A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.”
“A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.”
Source: Tess of the D'urbervilles
“A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.”
“A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice.”
“A novel is based on evidence, + or -x, the unknown quantity being the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always modifies the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it entirely.”
“A novel is basically a series of short stories wedged together, sometimes with shaky bridges.”
“A novel is interested in how one thing follows another; it is equally (arguably more) interested in what it feels like to live in time; in life lived by intensity. As a treatment of time, a novel activates not only curiosity in the reader (And then?) but memory: a form of attention that is accumulative as well as anticipatory, backward-reaching as well as forward-facing and itself capable of acting on time. That is, of repeating or extending the strategies of the narration. By skipping a bit of it. Or staying with it. Thickening it by reading a passage again.”
Source: The Long Form
“A novel is just a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.”
“A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.”
Source: The Red and the Black
“A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They’re all parts of yourself.”
“A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.”
Source: The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965
“A novel is like a long relationship and a short story is a brief one that lingers - it lingers powerfully and maybe more powerfully. I think that's true in a lot of cases, most long-term relationships compared to some of the briefer ones - the intensity of those brief ones that end, I think a short story is kind of like that. There's a certain level of intensity that I think is different.”
“A novel is like a mountain. Like Mount Rainier. You ever seen Mount Rainier? It's like you're looking at God. It's so gorgeous and dynamic and powerful and meaningful. Then as you walk toward it, Things change. At one point, it's not even a mountain anymore. There's an incline, but you don't see the whole thing. There are different levels. When you get to the top, you look out from the mountain and it's just as majestic because now you're looking from God's point of view. So the novel is a mountain. Now, the short story is an island --- some trees and a beach and a little creature running around. You go on the island, but then you realize that underneath it is a mountain, but it's just underwater, so you never see it. You have to describe the whole mountain, but only from the point of view of that island. Whatever detritus gets washed up, whatever the weather is there, whatever is happening underneath, you have to somehow give that to the reader without making it explicit.”
“A novel is like a window, open to an infinite landscape.”
Source: Paths of Resistance: The Art and Craft of the Political Novel
“A novel is like an animal you have to hunt down and kill. If you let it sit for two days, it's got a two-day head start. So, if I just look at it every day, I'm so much better off.”
“A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.”
Source: Lyrical and Critical Essays
“A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.”
“A novel is no different than graffiti in a bathroom stall, it's just more pretentious.”
“A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.”
Source: The art of subtext: beyond plot
“A novel is not an allegory.... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.”
Source: Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
“a novel is not born of a single idea. The stories I've tried to write from one idea, no matter how terrific an idea, have sputtered out and died by chapter three. For me, novels have invariably come from a complex of ideas that in the beginning seemed to bear no relation to each other, but in the unconscious began mysteriously to merge and grow. Ideas for a novel are like the strong guy lines of a spider web. Without them the silken web cannot be spun.”
“A novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.”
Source: Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
“A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.”
Source: In the Time of the Butterflies
“A novel is often a longer process in handling self-doubt.”
“A novel is really like a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.”
Source: Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations
“A novel is too much of a commitment. I tend to peruse Twitter - I check to see if I had any mentions and read the latest messages.”
“A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.”
Source: Signposts in a Strange Land
“A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is
not waking thoughts although it is written and thought
with waking thoughts. But really a novel goes as
dreams go in sleeping at night and some dreams are like
anything and some dreams are like something and some
dreams change and some dreams are quiet and some dreams
are not. And some dreams are just what any one would
do only a little different always just a little
different and that is what a novel is.”
Source: How Writing Is Written
“A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts.”
Source: The Gertrude Stein Reader: The Great American Pioneer of Avant-garde Letters
“A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.”
“A novel is, hopefully, the starting point of a conversation, one in which the author engages readers and asks that they see things from a different point of view than they might otherwise.”
“A novel it's different. It's kind of exhilarating not to have to cut to the bone constantly. Oh, well I can go over here for a moment. I can say what I think the guy was thinking or what the day looked like or what the bird was doing. If you do that as a playwright, you're dead.”
“A novel makes it possible to understand not just events, but the people who control the events; not only their choices, but also their motives.”
“A novel may take anywhere from two to five years to write and, in the end, you might manage a couple of thousand dollars on it, no more.”
“A novel means a new way of doing a story”
“A novel must be a rich forest known at the start only by instinct.”
Source: Novels, 1930-1942
“A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.”
“A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.”
“A novel must show how the world truly is, how characters genuinely think, how events actually occur. A novel should somehow reveal the true source of our actions.”
Source: Becoming Jane
“A novel must show how the world truly is. Somehow, reveals the true source of our actions.”
“A novel must work as a story because no one's going to get to the other themes if you don't entertain the reader. But I like to have another layer of meaning, although you can read the book on one level and not bother with that other layer.”
“A novel or a poem or a play, or a theoretical essay for that matter, is an attempt to make others see something that really matters to the writer. In this gesture, there is hope – not certainty – that perhaps others may come to share her vision, without any guarantee that she will be understood. To write is to risk rejection and misunderstanding. To create a work of art, Sartre writes, is to give the world a gift nobody has asked for. But if we don't dare to share with others what we see, the world will be poorer for it.”
“A novel requires a certain kind of world building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see. I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.”
“A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.”
“A novel rough draft is like bread dough; you need to beat the crap out of it for it to rise.”
Source: No Plot? No Problem!
“A novel seemed the easiest way to get what I had had in my head into the inside of other people's heads. Books are good that way.”
“A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.”
“A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.”
Source: Selected essays
“A novel should be as like life as a painting, but not as like life as a piece of waxwork.”
Source: The Life of Mary Russell Mitford ; Related in an Selection from Her Letters to Her Friends. Ed. by A.G. Estrange
“A novel takes the courage of a marathon runner, and as long as you have to run, you might as well be a winning marathon runner. Serendipity and blind faith faith in yourself won't hurt a thing. All the bastards in the world will snicker and sneer because they haven't the talent to zip up their flies by themselves. To hell with them, particularly the critics. Stand in there, son, no matter how badly you are battered and hurt.”