492 Quotes About Novels

The essentials," I answered, "are to learn to shape God with forethought, care, and work; to educate and benefit their community, their families, and themselves; and to contribute to the fulfillment of the Destiny.

My brother Keith begged to go with us as usual. He'll turn thirteen in a few days - August 14 - and the thought of waiting two more years until he's 15 must seem impossible to him. I understand. Waiting is terrible. Waiting to be older is worse than other kinds of waiting because there's nothing you can do to make it happen faster.

I consider my novels, amongst many other things, to be my political activism.

Incidental, all of it, of course, but this was what this city bestowed that novels couldn't: not what you needed in order to live, but what made the living worth doing in the first place.

We suppress our emotions, edit our thoughts, and behave politely to the point of tedium. No wonder we seek solace in the emotional and psychological honesty of an unfiltered make believe world of novels, movies, and plays.

Lives are like novels. Plot, character, and tone are all part of the devices we employ: Aim to be a contributor and not a detractor to the story.

It takes three or four years before the present day sinks in to you as a novelist. It has not just to be accepted in the mind but travel down your spine and fill your body and you can’t respond immediately to immediate events, there is this incubation period.Source: http://www.euronews.com/2013/06/25/ma...

A novel must be judged on its merits, not on how hard the journey was to write it.

. . . the final page of any novel is a destination, the creation of form offering the illusion of inevitability, the denial of chaos. We don’t love novels because they are like life, but because they are unlike it—deftly organized, filled with the satisfaction of shape.