59 Novella Quotes
Following is our list of the most famous novella quotations and slogans. We've compiled this selection of inspirational novella quotes. Hopefully, these novella quotes will keep you motivated not only during hard times but to expand your novella knowledge!
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Famous Novella Quotes
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
The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout. — Julio Cortazar
The secret of successful fiction is a continual slight novelty. — Edmund Gosse
The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. — Jose Saramago
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
A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters — Julio Cortazar
Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices. — Amos Oz
For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application -- why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again. — Howard Nemerov
A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul. — Stendhal
No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing. — Mario Vargas Llosa
The novel is more of a whisper, whereas the stage is a shout. — Robert Holman
A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images. — Albert Camus
Novelty is seldom the essential... make a subject better from its intrinsic nature. — Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
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
We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. — John Steinbeck
Short Novella Quotes
- I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose. — Jim Harrison
- I thought about starting a novella club because it seemed less ambitious. — Lena Dunham
- I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. — Ian McEwan
- Twitter is most suitable for me. In the Chinese language, 140 characters is a novella. — Ai Weiwei
- I grew up Spanish, so I grew up watching a lot of novellas. — Julie Gonzalo
People Writing About Novella
| Name | Quotes | Likes |
|---|---|---|
 Julio Cortazar |
55 | 1254 |
 Lorrie Moore |
131 | 310 |
 Jose Saramago |
206 | 954 |
 Lynn Abbey |
29 | 371 |
 Amos Oz |
158 | 456 |
 Howard Nemerov |
30 | 136 |
More Novella Quotes
I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his best days). — Ian McEwan
Within a scantily plotted, novella-style narrative (the movie is an adaptation of a short story by Tom Bissell), single shots become story events that mere mention would spoil. — Karina Longworth
I'm writinng my first full-length novel, which is based on a novella I wrote called "The Mad Scientist's Daughter." I'm having a wonderful time with it, but of course it's presenting challenges as well. Stories always do, no matter what they are. — Theodora Goss
Ayn Rand called her novella Anthem a "hymn to man's ego." My approach to Anthem the play was to provide the story a further dimension through music and sound. The work is now larger than a hymn. It's really "spoken opera." — Jeff Britting
The balance between literature and philosophy in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is different from that struck in the novella, but, as Mann clearly pointed out in his writings about both thinkers, both modes are present. — Philip Kitcher
The key to this collaboration - which we undertook after much deliberation - was to stretch creatively. New characters, new locales, new form (the novella). — Jonathan Kellerman
I think the term "artist's novel" for me has referred to writing which supports an art practice or a more specifically a particular artwork or project. The nonfiction novellas and nonfiction novel I have written play a role in my artwork as objects - which I will return to, but I write the books to exist autonomously. — Jill Magid
My father thought a novel was a broken short story. There's something to that. Many of my favorite novels are novellas. The authors of brief things must reckon with the precision of language. — Samantha Hunt
A creative person can suddenly realize it's not 90 minutes. They haven't got to do three acts, they haven't got to do the arc, but they can do other things. I think just as novellas turned into novels, I think that television series can begin to have that depth. — Steven Knight
I can write three novels in the time it takes to write one novella. I'm probably not going to go with that form again. — Nathan Lowell
Mann was less interested, I think, in constructing any kind of "portrait of an age" than he was in delineating an individual consciousness in which profound struggles about identity and direction arise - struggles that Mann himself had not only reflected on but felt keenly. Visconti takes up this central focus of the novella, but he couples it with a more social perspective. — Philip Kitcher
Mann was conscious of adopting different perspectives in different parts of the novella, but my guess is that there are plenty of passages in which the resonance of the words he chose struck him as exactly right (even though he didn't probe to discover exactly what tone or narrative device gave them that effect). — Philip Kitcher
We find in the novella a seamless interweaving of at least two narrative voices, one of which is that of an observer so sympathetic that his language appears to be Aschenbach's own, the other of which is superficially celebratory (except at the moment of moralistic condemnation) but undercuts Aschenbach by means of an ironic detachment. — Philip Kitcher
