Quotessence
Home / Topics / Novel Quotes

Novel Quotes

Browse 6108 quotes about Novel.

Related topics

Novel Quotes

“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?”

“Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel. If you are writing a plot-driven genre novel make sure all your major themes/plot elements are introduced in the first third, which you can call the introduction. Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development. Resolve your themes, mysteries and so on in the final third, the resolution.”

“A major boom in real stock prices in the US after Black Tuesday brought them halfway back to 1929 levels by 1930. This was followed by a second crash, another boom from 1932 to 1937, and a third crash. Speculative bubbles do not end like a short story, novel, or play. There is no final denouement that brings all the strands of a narrative into an impressive final conclusion. In the real world, we never know when the story is over.”

“But television affords you, what you just described, to - over the course of 18 hours, now that we're doing a third season - tell the story of this man. You're not under any obligation, really, to do massive expositional stuff at the beginning. You're at liberty to say, "Come with us on this journey," and, gradually, you become aware of what his motivations are, what drives him, what his weaknesses are, what his strengths are. That's what I think's sucking people into these worlds, because it is kind of like a novel, you just go really, really deep.”

“Not a lot of contemporary fiction is written about brothers and sisters. Salinger's Franny and Zooey was an inspiration for me. In Franny and Zooey, the sister gets in trouble and the brother comes to help her out. But I wanted to make sure that in my novel the sister had more to do than lie around on a sofa muttering, which is what Franny does for two-thirds of Salinger's novel.”