Quotes about Novelty

If you're anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line As a man of culture rare, You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms And plant them everywhere. You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases Of your complicated state of mind, The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter Of a transendental kind.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

A novel is a piece of prose of a certain length with something wrong with it.

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

For twenty pages perhaps, he read slowly, carefully, dutifully, with pauses for self-examination and working out examples. Then, just as it was working up and the pauses should have been more scrupulous than ever, a kind of swoon and ecstasy would fall on him, and he read ravening on, sitting up till dawn to finish the book, as though it were a novel. After that his passion was stayed; the book went back to the Library and he was done with mathematics till the next bout. Not much remained with him after these orgies, but something remained: a sensation in the mind, a worshiping acknowledgment of something isolated and unassailable, or a remembered mental joy at the rightness of thoughts coming together to a conclusion, accurate thoughts, thoughts in just intonation, coming together like unaccompanied voices coming to a close.

Federal commandeering of state governments is such a novel phenomenon that this Court's first experience with it did not occur until the 1970's....later opinions of ours have made clear that the Federal Government may not compel the States to implement, by legislation or executive action, federal regulatory programs....Even assuming, moreover, that the Brady Act leaves no "policymaking" discretion with the States, we fail to see how that improves rather than worsens the intrusion upon state sovereignty. Preservation of the States as independent and autonomous political entities is arguably less undermined by requiring them to make policy in certain fields than (as Judge Sneed aptly described it over two decades ago) by "reducing them to puppets of a ventriloquist Congress."

If you're anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line As a man of culture rare, You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms And plant them everywhere. You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases Of your complicated state of mind, The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter Of a transendental kind.

Sir Walter, with his 61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career than most of his brethren.

If you don't like my book, write your own. If you don't think you can write a novel, that ought to tell you something. If you think you can, do. No excuses. If you still don't like my novels, find a book you do like. Life is too short to be miserable. If you like my novels, I commend your good taste.

There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

I have a novel way to eliminate crime as we know it. Instead of passing sentences of a certain number of years, why don't we educate the inmates and not let them out until they have maintained at least a C average from a grade school to a high school curriculum. Do you know how many people we could actually keep in prison and for how long? Think about it.

We so love all new and unusual things that we even derive a secret pleasure from the saddest and most tragic events, both because of their novelty and because of the natural malignity that exists within us.

He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.

We are living in a period which all too readily scraps the old for the new. . . . As a nation, we are in danger of forgetting that the new is not true because it is novel, and that the old is not false because it is ancient.

Part of human nature resents change, loves equilibrium, while another part welcomes novelty, loves the excitement of disequilibrium. There is no formula for the resolution of this tug-of-war, but it is obvious that absolute surrender to either of them invites disaster.

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.

How novel and original must be each new mans view of the universe - for though the world is so old - & so many books have been written - each object appears wholly undescribed to our experience - each field of thought wholly unexplored - The whole world is an America, a New World.

A good novel tells us the truth about it's hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

It is clear that a novel cannot be too bad to be worth publishing. . . . It certainly is possible for a novel to be too good to be worth publishing.

I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

Yes, oh dear, yes, the novel tells a story.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting more novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will is a shapeless world.

Where we cannot invent, we may at least improve; we may give somewhat of novelty to that which was old, condensation to that which was diffuse, perspicuity to that which was obscure, and currency to that which was recondite.

All my life I have been trying to learn, to read, to see and hear, and to write. At sixty-five I began my first novel and after the five years, lacking a month, I took to finish it, I was still traveling, still a seeker.

The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.

What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe.

Novelty is an essential attribute of the beautiful.