Best novel & used Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“I'm used to adapting my novels for feature film - it can be challenging to cut and compress three or four hundred pages into two hours of dramatic action.”

Two Action Film Used Three Hours Challenges Novel Four Cutting Pages Hundred Features Dramatic Adapting

Author:Tom Perrotta

“I used to think that: whenever I heard that someone had taken 10 years to write a novel, I'd think it must be a big, serious book. Now I think, 'No - it took you one year to write, and nine years to sit around eating Kit Kats.”

Thinking Writing Years Book Bigs Used Novel Taken Heard Serious Eating Nine Nine Years

Author:Ian Rankin

“Brands are useful ways of short-handing practically anything - look at the way Tom Wolfe first used brand name lists to sharpen up a character and a situation. Look at the most brand-referenced novel, Bret Easton Ellis's 'Glamorama.”

Way Firsts Looks Character Used Names Situation Novel Lists Brands Toms Brand Names

Author:Peter York

“I like to be surrounded by books. My wife Evelyn has a PhD in comparative literature so we have a lot of her Spanish and German literature books which are wasted on me, plus a lot of novels and books on art and architecture shared by us both. Evelyn used to edit an art magazine called FMR, so we have a common interest in design.”

Art Book Used Literature Interest Common Novel Wife Design My Wife Architecture Magazines Plus Edits Common Interests Comparative Literature

Author:David Chipperfield

“[My wife] liked to collect old encyclopedias from second-hand bookstores, and at one point we had eight of them. When I wrote my first historical novel---back in 1980, before I was online---I used them often as a research tool. For instance, I learned that the Bastille was either 90 feet high or 100 feet or 120 feet. This led me to formulate Wilson's 22nd Law: 'Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.'”

Firsts Looks Hands Law Used Novel Wife Feet Research Tools Historical Eight My Wife Instance Online Bookstores Wilson Encyclopedia Second Hand Certitude Historical Novels Bastille

Author:Robert Anton Wilson

“I never get used to it, the unknowable mystery of a person so suddenly, totally closed, snapped shut like a half-read novel.”

Persons Used Half Novel Mystery

Book:Steel Guitar

Source: Steel Guitar

“Just looking at pictures used to be considered cheating. No longer. The graphic novel is booming. Comics, heavily illustrated texts, books with no words are now accepted as reading.”

Book Used Reading Novel Accepted Used To Be Cheating Graphic Graphic Novels

Author:Jon Scieszka

“The phrase the violent bear it away fascinated the 20th century Irish-American storyteller Flannery O'Connor, who used it as the title of one of her novels. O'Connor's surname connects her to an Irish royal family descended from Conchobor (pronounced Connor), the prehistoric king of Ulster who was foster father to Cuchulainn and husband of the unwilling Derdriu. In the western world, the antiquity of Irish lineages is exceeded only by that of the Jews.”

Source: How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe

“Certain kinds of things that the novel used to do, which was, "Oh, I'm living out here in West Nowhere, Nebraska and I'm curious how the upper class in New York City lives, I guess I'll read a novel about it." We don't have to do that now. You just turn on the TV. Turn on Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous. You can get that information anywhere. Novels don't have to do that anymore.”

Kind Used Certain Turns Cities Class Novel Rich Information New York Tvs West Lifestyle Curious New York City Turn-on City Life Upper Class Nebraska

Author:Jonathan Franzen

“It's difficult for me to have a large story, a very large story - a novel is a large story. I'm used to writing and doing these little miniature paintings.”

Writing Littles Stories Used Difficult Novel Painting Miniatures

Author:Sandra Cisneros

“You can get rid of the column. It's a little like staying at a hotel; you get used to the shape of the room, and then you're gone. With a novel you move into town and stay for a long time. That's both comforting and terrifying.”

Littles Long Moving Used Rooms Novel Gone Shapes Long Time Towns Hotel Staying Comforting Columns

Author:Anna Quindlen

“In the great city of San Francisco, where I used to live, at 2 in the morning every other Victorian house has somebody who is writing the great American novel. And the city is not loaded with James Joyces or Virginia Woolfs. But entrepreneurship is about distorted views of reality.”

Writing Reality Used House Views Business Cities Morning Novel Entrepreneurship San Francisco Virginia Loaded Victorian Great American Great Cities Joyce

Author:Tom Peters

“You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career.”

Thinking Writing Whole Stories Used Turns Three Careers Novel Happened Historical Short Story Historical Novels

Author:Hilary Mantel

“We don't really know how technology will affect narrative. That's the question. See, people used to say that the novel is going to die, but they would never say that movies will die with it, when in fact all forms depend on the narrative. I think if one of them fails, the others are going to fail as well. Maybe this will happen to both forms, and maybe movies will take a totally different direction with fiction.”

People Ifs Thinking Knows Wells Different Facts Happens Form Used Dies Fiction Technology Novel Know How Failing Depends Narrative Different Directions

Author:Don DeLillo

“When I'm trying a new form- trying to do something I'm not used to doing, which was true of the novel.”

Trying Form Used Novel

Author:Lydia Davis

“I have used Lenovo since I wrote my first novel. My old laptop broke, so I bought a new one, but still a Lenovo. It is one of my most essential devices.”

Firsts Stills Used Novel Essentials Broke Devices Laptops

Author:Okky Madasari

“At conventions, one of the standard questions I get is, 'Are you writing any new novels?' To which I used to respond, in my smart-[alec] fashion, 'No, I've decided to write only old novels.'”

Writing Used Novel Fashion Smart Standards Decided Conventions

Author:Peter David

“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

“What I find interesting and heartening, though, is that there does seem to be a shift in the subject matter being written about by women that is doing well in the culture. We're seeing more women writing dystopian fiction, more women writing novels set post-apocalyptic settings, subjects and themes that used to be dominated by men.”

“To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you... a truth... that used to elude you.”

Knows Want Writing Character Used Novel Conditions Metaphor Insight What You Want Elude Opaque Elude You

Author:Norman Mailer

“In my later novels, I systematically used the convention, and then a moment came - when did it come? With The Book of Illusions, maybe - I thought, I don't need them anymore, I don't need them, I want to integrate the dialogue into the text.”

Want Needs Book Moments Used Novel Illusion Dialogue Conventions Integrating

Author:Paul Auster

“Thomas Mann used to write education novels and now you can write an education memoir, and there are all these memoirs coming out now about people's relationships with books. Like anything else, these can be good or bad. The genre doesn't make it good or bad, it's the execution.”

People Writing Book Used Novel Be Good Memoir Genre Coming Out Execution

Author:Marco Roth

“Just in terms of being able to be a professional artist, but also it's nice to not have to dread introductions. "What you do for a living?" It used to be easier just to tell people that I was a magazine illustrator than try to explain that I did comics, but not the kind of comics that they were used to, and no, it's not pornography, etc. And now people even of our parents' generation are familiar with the term "graphic novel," which is kind of amazing.”

People Trying Kind Able Used Artist Parent Term Novel Nice Generations Easier Familiar Used To Be Magazines Etc Dread Pornography Introduction Graphic Graphic Novels Illustrators

Author:Adrian Tomine

“There's also an immediacy to everything that has changed everybody's expectations. Now if I can't get a hold of somebody on their cell phone I'm, like, angry with them. And in my mind, all the things that I really value in terms of art, really good novels or films or comics, I know they all take a long, long time to create, and they take a lot of concentration and dedication...and I just feel like the training for that is becoming more and more rare when people are used to seeing things like YouTube clips, and being able to acquire things instantly.”

“I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel.”

Used Fiction Novel

Author:David Quammen

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