N Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with N. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Novels are better as an addiction than drugs are.”
“Novels are completed when they are finished, but the memoir changes its own conclusion by virtue of being written... I was not at all the same person, when I handed the manuscript to the publisher, as I had been when I began. A memoir may always be retrospective, but the past is not where its action takes place.”
“Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.”
“Novels are food for the leftover hours of life, the in-between times, the moments of waiting.”
Source: I Have the Right to Destroy Myself
“Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night. They are the long haul. They are marriage. Stories, on the other hand, you can lose yourself in for a few weeks and then wrap up, or grow tired of and abandon and (maybe) return to later. They can cuddle you sweetly, or make you get on your knees and beg.”
“Novels are just very, very, very long lies. That is to say, you’ve got to get your story straight!”
“Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.”
“Novels are longer than life.”
Source: A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney
“Novels are make-believe and play for adults.”
“Novels are more difficult simply because they are longer and require more juggling, but short stories are closer to perfection, if you can get the language right.”
“Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.”
“Novels are political not because writers carry party cards -- some do, I do not -- but because good fiction is about identifying with and understanding people who are not necessarily like us. By nature all good novels are political because identifying with the other is political. At the heart of the 'art of the novel' lies the human capacity to see the world through others' eyes. Compassion is the greatest strength of the novelist.”
“Novels are read
Or their authors are blue.
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Buy their books, post reviews!”
“Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination - the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings - and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools.”
“Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things. And here we are with our crash helmets on, with concertina wire all around us.”
“Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them-almost all women; a vast number of clever, hardheaded men.”
Source: The four Georges. The English humorists. Roundabout papers
“Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.”
“Novels are to love as fairy tales to dreams.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“Novels are usually built on conflict, sometimes very, very difficult conflict. It's why men write war novels - because there you go, there's the conflict writ large.”
“Novels are very different than films and I love to see someone else's imagining of my story.”
“Novels are written, not wished into existence. You have to sit your ass in the chair or nothing gets done.”
Source: Is Life Like This?: A Guide to Writing Your First Novel in Six Months
“Novels aren’t about heroes. They’re about us. The novel is a literary form that arose at the same time as the middle class in Europe, those people of small business and property who are neither peasant nor aristocrat, and it has always treated of the middle class. Both lyric and epic poetry grew out of a time that was elitist, a time that believed in the innate rate of royalty to rule and the rest of us to amount to not very much. Hardly surprising, then, that both forms lean toward the aristocratic in subject matter and treatment. The novel, on the other hand, isn’t about them; it’s about us.”
Source: How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form
“Novels aren’t just happy escapes; they are slivers of people’s souls, nailed to the pages, dripping ink from veins of wood pulp.”
“Novels aren't pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline. A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it's a good starting place for me.”
“Novels aren’t just happy escapes; they are slivers of people’s souls, nailed to the pages, dripping ink from veins of wood pulp. Reading the right one at the right time can make all the difference.”
“Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.”
“Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.”
Source: The Uses of Literature
“Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.”
“Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.”
“Novels by serious writers of genius often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are written by second-class writers whose psychological brew contains a touch of naïvety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and a mysterious sympathy with the day-dreams of ordinary people.”
“Novels can comfort you when drugs can't. Don't take drugs. Instead read novels.”
“Novels can fill in the spaces about what that emotional resonance is.”
“Novels definitely come more naturally to me. When I write short stories, it's always a fight against it expanding.”
“Novels do not force their fair readers to sin, they only instruct them how to sin; the consequences of which are fully detailed, and not in a way calculated to seduce any but weak but weak minds; few of their heroines are happily disposed of.”
“Novels do take charge of the writer, and the writer is basically a kind of sheepdog just trying to keep things on track.”
“Novels expose man to the nuances of life through the thought process of its protagonists to form the foundation for its understanding and thus are the best self-help books there ever were.”
Source: Jewel-less Crown: Saga of Life
“Novels expose man to the nuances of life through the thought process of their protagonists to form the foundation for its understanding and thus are the best self-help books there ever were.”
Source: Jewel-less Crown: Saga of Life
“Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.”
“Novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories.”
“Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.”
Source: The Golden Notebook
“Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.”
“Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.”
Source: Conversations with Ian McEwan
“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.”
Source: Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay
“Novels may have taken care of the emotional business for me, which has allowed music to be more emotional for me.”
“Novels may teach us as wholesome a moral as the pulpit. There are "sermons in stones," in healthy books, and "good in everything.”
“Novels must have verisimilitude, and truth has little enough of that.”
“Novels need readers of a certain kind, people who are patient and enjoy immersing themselves in another perspective for uninterrupted stretches of time. Reading habits might well be changing. People who pay for novels might overlap significantly with those who engage in Twitter and Facebook.”
“Novels often have leisurely openings; a TV drama needs an arresting opening.”
“Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don't need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning.”
Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
“Novels seem to exist because of this need to know and connect, and so story becomes charged with necessity.”