if they went by rubber band.

When I was writing 'The Luminaries,' I read a lot of crime novels because I wanted to figure out which ones made me go, 'Ah! I didn't know that was coming!'

Why do fairy tales exist, and why do movies exist? Why do novels exist? There has to be a reason for it; otherwise, none of these things would be there.

There are 2,000 young-adult novels published a year, and hardly any of them ever break out.

We love fantasy novels in which the characters think that they're peasants but turn out to be princes and kings.

While the subject matter of my novels could not be further removed from the stuff I used to trot out at the Comedy Store, the delivery of the material employs many of the same techniques.

We've had science fiction novels where China is dominant; we've had novels where India is dominant, and I suppose it's all about getting away from that cliched old tired idea that the future belongs to the West.

To see what books were available for my older students, I made many trips to the library. If a book looked interesting, I checked it out. I once went home with 30 books! It was then that I realized that kids' novels had the shape of real books, and I began to get ideas for young adult novels and juvenile books.

Writers begin changing the instant they append 'The End' to a novel. Readers begin changing the moment they encounter that same phrase. And even the novels themselves, through the strange transmutations of time and shifting tastes and mores, exhibit changes as we look backward upon them, acquiring retroactive meanings and tonalities.

There is nothing that's been in any of my novels that, in my view, hasn't been either illuminating surroundings or defining a character or moving a plot.

When I started reading novels that really charged me or did something to me, that's when I started thinking that maybe I would like to build stories instead of houses.

When I started out in the eighties, the idea of creating serious comics for adults was pretty laughable to most folks, and for the longest time it was hard to even explain what alternative comics or graphic novels were. Nobody seemed to understand or care. Not so, any longer.

Various books revolutionised what I think about novels and showed me that they're not strict, formulaic things. 'Coming Through Slaughter' by Michael Ondaatje was one of them.

Total oblivion is the fate of almost everything in this world. I'm very likely to suffer that same fate; my work will probably not be remembered, and if any of it is, if any of those novels is fated to be one of those novels that is still being read 50 or 100 years after it was written, I've probably already written it.

War has always been a part of science fiction. Even before the birth of SF as a standalone genre in 1926, speculative novels such as 'The Battle of Dorking' from 1871 showed how SF's trademark 'what if' scenarios could easily encompass warfare.

We didn't plan all this it kind of evolved that way. I write Western novels and do a lot of western music, so we put that kind of a slant on it.

Books speak more to a female audience than does his music so these novels give him an opportunity to show, particularly his female fans, another side.

Even the best novels have their share of stinker lines.

Biographies are, in their nature, far more difficult to make into films than novels, because novels come with plots constructed and dialogue written, whereas I don't invent dialogue for my subjects or plot their lives for them.

Eragon started as me but ended up evolving into his very own character, ... Even as he has gone through his coming-of-age story, the process of writing and publishing these novels has been my own coming-of-age story. There are parallels between my own experience and Eragon's, but fortunately, I don't have people charging at me with swords.

Five would take care of all the graphic novels ? but there's new material that I'm writing for the second one.

Far more women read fiction than men, and because of this, novels have become marginalised as serious texts.

Feast of the Goat. It has been like a huge birthday present that this film based on one of my novels, one of the novels I worked hardest on to write, is released on the day of my birthday.

There's no such thing as the contemporary novel. Before I seem the complete reactionary, let me add that I've happily joined in many discussions about 'the contemporary novel' where what that usually, unproblematically means is novels that have appeared recently or may appear soon.

I started writing novels by not thinking about actually writing a whole novel - that felt altogether too daunting. I thought out a rough idea, then wrote chapter by chapter, and then by the time I'd hit 40,000 words, it was a challenge just to see if I could get to the end.

I sold my first short story while I was home on maternity leave, then began working on novels. Since I was reading and enjoying romance novels at the time, the first two unpublished manuscripts I wrote were both romances. I sold my third novel, 'Call After Midnight,' to Harlequin Intrigue after submitting it unagented.

I sort of half read Thomas Hardy's 'The Mayor of Casterbridge.' It was assigned in 10th grade, and I just couldn't get into it. About seven years later, I rediscovered Hardy and consumed four of his novels in a row.

