Quotes about Novel

My dear, you will be woefully disappointed if in my story you expect any thing like a novel. I once heard a general say, that nothing was less like a review than a battle; and I can tell you that nothing is more unlike a novel than real life. Of all lives, mine has been the least romantic.

The Bible is the story so far in the true novel that God is still writing.

I think of the Jewish novelist Chaim Potok, whose artistic hero Asher Lev searches for imagery to express the pain of modern Judaism. The only thing he can find that will do—to the predictable horror of his community—is the crucifixion scene, which he paints in fresh and shocking ways. I think of the way in which the first Harry Potter novel ends with the disclosure that Harry had been rescued, as a young child, by the loving self-sacrifice of his mother. We could go on.

You don't need to read a mystery novel; your life is a mystery to you.

A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other dishevelled, bespectacled writers. He says very 'deep' things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published.

Surely the novel should be a form of art - but art was not enough. It must contain not only the perfection of art, but the imperfection of nature.

Good fiction must be entertaining- but what makes fiction special- and True- is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.

At the bottom of a Peretti novel is the biblical view of things, the Christian message. Whether you're a Christian or not, you're still going to have to deal with good versus evil.

I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.

hearing C-flat against an F-minor humming the lullaby to the rhythm of you reading that silly novel you try to complete each night I rest in your rest while the day snuggles in and sings me to sleep 'After the Day

I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humor, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?