Quotes about Novel

This book is an awesome read, insightful, woman loving - a challenge to all spiritual seekers to rethink, re-vise, and dream anew.
-- bell hooks, professor, activist and author of national bestseller all about love.

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

If your life's story were written, would you read it?

Life is what you make it will your story have a peak, a conflict, suspence, action, a climax, and a conclusion? Or will you live your life keeping it safe and never taking any risks?  Ask yourself: if your life story were written, would you read it?

What If Our World Is Their Heaven?

Any time you tamper with a beloved novel, you're taking a chance, but if you don't tamper with the novel, you're basically making a book-on-tape with pretty pictures. The challenge here was to take Khaled Hosseini's story -- which has inspired so much affection and loyalty from its readers -- and find a way to tell it in two hours without benefit of access to the protagonist's mind.

Years from now when verisimilitude is finally understood as a terribly limiting proposition, let our daringly experimental books (often self-published, often ignored by the mainstream) be remembered as the Rubicon fiction crossed on its journey into multidimensionality.

I was sick to the bone of disappearing by degrees, dissolving into library walls, playing my sad little violin of loneliness as time’s invisible ink wrote out my meaningless days even as it erased them. We imaginary people must live the Adventure passionately, set ourselves down with the liquefied marrow of Experience, or else lament the Moment’s passing with a whimper as our unrecorded voices are swallowed by silence.

Let’s begin a new literary movement. I don’t care what we call it. Let’s start writing novels for people who don't like novels. Because these days who can blame them? You can please all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can’t please all the people all the time. So let’s at least please ourselves.

To grasp organizational life as it is, read novels (!) .... It is my fervent belief that we will never design rational processes that "overcome" such irregularities—don't bother telling that to a consultant. Hence, we should embrace the real, nonrational, nonlinear world with vigor and glee—and develop enterprise and career strategies accordingly.

The beauty of a metaphor is it doesn’t have to be real to ring true. The instant a metaphor becomes real it ceases to be a metaphor, which suggests a disconnect between truth and what’s commonly referred to as reality. This is a pivotal point—that the real world probably isn’t what you believe it is, or rather, that it’s precisely what you believe it is—which, if you still don’t get it, I can only trust someday you will.

Theory does everything in its power to remove the living soul of literature, tear its heart out, make of the study of Art a hard-edged Science. Never mind that Art is as far removed from measurement as Science is from love. As writers confronting theory, it’s incumbent on us not to let our prose dry up in that desert, but to allow it to become a desert rose, our prose, flourishing in the heat and sands of what passes for knowledge.

DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction insofar as we are all, each and every one of us, including yours truly, and including you (perhaps most of all), works of fiction. Beyond that, it is pure and absolute nonfiction; and though its “author” technically never existed, at least not in the dense, empirical, flesh-and-blood sense, the personages and events herein depicted are drawn straight from life, as it were. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual places, living or dead, while purely coincidental from the point of view of intention, should surprise no one.

The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. This novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.