#Novels Quotes

“Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.”

“To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination.”

“Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.”

“Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.”

“I don't write fantasy, I write reality. Also, my novels have roots to Greek tragedies and as such, there has to be tragedy.”

“Working on a novel is very solitary and I get to be the boss. I'm the dictator, so I win every battle. So, in that sense, novels are easier because you don't have to answer to anyone. And then, you go into something like film and there are more cooks in the kitchen, so to speak.”

“I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much”

“I'm a novelist at heart. My sole intention is to write the best novel possible. I don't think about the film potential at all.”

“I think, above all, the characters in my novels feel universal to the readers.”

“Surely the test of a novel's characters is that you feel a strong interest in them and their affairs the good to be successful, the bad to suffer failure. Well, in John Ward, you feel no divided interest, no discriminating interest you want them all to land in hell together, and right away.”

“I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding?joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid leaves with disgust.”

“No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.”

“almost all novels are love stories.”

“Writing a novel is agony.”

“With a novel, you have to have a story. It's much more important to have it matter to the reader what happens to people, and it has to make sense and end in a way that is satisfying. So I spend a lot more time thinking about that. Then the writing itself usually is easier for me, because I know where it's going.”

“With a novel, you have the reader with you a lot longer, and you owe him a lot more. Obviously you have to have a plot - I say "obviously," although I think a lot of fiction doesn't, and nothing seems to happen. But to me, there should be something that happens, and it should be at least vaguely plausible. And because the readers are going to be with these characters for a long time, you have to get to know them and like them and want to know what happens to them.”