We wish to discuss a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid. D.N.A. This structure has novel features which are of considerable biologic interest. — Rosalind Franklin
Worker bees can leave. Even drones can fly away. The Queen is their slave. — Chuck Palahniuk
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae. — Kurt Vonnegut
Reading a novel in which all characters illustrate patience, hard work, chastity, and delayed gratification could be a pretty dull experience. — Thomas Perry
You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away. — Chuck Palahniuk
Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth. — Anatole Broyard
Strangely enough, the first character in Fried Green Tomatoes was the cafe, and the town. I think a place can be as much a character in a novel as the people. — Fannie Flagg
I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium. — Lynn Abbey
Short Novel Quotes
Comic books and graphic novels are a great medium. It's incredibly underused. — Darren Aronofsky
The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout. — Julio Cortazar
Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple. — Stella Gibbons
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. — Dorothy Parker
Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel. — Robert Hughes
If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear! — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
You are my creator, but I am your master; Obey! — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
I beheld the wretch-the miserable monster whom I had created. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Novel Image Quotes
Fiction Book Quotes
I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable. — Martin Amis
I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas. — Louise Brown
There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person. — Elizabeth Moon
Expand the definition of 'reading' to include non-fiction, humor, graphic novels, magazines, action adventure, and, yes, even websites. It's the pleasure of reading that counts; the focus will naturally broaden. A boy won't read shark books forever. — Jon Scieszka
A stage play requires very different craft from a book, fiction or otherwise, and ditto from a screenplay. — Dirk Benedict
Gayness is built into Batman. I'm not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There's just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he's intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay. — Sayings
Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin. — Ann Patchett
I love fiction because in fiction you go into the thoughts of people, the little people, the people who were defeated, the poor, the women, the children that are never in history books. — Isabel Allende
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. — Ernest Hemingway
Without books we're a very uneducated society. Think of the places books have taken us, the people we've been introduced to (fiction or non-fiction) and how books have allowed us to broaden our vocabulary. — Tom Robinson
Fiction Quotes
Better to have a small role in God's story than to cast yourself as the lead in your own fiction. — LeCrae
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists. — Hannah Arendt
If you have to write a fictional adventure to convey a philosophy of evil, the best person is the destroyer of evil himself, Lord Shiva. — Amish Tripathi
It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense. — Mark Twain
I am no longer going to become a fictional character to please people. That's too much work. — Lauryn Hill
The gospel is fiction when judged by the empire, but the empire is fiction when judged by the gospel. — Walter Brueggemann
The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky. — Flannery O'Connor
What might sound like science fiction elsewhere in the world at DARPA was future science. — Annie Jacobsen
You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion. — L. Ron Hubbard
Fiction Stories Quotes
The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories — Diane Arbus
Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best. — Linwood Barclay
Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters. — Umberto Eco
I could write historical fiction, or science fiction, or a mystery but since I find it fascinating to research the clues of some little know period and develop a story based on that, I will probably continue to do it. — Jean M. Auel
A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. — Frederik Pohl
It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check. — Erle Stanley Gardner
Short fiction seems more targeted - hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it's a lot smokier and less defined. — Paolo Bacigalupi
Babylon 5 is probably the biggest, most ambitious television science fiction series ever made. It's one big novel told over five years with 110 different stories told within it. — Bill Mumy
The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home. — John Y. Campbell
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying. — Anton Chekhov
Fantasy Novels Quotes
Oh, I’m nerdy about science fiction and fantasy and graphic novels and reading, and I’m nerdy about board games. My favorite board game is a board game I’m working on right now. It’s a game of Napoleonic era naval warfare, and it’s going to be fun. — Billy Campbell
I never think about genre when I work. I've written fantasy, science fiction, supernatural fiction, and am now working on a suspense novel. Genres are mostly useful as a marketing tool, and to help booksellers known where to shelve a book. — Elizabeth Hand
I've come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English. — William Golding
Children are dying." Lull nodded. "That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words. — Steven Erikson
I believe that I have now experienced the lifetime maximum exposure to bottom spanking in fantasy novels. — James Nicoll
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
Heaven knows, I've exposed myself in my novels through the use of fantasy and imagination... now my new book is about what really happened to me... not my heroines. — Judith Krantz
Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It (Gormenghast trilogy) is a very, very great work ... a classic of our age. — Mervyn Peake
Im a geek - I read fantasy novels, I play World of Warcraft, Im a massive gamer, I have Star Trek outfits. — Robert Kazinsky
When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book. — Salman Rushdie
Reading Fiction Quotes
Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction. — Joan D. Vinge
All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction. — Steve Almond
Simply put, Redeeming Love is the most powerful work of fiction you will ever read. — Liz Curtis Higgs
As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography. — Norman Spinrad
