Novels Quotes

A group of ten prisoners from Dachau, I was with them, we hid in the forest to wait for the Americans. The Germans had already left everything behind. We had food but no weapons. For days we could hear bombs exploding around us. We just wanted to survive long enough for the Americans to control the territory. We didn’t want to die. At that point, our prison uniforms were the only things to keep us from being shot on the spot by the Americans. That was all we had. Who would the Americans believe? Real prisoners or guards dressed as prisoners? Those devils might even say we were the Germans. This was our nightmare.

~ Sergio Troncoso

The Cool Stuff Theory of Literature is as follows: All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool. And that works all the way from the external trappings to the level of metaphor, subtext, and the way one uses words. In other words, I happen not to think that full-plate armor and great big honking greatswords are cool. I don't like 'em. I like cloaks and rapiers. So I write stories with a lot of cloaks and rapiers in 'em, 'cause that's cool. Guys who like military hardware, who think advanced military hardware is cool, are not gonna jump all over my books, because they have other ideas about what's cool.The novel should be understood as a structure built to accommodate the greatest possible amount of cool stuff.

~ Steven Brust

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.

~ Anne Carson

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

~ Michael Ondaatje

If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

If every book was judged by its cover, very few would be read; education would be limited, and fewer movies would be made.

~ Ellen J. Barrier

If there was any great lesson in life it was this: No battle was ever won with silence.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Now the son whose father's existance in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain. The father dead has euchered his son of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more than his goods.He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

You will never accept gratitude as a solution to your problems, until you have reached the last stage of grief--acceptance.

~ Shannon L. Alder

The magic in writing is not so much using your imagination as it is allowing the reader to uses theirs. When I write a novel I’m not going to hand walk you through each scene. Avid readers tend to have very high IQ’s so I’m constantly aware of, and respect that. I have a tendency to give my readers vivid descriptions of panoramic viewpoints, soft breezes, and the late evening as it scrapes against the emerging night and present this step by suspenseful step. Once I get them to the threshold of that unseen cliff, I shove them off and say, take it from there.

~ Carl Henegan

A pessimist is a man who tells the truth prematurely.

~ Cyrano De Bergerac

Destiny is as it is. Nothing can change it. Accept it before it ruins you.

~ J.l. Sheppard

Her heart and soul had already spoken. They wouldn’t let Lucas go.

~ J.l. Sheppard

I’ll never turn her away, Clyde. She’s my mate. I’ll protect her till my dying breath. I’ll even swallow my pride and ask a favor as momentous as the one I just asked of a man who has done nothing but try to drive a wedge between her and myself.

~ J.l. Sheppard

The true magic of novels dwells within us individually. Each reader will interpret every single character, scene, and metaphor in a slightly different way

~ Carl Henegan

One of the most important things you can do on this earth is to let people know they are not alone.

~ Shannon L. Alder

[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art--novels, poems, plays, paintings or films--can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world.

~ Alain De Botton

I looked for any footmarks of course, but naturally, with all this rain, there wasn't a sign. Of course, if this were a detective story, there'd have been a convenient shower exactly an hour before the crime and a beautiful set of marks which could only have come there between two and three in the morning, but this being real life in a London November, you might as well expect footprints in Niagara. I searched the roofs right along—and came to the jolly conclusion that any person in any blessed flat in the blessed row might have done it.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I avoided my eyes while brushing my teeth, then climbed into bed with a copy of _The Blind Assassin_, because if you're not with the book you want, you might as well want the book you're with.--Melissa Albert, _The Hazel Wood_

~ Melissa Albert

After finishing 1st draft of a novel, I have the characters, dialogue, scenes, and a plotline. I used to think this meant I knew where the story was going, and what the book was about.I have learned over the years, this ain’t so.As I work through its 2nd draft, characters start to nudge each other. The story itself takes its first soft and shallow breath, and one could imagine he hears a little bit of a heartbeat. Passions deepen, and emotional threads start to weave through what had earlier just been little more than a sequence of events.On the 3rd run through, the characters stand tall. Some break free of my earlier concepts of what they were all about, what they wanted, how they related to each other, and where they were going.From then on, THEY set the pace, and I do my best to honor them in becoming what THEY choose to be.From then on, my friends; we have a story!By the end of the 3rd draft, I have enough of an idea of where the characters are going, and how their passions empower the story, or tear it apart, that I can start cutting away, and cutting away, anything that isn’t that.Until we reach the point where there is not a single word left anywhere in the book, that isn’t a vital, dynamic, organic contributor to the living whole.

