Novel Criticism Quotes

#1. Some days I am more wolf than woman, and I am still learning how to stop apologizing for my wild.

Nikita Gill

#2. This is all you have to do. Sit down once a day to the novel and start working without internal criticism, without debilitating expectations, without the need to look at your words as if they were already printed and bound. The beginning is only a draft. Drafts are imperfect by definition.

Walter Mosley

#3. The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.

Randall Jarrell

#4. A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.

Rebecca West

#5. You don't market-research a novel; you really are writing it for yourself. It's a hobby, in many ways. The problem becomes what you do when you're confronted by criticism. You just don't listen to it.

Bret Easton Ellis

#6. Small conspiracies fail and large conspiracies are betrayed.

W. Clark Boutwell

#7. for the first time in a popular novel I was reading about wrongdoing by the then-sacred institution, the FBI. I was reading open criticism and accusation of J. Edgar Hoover himself. I was reading it not from the typewriter of a young radical but from that of an old novelist.

Rex Stout

#8. Richard Wright, a Mississippi-born negro, has written a blinding and corrosive study in hate. It is a novel entitled "Native Son".

David L. Cohn

#9. I can only conclude that worse than hunger or thirst, worse than being unemployed, unhappy in love or defeated and in despair, far worse than any of all those things, is feeling that no one, absolutely no one, cares about us.

Paulo Coelho

#10. As for singing, my parents say I have a good voice, but then again, they have to say that.

Jessica Springsteen

#11. Life had sure been simpler when I hadn't dated.

Charlaine Harris

#12. What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism.

Philip Pullman

#13. Hacks are killing our national literary culture. America treats best-sellers like literary lions and literary lions worse than stray dogs.

David B. Lentz

#14. A novel is a tricky thing to map.

Reif Larsen

#15. As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.

Kurt Vonnegut

#16. Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'

Jeffrey Eugenides

#17. Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code ... a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name.
(Discussion at Woodruff Auditorium in Lawrence, KS; October 7, 2005.)

Salman Rushdie

#18. The enterprise, by definition, must be capable of producing more or better than all the resources that comprise it.

Peter Drucker

#19. Lawrence's claims for the vital self and his inability to make it
convincing independently of Freudian psychology are serious flaws in the novel, explain the sense in which the author's vision exceeds his grasp, and bring the cleavage between intention and performance into clear perspective.

John E. Stoll

#20. The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism.

Kate Zambreno

#21. I loved him in the way that one loves those who no longer matter: poignantly.

Molly O'Neill

#22. Hardy classified A Pair of Blue Eyes among 'Romances and Fantasies'. A favourite of Tennyson, its melancholy treatment of youth, love and death is expressive of late nineteenth-century susceptibilities. Not unnaturally in an early novel, Hardy draws freely on his own life.

Geoffrey Harvey

#23. Kerouac lacks discipline, intelligence, honesty and a sense of the novel. His rhythms are erratic, his sense of character is nil, and he is as pretentious as a rich whore, sentimental as a lollypop.

Norman Mailer

#24. The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.

George Steiner

#25. Meaning is deferred until some indefinite future.

Christopher Bigsby

#26. Steve Jobs was a pretty complicated character and somewhat a psychologically complicated guy.

Ashton Kutcher

#27. Like everyone else, there are days when I don't want to go to work. However, writing is a job like anything else.

Francine Rivers

#28. Mais c'est renfantillage - this is childishness!' we heard de Grandin pant as we closed in and sought a chance to seize his skeleton-like antagonist. 'He who fights an imp of Satan as if he were human is a fool!'
("The Man In Crescent Terrace")

Seabury Quinn

#29. Listen.
Dead people never stop talking. Maybe because death is not death at all, just a detention after school. You know where you're coming from and you're always returning from it. You know where you're going though you never seem to get there and you're just dead. Dead.

Marlon James

#30. The war must have broken God's heart, Anna. How could he stand to watch what we did to each other?

Dean Hughes

#31. If you look at the last decade of global temperature, it's not increasing,

John Barnes