It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly. — C. J. Cherryh
I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me. — Jonathan Lethem
Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise. — Philip Roth
I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil. — Flannery O'Connor
I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and say to myself "well, that's not going to happen — Rita Rudner
Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction. — Arthur Golden
Mystery Novels Quotes
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable. — Raymond Chandler
After immersing myself in the mysteries of the Electoral College for a novel I wrote in the '90s, I came away believing that the case for scrapping it is less obvious than I originally thought. — Jeff Greenfield
If I had a bookstore I would make all the mystery novels hard to find. — Demetri Martin
Every movie is a road movie. Every novel is a mystery. Every tortilla chip is sacred. — Sherman Alexie
Detective stories keep alive a view of the world which ought to be true. Of course people read them for fun ... But underneath they feed a hunger for justice ... you offer to divert them, and you show them by stealth the orderly world in which we should all try to be living. — Dorothy L. Sayers
I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon
There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called "powerful" novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog. — Vladimir Nabokov
When I am thickening my plots, I like to think 'What if ... What if ... ' Thus my imagination can move from the likely, which everyone can think of, to the unlikely-but-possible, my preferred plot. — Patricia Highsmith
Ah, there's nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization - this tea ritual and the detective novel. — Ayn Rand
Adrianne Harun's dark, mysterious novel is by turns Gothic and grittily realistic, astute and poetic in its evocation of evil everywhere. — Andrea Barrett
Science Fiction Quotes
The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction. — Frederik Pohl
20 years ago, all of this [artificial intelligence] was science fiction. 10 years ago, it was a dream. Today, we are living it. — Jensen Huang
Science fiction readers probably have the gene for novelty, and seem to enjoy a cascade of invention as much as a writer enjoys providing one. — Walter Jon Williams
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. — Leonard Nimoy
My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky. — Alan Moore
We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that. — Kevin J. Anderson
The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion — Donna J. Haraway
Virtual reality, all the A.I. work we do, all the robotics work we do - we're as close to realizing science fiction as it gets. — Jensen Huang
Science fiction does not remain fiction for long. And certainly not on the Internet. — Vinton Cerf
Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein's general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out. — Stephen Hawking
Love Novels Quotes
I loved this smart, funny, big-hearted novel. As hilarious and wise as early Philip Roth, The Mathematician's Shiva will delight and move you. — Steven Strogatz
I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you. -Mr. Darcy — Jane Austen
Reconsidering Happiness captures all the contradictory impulses of falling in and out of love-the lust and wanderlust, the contentment and restlessness, the secret loyalties, the hard compromises. Sherrie Flick has written a wise and elegant novel. — John Dalton
I used to go with my parents and loved it, I was in school plays, and I started reading plays before I started reading novels. I'll defend it to the hilt. When theatre is good it is fabulous. — Patrick Marber
Life is like a novel. It's filled with suspense. You have no idea what is going to happen until you turn the page. — Sidney Sheldon
I should love to do a novel, about one abnormal character seeing present-day life, very ordinary life, yet arresting through it, abnormality, until at the end the reader sees, and with little reluctance, that he is not abnormal at all, and that the main character might as well be himself. — Patricia Highsmith
A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film. — Lorrie Moore
Eat good dinners and drink good wine; read good novels if you have the leisure and see good plays; fall in love, if there is no reason why you should not fall in love; but do not pore over influenza statistics. — Jerome K. Jerome
Someone wrote a piece about Henry Green in The Partisan Review that was so intriguing that I got one of his novels, Loving, I believe, which was the first that came to attention in the United States. — Terry Southern
Great Novels Quotes
Oh, how few find time for prayer! There is time for everything else, time to sleep and time to eat, time to read the newspaper and the novel, time to visit friends, time for everything else under the sun, but-no time for prayer, the most important of all things, the one great essential! — Oswald J. Smith
The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected. — Frank Dane
I don't think anyone has written a great graphic novel. — Ted Rall
The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain. — Michel Houellebecq
I'm just trying to tell a good story and make thought-provoking, entertaining films. I just try and draw upon the great culture we have as a people, from music, novels, the streets. — Spike Lee
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual. — Milan Kundera
I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them. — Scarlett Thomas
It is my contention that a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen. A novelist must have the intestinal fortitude to cut out even the most brilliant passage so long as it doesn't advance the story. — Frank Yerby
In a novel, the author gives the leading character intelligence and distinction. Fate goes to less trouble: mediocrities play a part in great events simply from happening to be there. — Charles Maurice de Talleyrand
Novel Writing Quotes
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
But compared to writing a novel, where you can be God, I did the Bay of Pigs invasion in six pages once, and there were 50,000 guys with boots that I didn't have to pay, and all those extras; we didn't have to pay them. — John Sayles
Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour. — Bret Easton Ellis
Architecture is a discipline that takes time and patience. If one spends enough years writing complex novels one might be able, someday, to construct a respectable haiku. — Thom Mayne
I began writing 'Matterhorn' in 1975 and for more than 30 years I kept working on my novel in my spare time, unable to get an agent or publisher to even read the manuscript. — Karl Marlantes
When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling. — Ted Rall
