Modern Novel Quotes

#1. The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.

Sara Sheridan

#2. At the emergence of the modern novel with Rabelais and Cervantes, all kinds of things were possible in a long-form prose work. Within a couple of hundred years, most of those possibilities were abandoned in favor of a text that efficiently transmitted sentiments.

Teju Cole

#3. Even though the method of 'Harvest' was a historical novel, its intentions were that of a modern novel. I'm asking you to think about land being seized in Brazil by soya barons. It's also a novel about immigration.

Jim Crace

#4. A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

Chaim Potok

#5. The theologian is interested specifically in the modern novel because there he sees reflected the man of our time, the unbeliever, who is nevertheless grappling in a desperate and usually honest way with intense problems of the spirit.

Flannery O'Connor

#6. The great modern novel of the comic-pathetic illusion of freedom is Confessions of Zeno .

Italo Svevo

#7. over the centuries Dante has been variously "constructed" - as lover, statesman, neo-Platonist, proto-Protestant, Romantic visionary, Byronic hero, Pre-Raphaelite, father of his country, theologian in verse, precursor of the modern novel, and, finally, altissimo poeta, the consummate poet.

Peter S. Hawkins

#8. It would not be a good place for the heroine of a modern novel to stay at. The heroine of a modern novel is always "divinely tall," and she is ever "drawing herself up to her full height." At the "Barley Mow" she would bump her head against the ceiling each time she did this.

Jerome K. Jerome

#9. Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.

Umberto Eco

#10. Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.

Charles Lamb

#11. Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don't want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons.

Roman Payne

#12. In modern novels I try to not let myself get away and to be here, and that's why I write about my life and myself. But even when I do that there's an element of disappearing to a place that's not me. It's "the selflessness of writing". It seldom happens, but when it does it's worth quite a lot.

Karl Ove Knausgard

#13. Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.

J.G. Ballard

#14. I've got an idea for a modern day faerie tale that I think would made a great short novel. But I just don't have the time to work on it right now. I'm way too busy with the 'Kingkiller Chronicles' and being a new dad.

Patrick Rothfuss

#15. The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, "To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls." Another one said, "To describe blow-jobs artistically.

Kurt Vonnegut

#16. I went to an all-girls Catholic high school. The three things that they focused on were reading, writing, and arithmetic. My goodness, this is a novel idea in this modern society. I was really good at all three of these things. I was particularly good at math.

Ursula Burns

#17. When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.

J.G. Ballard

#18. In Conservatory of Death we see modern culture tired and kicking at the end of a rope. It is perhaps the first "deathpunk" novel.

David Kerekes

#19. To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it's incredibly valuable.

Cal Newport

#20. The wildest ride in modern crime novel exoticum. A novel so steeped in milieu that it feels as if you've blasted to mars in the grip of a demon who won't let you go. Read this book, savor the language-it's the last-and the most compelling word in thrillers.

James Ellroy

#21. Though a modern woman's computer is more intimate than her bed ...

Elizaveta Mikhailichenko

#22. Whether we think of Disney's blonde beauty and her pumpkin carriage or Marissa Meyer's recent recasting of 'Cinderella' as a cyborg in the young adult novel 'Cinder,' we know that there are countless modern retellings of the tale.

Marie Rutkoski

#23. They do think the world is some kind of science-fiction novel, then. Do you realize how fervently most people will believe in the promises of technology, even when those promises fly in the face of common sense?

Dexter Palmer

#24. I have some art, but I am a hobbyist. I would not consider myself an expert but in the course of writing this novel I became very familiar with the various movements in American Modern Art from 1900 onwards.

Nicholas Sparks

#25. Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.

Philip Larkin

#26. Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, 'Collecting material'. No one can object to that.

Stella Gibbons

#27. Joaquin Jackson's frank and colorful account of his long career as a modern-day Texas Ranger thrills like an action novel, yet the stories are true, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, but always gripping. I could hardly put the book down ... The writing is superb.

Elmer Kelton

#28. This probably sounds ridiculous. Like a modern Edith Wharton novel or something.

Sierra Simone

#29. The historical novel gives us perspective on our modern lives and helps us connect with the story, which we are continuing ourselves.

Mary Pope Osborne

#30. Everyone assumed it had to be some sort of biography, because if you are a woman and use yourself as a character, it has to be some sort of confessional, whereas if you're a man, you're actually doing some post-modern play on the novel, some critique on identity with lots of references to Foucault.

Jeanette Winterson

#31. There is not now, nor I suspect will there ever be, a le Carre novel with ninjas in it. Most serious novelists are wary of including ninjas in their writing. That's a shame, because many much-admired works of modern fiction could benefit from a few.

Nick Harkaway

#32. As a civilian, I know nothing about combat, the Marine Corps experience or modern man's struggle adjusting to peace after war. I only know what's been shared with me; confidences I would never betray, nor use as details in a novel.

Tiffany Madison

#33. I'm not a twentieth-century novelist, I'm not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst, and I'm not an intellectual.

John Irving

#34. We have a thriving subculture of 'independent' American movies that makes an impact on America as a whole roughly equivalent to that of a the modern literary novel. These are the films sincere viewers marry, whereas, once upon a time, movies were a lifetime of one night stands.

Edward Jay Epstein

#35. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

Milan Kundera

#36. The Watch is a powerful tale, courageous both in concept and creation: an ancient tale made modern, passed through different narrators in extraordinary shape-shifting prose that makes this not just an important novel, but a remarkable read.

Aminatta Forna

#37. If your like a powerful modern thriller with an historical core in the Scandinavian style of many separate threads which eventually come together, Purple Killing will grip you. It is my latest book and a companion to Hitler's First Lady, but in a very different style. Set equally in the US and UK.

Malcolm Blair-Robinson

#38. But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we'll find out - and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out - what happened.

Ali Smith

#39. 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