I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.

I've read everything Harry Crews has ever published. I reckon all of his novels and even his first story, which was published in about 1963.

I've never written a movie, I'm not in the movie business. I go out to L.A. and I'm like everyone else wandering around in a daze hoping I see movie stars. I write the novels that the movies are based on, and that feels like enough of a job for me.

The surprising thing is that so many teenage cancer novels are very good. John Green's 'The Fault in Our Stars,' recently published by Penguin, was voted 'Time Magazine''s book of the year in 2012 ahead of Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith.

I've always been fascinated by the concept of reincarnation. I learned that many brilliant people were interested in reincarnation, including Carl Jung. I'm a big Jungian. So I began writing novels involving theories integrating past and present, even if the past element in the novel took place 500 or 1,000 years ago.

I've always had a compassion for characters in novels - the sense that they are, whatever they might think, living in a world that has a shape they don't know and can't finally alter.

Soon after publishing a book for kids, my mailbox began to fill with letters from children all across America. Not because my novels for young readers are bestsellers - they're not by a long shot - but because today's kids love to write to authors.

Sometimes the fantasy writers set their novels in an ancient Earth, sometimes a parallel Earth, or, quite often, they offered no explanation at all as to the temporal and geographic location.

'Presumed Innocent' was written over a six to seven year period with intervals in between where I was figuring out the end of the book and writing other stuff... My life as a writer was carried on against the odds. I had written four unpublished novels by then... as a writer of fiction, I hadn't gotten very far. I just wanted to do it.

Perhaps one of the things I'll get criticized for, ... is the choice not to use the internal monologue that Herbert used in the book. If you use the voice-over narrative -- if you use it to tell the emotional state of a character while you're watching that character -- it has the effect of stopping the motion picture. Movies are images and moving pictures. Novels are words.

Science fiction is the ugly stepchild of mainstream literature, and fantasy is the ugly stepchild of science fiction, and tie-in novels are the ugly stepchild of fantasy... and on and on and on.

Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark... your words come out, and then nothing... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.

Publishers send me a lot of first novels because my first novel was the defining novel of my career, and I guess a lot of people want my benediction or something.

Realistic novels simply pretend that the rules of their invented worlds are identical to the rules of actual life, but that's a ruse.

Readers of novels often fall into the bad habit of being overly exacting about the characters' moral flaws. They apply to these fictional beings standards that no one they know in real life could possibly meet.

People read vampire novels and say, 'Oh I want to read another vampire novel.' People read fantasy, and they're like, 'Oh I love fantasy.' I don't know that people are necessarily finishing 'Hunger Games' and immediately wanting to read another dystopian tale.

Novels written by university professors and set in the groves of academe are far more rigidly predictable than anything but the most routine science fiction novel, but they have escaped the stigma of being labeled as genre.

Novels were designed to entertain, and those of us who wish to keep the art form alive need to keep this in mind. To aim for lofty literature instead of aiming for a good story with real characters who grow and develop and a setting that's brought to life is... like putting the varnish on the canvas first.

Novels have much more space than short stories, which gives you more leeway with the number of characters you can include. Even 'furniture' characters can be described and given speaking parts to develop background or atmosphere.

Novels have a habit of concluding in the same way that the Lord's Prayer begins: with the kingdom of heaven on earth.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

Novels are the means by which we can escape the moment we are imprisoned in, but at the same time, the roots of a novel are in the world in which it is written. We write, and we read, to understand the world we live in.

Novels are pirated all the time, but it's hard to imagine that you're at work and you open up the attachment that your brother sent you and it's the new Phillip Roth novel.

Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.

Novels are nothing but evolution, but there does come a point when that stops, and the story is sealed within the pages of the book. That doesn't happen with a play. Even performances are different every night.

Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can.

As a writer of both novels and screenplays, I can say that screenwriting is a vastly rewarding creative life - if you fight hard enough to do it on your own terms. Whether I write books or not, my screenwriting life has been creatively rewarding and remains so.

Authors know that you should never really write a funny book because funny books do not get awards. Comic novels will not get awards.