#novel

...a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest. ↗

— Karen Armstrong

#myth #novels #reading-books #art

I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it. ↗

— Tom Wolfe

#bit #first #i #i do #into

Watergate is an immensely complicated scandal with a cast of characters as varied as a Tolstoy novel. ↗

— Bob Woodward

#characters #complicated #immensely #novel #scandal

I can't change the past, and I don't think I would. I don't expect to be understood. I like what I've written, the stories and two novels. If I had to give up what I've written in order to be clear of this disease, I wouldn't do it. ↗

— Harold Brodkey

#clear #disease #expect #give #had

Others, amounting to four novels and a mess of short stories which I did not think worth preserving, I have done my best to eliminate from the record by refusing all requests for permission to reprint them, and I hope I have done a good job of making them hard to unearth. ↗

— Leslie Charteris

#did #done #eliminate #four #good

I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose. ↗

— Sven Birkerts

#novels #reading #age

I also wanted to do something that I hadn't really seen in almost any black novels, which was a complex love story in which both people were extremely intelligent and talented and understood a lot of things and were still at odds getting it together. ↗

— Stanley Crouch

#also #any #black #both #complex

It’s not supposed to end this way. Whatever else Roland and his ka-tet knows, that’s one thing that they ken for sure. This business ain’t supposed to end, and end bloody, at the base of some godforsaken pile of rock called Jericho Hill. Because John Farson is evil, and they’re good, and good may have its setbacks and bumps along the road, but when the final bell gongs, only good is left to hear its peals. They know that. They just…they know it. This ain’t how it’s gonna end. ‘Cept, deep down…they know it is. ↗

— Stephen King

#business

the best of Cervantes is untranslatable, and this undeniable fact is in itself an incentive [for one and all] to learn Spanish. ↗

— Aubrey F.G. Bell

#cervantes #don-quixote #great-books #man-of-la-mancha #modern-library

I often think that he's the only one of us who's achieved immortality. I don't mean in the sense of fame and I don't mean he won't die someday. But he's living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with everyday that passes. . . They change, they deny, they contradict- and they call it growth. At the end there is nothing left, nothing unreveresed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out of an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they never held for a single moment? But Howard- one can imagine him living forever. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#romance-novels #change