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Novel Quotes

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Novel Quotes

“. . . you [film critics] always overstress the value of images. You judge films in the first place by their visual impact instead of looking for content. This is a great disservice to the cinema. It is like judging a novel only by the quality of its prose. I was guilty of the same sin when I first started writing for the cinema. . . . Now I feel that only the literary mind can help the movies out of that cul de sac into which they have been driven by mere technicians and artificers.”

Feels Writing Mind Firsts Has Beens Helping Film Values Sin Quality Novel Judging Impact Mere Critics Driven Guilty Crafts Cinema Visuals Prose Technicians Disservice Film Critics

Author:Orson Welles

“The latest gorgeous entry in the Belknap Press' growing library of annotated Jane Austen novels arrives, this time the mighty Emma under the exactingly careful guidance of Bharat Tandon of the University of East Anglia. Belknap has once again done its end of the job superbly: the book is a physical treat-luxuriantly over-sized, heavy with quality paper and solid binding, decked out in a beautiful cover and dozens of well-chosen illustrations throughout. This is one of the prettiest Jane Austen volumes available in bookstoresthis season.”

“One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.”

Should Philosophy Quality Novel Five Thousand Hundred Should Have Golden Notebook

Book:The Golden Notebook

Source: The Golden Notebook

“Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there - that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.”

Giving Wells Facts Might Felt Quality Novel Heard Emotional Drama Pages Ears Deeds Mood Auras Inexplicable High Quality

Book:Not Under Forty

Source: Not Under Forty

“I've no objection to the term 'graphic novel,' as long as what it is talking about is actually some sort of graphic work that could conceivably be described as a novel. My main objection to the term is that usually it means a collection of six issues of Spider-Man, or something that does not have the structure or any of the qualities of a novel, but is perhaps roughly the same size.”

Men Mean Long Doe Term Quality Talking Novel Issues Six Structure Size Collections Spiders Graphic Objections Spider Man Graphic Novels

Author:Alan Moore

“Special qualities are required of the essayist. A poem or a novel may spring from the inner consciousness of an author. Reasoning poers must be brought to reinforce imagination.”

May Imagination Consciousness Quality Novel Special Spring Reasoning Essayists

Author:Flora Thompson

“One of the marks of true genius is a quality of abundance. A rich, rollicking abundance, enough to give indigestion to ordinary people. Great artists turn it out in rolls, in swatches. They cover whole ceilings with paintings, they chip out a mountainside in stone, they write not one novel but a shelf full. It follows that some of their work is better than other. As much as a third of it may be pretty bad. Shall we say this unevenness is the mark of their humanity - of their proud mortality as well as of their immortality?”

Source: The Nature of the Artist: An Address Delivered at the Dedication Ceremonies for Lee Pattison Recital Hall, Wilbur Hall, Mary Kimberly Residence Hall

“... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.”

Years Two Truth Fiction Quality Novel Perception Hundred Universal Fifty Truth Of Life Imaginative Truthfulness

Author:Elizabeth Bowen

“I don't really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that's my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving.”

Asks Given Hours Numbers Quality Novel Pages Fetish

Author:Jonathan Lethem

“Just getting something to work usually means writing reams of code fast, like a Stephen King novel, but making it maintainable and high-quality code that really expresses the ideas well, is like writing poetry. Art is taking away.”

Writing Wells Mean Art Ideas Quality Novel Kings Art Is Code High Quality Writing Poetry

Author:Erik Naggum