492 Quotes About Novels

I think the reason novels are regarded to have so much more 'information' than films is that they outsource the scenic design and cinematography to the reader... This, for me, is a powerful argument for the value and potency of literature specifically. Movies don't demand as much from the player. Most people know this; at the end of the day you can be too beat to read but not yet too beat to watch television or listen to music.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.

I only wrote prose before I met you. My musings were superfluous and serious as well. But now the words dance with me. I sing with them and we create poetry.

When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust; I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the denouement.

I’ve more or less finished with the world as narration – the world of novels and films, the world of music as well. I’m now only interested in the world as juxtaposition – that of poetry and painting.

In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.

...but I was bored, I could scarcely understand them. I started to borrow novels from the circulating library, and read one after the other. But in the long run they didn't help. They presented intense lives, profound conversations, a phantom reality more appealing than my real life. So, in order to feel as if I were not real, I sometimes went...

You will never accept gratitude as a solution to your problems, until you have reached the last stage of grief--acceptance.