If I had to rank my skills, I have a long way to go before I can write a good graphic novel. — Ted Rall
Novel writing should never be confused with journalism. Unfortunately, in the case of Primary Colors, a fair number of journalists confused. — Joe Klein
Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it. — J. G. Ballard
Doing graphic novels is cool! It's fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out. — Anthony Bourdain
Reading Novels Quotes
Novels aren’t just happy escapes; they are slivers of people’s souls, nailed to the pages, dripping ink from veins of wood pulp. Reading the right one at the right time can make all the difference. — Brandon Sanderson
Within my own life, I read all the beloved novels by lamps of vegetable oil; I saw the Standard Oil invading my own village, I saw gas lamps in the Chinese shops in Shanghai; and I saw their elimination by electric lights. — Hu Shih
Life is like reading a novel or running a marathon. It’s not so much about reaching a goal but rather about the journey itself and the experiences along the way. — Edward O. Thorp
Oh, that sound? I'm in the hot tub, reading a novel. — Jane Smiley
This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue. — Carol Shields
I think you can tell, when you meet someone, whether they read novels or not. There is some little hollowness if they don't. — Philip Hensher
Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days. — Richard Wright
People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience. — Flannery O'Connor
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms. — Angela Carter
When I'm really into a novel, I'm seeing the world differently during that time— not just for the hour or so in the day when I get to read. I'm actually walking around in a haze, spellbound by the book and looking at everything through a different prism. — Colin Firth
Science-fiction Quotes
To be creative means to connect. It's to abolish the gap between the body, the mind and the soul, between science and art, between fiction and nonfiction. — Nawal El Saadawi
Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem by John Updike and to have sent teams of scientists deep underground for 50 years to build huge science-fiction-like contraptions to unravel their mysteries. — Lawrence M. Krauss
I've been getting a lot of science fiction scripts which contained variations on my 'Star Trek' character and I've been turning them down. I strongly feel that the next role I do, I should not be wearing spandex. — Marina Sirtis
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. — Theodore Sturgeon
Science Fiction is not just about the future of space ships travelling to other planets, it is fiction based on science and I am using science as my basis for my fiction, but it's the science of prehistory - palaeontology and archaeology - rather than astronomy or physics. — Jean M. Auel
I did one sci-fi movie. I did 'Gattaca.' I liked 'Gattaca' because that was always the kind of science fiction I really dug, the non-action oriented sci-fi. — Ethan Hawke
Should the research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this [atomic] energy in a form which could be employed, the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dream of scientific fiction. — Francis William Aston
Star Wars is adolescent nonsense; Close Encounters is obscurist drivel; ‘Star Trek’ can turn your brains into puree of bat guano; and the greatest science fiction series of all time is Doctor Who! And I'll take you all on, one-by-one or all in a bunch to back it up! — Harlan Ellison
If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless. — Bruce Sterling
I have been spending the better part of my professional life trying to create self-driving cars. At Google, I am working with a world-class team of engineers to turn science fiction into reality. — Sebastian Thrun
My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite. — Ghassan Kanafani
In the face of the sudden outbreak of the novel coronavirus, we have adhered to the supremacy of the people and the supremacy of life, adhered to dynamic zero-COVID, carried out the people's war, the overall war and defensive war against the epidemic, protected the people's life safety and physical health to the greatest extent, and achieved major positive results in the overall prevention and control of the epidemic, and economic and social development. — Xi Jinping
Originality is taking the road less traveled. Championing a set of novel ideas that go against the grain but ultimately make things better. But it doesn’t stop there: Originals are people who take the initiative to make their visions a reality. — Adam Grant
What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use men of prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Ghost does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does not anoint plans, but men, men of prayer. — Edward McKendree Bounds
If we want to forecast whether the originators of a novel idea will be successful, we need to look beyond the enthusiasm they express about their ideas and focus on the enthusiasm for execution that they reveal through their actions. — Adam Grant
Creativity is generating ideas that are novel and useful. I define originals as people who go beyond dreaming up the ideas and take initiative to make their visions a reality. — Adam Grant
I like the idea of making big budget films with a heart. I like graphic novels more than comic books. — Matthew Vaughn
Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella." (spoken by character in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa) — Mario Vargas Llosa
For your information, a good novel can change the world. Keep that in mind before you attempt to sit down at a typewriter. Never waste time on something you don't believe in yourself. — John Fante
These mnemonic collisions during REM sleep spark new creative insights as novel links are forged between unrelated pieces of information. Sleep cycle by sleep cycle, REM sleep helps construct vast associative networks of information within the brain. — Matthew Walker
Our companies communities and countries don’t necessarily suffer from a shortage of novel ideas. They’re constrained by a shortage of people who excel at choosing the right novel ideas. — Adam Grant
The Union of the Russian People helped invent a new style of right-wing politics – novel not just for Russia but for most of the world – a politics in a new key oriented toward the masses, public spaces, and direct action, a fascism avant la lettre. — Stephen Kotkin
The joy of poetry is that it will wait for you. Novels don't wait for you. Characters change. But poetry will wait. I think it's the greatest art. — Sonia Sanchez
Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets. — Joseph Brodsky
We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. — John Steinbeck
In Conclusion
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