~ Edward Fahey

Sometimes I wonder if novel writers aren’t completely f**ked in the head. ~ Drew Stirling

~ Jayden Hunter

I believe books should be like a prime rib steak ~ good and thick.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

To be motivated to write a novel, I need to be unable not to write.

~ Johnny Rich

Every writer dreams about the day they can step into their fiction and wander its hallways.

~ Shannon L. Alder

It is a wonderful thing to be liked by a stranger, but without respect it is pointless. It is like pulling the pedals off a rose and throwing the stem at the person you like. It’s creepy, but had good intentions that suddenly experienced some strange form of verticillium wilt, during the climate change of their mood.

~ Shannon L. Alder

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he'd managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics and the general behavior of academics, who were as a whole no more brilliant or Machiavellian than travel agents. They tended toward shabbier clothes and manners, and of course there was the occasional storied eccentric or truly original mind, but most college campuses — especially the older ones — functioned less as brain trusts than as wildlife preserves, housing and protecting people who wouldn't last a week in GenPop.

~ Jincy Willett

A book is a place where my reality, escapism, hope, despair, love and death lie.

~ Nikita Dudani

My only wish is to be buried with my books.

~ Nikita Dudani

Part of the desire to see each other succeed is to stop putting a price on success.

~ Crystal Evans

I read daily, not so much for the benefit of my writing, but because I am addicted to it. There is nothing in the world for me that compares to being lost in a really good novel. That said, reading is an absolute must if you want to write. It is a trite enough thing to say, but very true nonetheless. I cannot understand aspiring writers who email me for advice and freely admit that they read very little. I have learned something from every writer I have ever read. Sometimes I have done so consciously, picking up something about how to frame a scene, or seeing a new possibility with regards to structure, or interesting ways to write dialogue. Other times, I think, my collective reading experience affects my sensibilities and informs me in ways that I am not quite aware of, but in real ways that impact how I approach writing. The short of it is, as an aspiring writer, there is nothing as damaging to your credibility as saying that you don’t like to read

~ Khaled Hosseini

Great writers experience their dreams. They put them on paper, where others can read about them.

~ Ellen J. Barrier

What is it about us lady authors and our fascination for the exclamation mark?

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

I write about romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

~ Angeline M. Bishop

I write romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

~ Angeline M. Bishop

The attraction of reading is that it allows you to live, for a few hours, as someone else—grants you access to their head, their thoughts, their secrets.

~ Alessandra Torre

That was how the heroine of a book would play it and Diana was still writing her own story the best heroines she'd always believed took their fate into their own hands.

~ Anna Godbersen

Closing my eyes, I breathe in the air around me.When I slowly re-enter the world, I look into the most intense brown eyes I've ever seen. My breathing catches. I can’t look away. Fuck, he's hot. I can literally feel my brain cells frying. Who's dumb as a rock now, Alexis?I feel completely frozen and can’t move. I don’t even think I want to. Blink, Richards, blink.-AlexisWhat happens to someone who has everything figured out and doesn't let anyone rattle her?To some love is exciting. To her, it's a nuisance.

~ Kristina Steiner

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than characters in history, or even our own friends; we have been told all about them that can be told; even if they are imperfect or unreal they do not contain any secrets, whereas our friends do and must, mutual secrecy being one of the conditions of life upon this globe.

~ E.m. Forster

The only thing which can tell us about the novel is the novel.

~ Edwin Muir

There is no endTo what a living worldWill demand of you.

~ Octavia E. Butler