The more you read the novella, the more you should wonder, I think, which judgments are to be taken as bedrock. — Philip Kitcher
I don't think readers of Mann have overlooked the fact that he was a great ironist, but they have tended to see the irony in particular parts of the novella, and to miss it in others. — Philip Kitcher
So my methodological approach is to draw on many different features in highlighting different facets of the novella (and the opera and the film). — Philip Kitcher
Think about Mann's own daily routine (ascribed to Aschenbach), read the extant diaries and the letters in which he discusses the novella's themes, and it won't be so obvious that the attraction to Tadzio is completely unprecedented; it also won't be obvious that what Aschenbach wants is full sexual contact. — Philip Kitcher
Look at Mann's reading habits, his explicit comments on Nietzsche, and his copy of Birth of Tragedy, and it starts to seem doubtful that this work of Nietzsche's played much role in the gestation of the novella. — Philip Kitcher
I felt I should also contrast Visconti's treatment of the novella - usually damned by Mann fans (who typically respect Britten's more "faithful" adaptation). The Visconti film does many quite wonderful things, although there are good reasons for the condemnation. — Philip Kitcher
As I read Mann in German for the first time, the full achievement - both literary and philosophical - of Death in Venice struck me forcefully, so that, when I was invited to give the Schoff Lectures at Columbia, the opportunity to reflect on the contrasts between novella and opera seemed irresistible. — Philip Kitcher
For a sampler, you could try my short story collection "Wireless". Which contains one novella that scooped a Locus award, and one that won a Hugo, and covers a range of different styles. — Charles Stross
In a novella, a whole lot of crap can happen, and you can build momentum and suspense and leave room for a surprise or three. Stories are cut down to the most essential elements, and novels (this might be an unfair generalization on my part) are big fat clumsy efforts where the reader can snooze for a couple chapters and miss nothing of consequence. Hence my love for the middle way. — Robert Reed
When I think of Tokyo Story, yeah, it is like a novella. That doesn't mean it's not great. Some of my favorite Tolstoy works are his novellas. — Paul Auster
Having made films, I know very well that the scope of the average 90- to 120-minute movie is about the same narrative heft as a long short story or a novella. — Paul Auster
Basically, it's somebody who got stuck having to interview me who really wants to be a novelist, so they're writing these novellas and I was like, "It's not true, that didn't happen, they just made all that up! Why don't they just go ahead and be a novelist instead of bothering with interviewing me?" — Christian Bale
The novella is at once the most elegant and demanding form: a writer must balance the looseness of a novel with the concision of a short story, a feat that only the bravest and most talented of us can manage. In Brazil, Jesse Lee Kercheval proves, yet again, that she is exactly the right writer for the job. A wild American picaresque, Brazil snaps along briskly, yet feels full-fleshed, and brims with a sly wit and grace. — Lauren Groff
A verbose, prosaic review which mentions whistling winds and the timeless feeling of jade doesn't mean anything to me; I don't need a novella telling me about how an album is like a fine meal. — David Cross
With Wings of the Butterfly, John Urbancik infuses his tale of shapeshifters, romance and pack rivalry with some unexpected and welcome surprises. Fluid prose, gore galore and all-too human characters make this unusual, fast-paced novella a must for fans who like their horror served blood-rare. — Kealan Patrick Burke
I only respond to Telemundo when it's about novellas, in regards to music or movies they have nothing to do with it; that's mine. — Jencarlos Canela
CEREMONY OF FLIES hits the road like a nitrous-fueled GTO...and then pulls the ultimate stunt of getting better. What starts as a deceptively simple hard-boiled noir story twists on itself and adds layers and grows stranger and before you know it, BAM - it's the end of the world and all you can do is hang on by your fingernails. This really, truly is one of the best novellas I've read in years. — Lisa Morton
I've got a folder full of rejection slips that I keep. Know why? Because those same editors are now calling my agent hoping I'll write a book or novella for them. Things change. A rejection slip today might mean a frantic call to your agent in six months. — MaryJanice Davidson
'Envy the Night' was my first stand alone, the first book I'd written in the third person and I loved the feel of that, and it was different but it was also the same. 'So Cold the River,' I knew, was going to be really different, and that's why I thought about doing it as a novella under a pseudonym, because I didn't want to damage my career. — Michael Koryta
The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it. — Ian McEwan
Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last. — Marisha Pessl
In Conclusion
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