Home / Topics / Novel Quotes

Novel Quotes

Browse 6108 quotes about Novel.

Novel Quotes

“originality" is everyone's aim, and novel techniques are as much prized as new scientific discoveries. [T.S.] Eliot states it with surprising naïveté: "It is exactly as wasteful for a poet to do what has been done already as for a biologist to rediscover Mendel's discoveries.”

Has Beens States Done Novel Poet Discovery Aim Technique Surprising Originality Biologist Scientific Discovery Vets Eliot Mendel

Author:Randall Jarrell

“Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It (Gormenghast trilogy) is a very, very great work ... a classic of our age.”

World Age Able Three Fantasy Novel Poet Classic Great Work Trilogies Allan Poe Gormenghast

Book:The Gormenghast Novels

Source: The Gormenghast Novels

“Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism.”

Giving Energy Social Novel Poet Ancient Myth Access Novelists Muse Mystical Homosexual Erotic Stand Alone Emily Great Poet Subordination

Author:Camille Paglia

“Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels.”

Jobs Poetry Secret Novel Mystery Taught Poet Keys Reader Mystery Novels

Book:Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Source: Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, its their only elective, so this is their one shot. Theyll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.”

Want Giving Courses Teach Novel Students Poet Shots Lectures American Poetry High Points

Author:Robert Hass

“In America they have to know just what you are-- novelist, poet, playwright... Well, I've been all of them... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.”

Thinking Knows Wells Stories America Novel Poet Spring Seeds Novelists Playwright Knitting Polo

Author:Robert Penn Warren

“Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths.”

People Should Writing Enough Novel Poet Fame Mouths Profit Bread

Book:Jane Austen's Letters

Source: Jane Austen's Letters

“Imagination, which is the Eldorado of the poet and of the novel-writer, often proves the most pernicious gift to the individuals who compose the talkers instead of the writers in society.”

Individual Imagination Novel Poet Prove Storytelling Pernicious Talkers

Author:Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington

“I started out in life as a poet, I was only writing poetry all through my 20s, it wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them.”

Writing Reading Novel Serious Poet Prose Detectives Writing Poetry Writing Poems

Author:Paul Auster

“The novel may be dead as a commercial form. When art forms things die as commercial forms, something happens to the practice of those arts that isn't very pleasant. It used to be that a poet like Tennyson could keep his house and his coach-and-four and his staff of six servants on the income from poetry. That doesn't happen anymore.”

May Art Happens Form Used Dies House Practice Novel Four Poet Six Coaches Things Happen Income Used To Be Servant Pleasant Staff Tennyson

Author:William Monahan

“I think poets are supposed to be writing for television and film. I grew up in the day of early TV that was so raw and funny, and I think we're in the next important moment of television, where it's really telling the epic of the culture like Charles Dickens was doing in the 19th century with his serialized novels.”

Thinking Writing Important Moments Film Culture Next Novel Century Television Poet Tvs Grew Grew Up Supposed To Be Epic 19th Century Dickens Important Moments

Author:Eileen Myles

“When I was fifteen I wrote seven hundred pages of an incredibly bad novel - it's a very funny book I still like a lot. Then, when I was nineteen I wrote a couple hundred pages of another novel, which wasn't very good either. I was still determined to be a writer. And since I was a writer, and here I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.”

Writing Trying Years Littles Stills Book Play Seems Novel Poet Couple Pages Hundred Twenties Seven Very Good Determined Nine Novelists Fifteen Nine Years Nineteen Funny Book

Book:Conversations with Edward Albee

Source: Conversations with Edward Albee

“I co-edited an anthology called Interfictions with Delia Sherman and wrote a short scholarly book on three women poets called Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. So I've been busy, but I haven't had time to write a novel.”

Writing Book Three Voice Novel Havens Poet Busy Mary Anthology Charlotte Edited Scholarly

Author:Theodora Goss