#novel

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#approach #book #characters #completely #diction

The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#bit #classics #consequences #five #him

I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published. ↗

— Lynn Abbey

#being #cast #constrained #fantasy #genre

I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn't novel. ↗

— Ernest Gaines

#because #i #new #new york #novel

When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I'm finished with a theme, I'm generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises. ↗

— Richard Russo

#find #finished #generally #guises #i

Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission. ↗

— Lion Feuchtwanger

#answers #asking #author #composer #expecting

Opening lines of The Great Indian Novel narrated as a modern day MahaBharata. They tell me India is an underdeveloped country. They attend seminars, appear on television, even come to see me, creasing their eight-hundred-rupee suits and clutching their moulded plastic briefcases, to announce in tones of infinite understanding that India has yet to develop. Stuff and nonsense, of course. “These are the kind of fellows who couldn’t tell their kundalini from a decomposing earthworm, and I don’t hesitate to tell them so. I tell them they have no knowledge of history and even less of their own heritage. I tell them that if they would only read the Mahabarata and the Ramayana, study the Golden Ages of the Mauryas and the Guptas and even of those Muslim chaps the Mughals, they would realize that India in not an underdeveloped country but a highly developed country in an advanced stage of decay.” They laugh about me pityingly and shift from one foot to the other, unable to conceal their impatience, and I tell them that, in fact, everything in India in over-developed, particularly the social structure, the bureaucracy, the political process, the financial system, the university network and, for that matter, the women. Cantankerous old man, I them thinking, as they make their several exists ↗

— Shashi Tharoor

#age

While art thrives on the blazing colours of scandal, literature blossoms on the dark soil of tragedy. ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#artists #arts-and-humanities #books #classics #creativity

Nowdays, Rosie the Rivetere was a former soccer mom who had just opened her own catering business when Last Night came down and her husband and kids were eaten by a parking attendant at the local megamall’s discount- appliance emporium. ↗

— Colson Whitehead

#rosie-the-rivetere #zombie #zone-one-a-novel #business

But show business has always been like that - any kind of show business. If these people didn't live intense and rather disordered lives, if their emotions didn't ride them too hard—well, they wouldn't be able to catch those emotions in flight and imprint them on a few feet of celluloid or project them across the footlights. ↗

— Raymond Chandler

#mystery-novels #thriller #business