Modern Novel Quotes & Sayings

Just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales -- because they find them romantic. In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him. — G.K. Chesterton

Described by Harold Bloom as "the beginning of the end of the traditional novel of social morality" (xii), George Eliot's Middlemarch is nonetheless replete with a kind of authorial intervention that modern readers might find tiresome. Readers today are accustomed to the contemporary fictional maxim of "show, don't tell" but Eliot had different aesthetic ideas, for she always tells us right away who we are dealing with. At the beginning of Middlemarch, the character of one of its protagonists, Dorothea Brooke, is laid out. Eliot writes, — George Eliot

I went to an all-girls Catholic high school. The three things that they focused on were reading, writing, and arithmetic. My goodness, this is a novel idea in this modern society. I was really good at all three of these things. I was particularly good at math. — Ursula Burns

In the temple, I sit on the cool floor next to Grandfather, beneath the stern benevolence of the goddess's glance. Grandfather is clad in only a traditional silk dhoti
no fancy modern clothes for him. That's one of the things I admire about him, how he is always unapologetically, uncompromisingly himself. His spine is erect and impatient; white hairs blaze across his chest. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Even though the method of 'Harvest' was a historical novel, its intentions were that of a modern novel. I'm asking you to think about land being seized in Brazil by soya barons. It's also a novel about immigration. — Jim Crace

the best of Cervantes is untranslatable, and this undeniable fact is in itself an incentive [for one and all] to learn Spanish. — Aubrey F.G. Bell

Hopis have lived in America longer than anyone. We wanted to explore the concept of Earthly visitation through the eyes of people who have also witnessed the rapid evolution of modern culture. For us, their beliefs ring true on so many levels. Hopi prophecy speaks to the destiny of man...in a universe where we are not alone. — T.J. Wolf

As a civilian, I know nothing about combat, the Marine Corps experience or modern man's struggle adjusting to peace after war. I only know what's been shared with me; confidences I would never betray, nor use as details in a novel. — Tiffany Madison

The novel was born with the Modern Era, which made man, to quote Heidegger, the "only real subject," the ground for everything. It is largely through the novel that man as an individual was established on the European scene. Away from the novel, in our real lives, we know very little about our parents as they were before our birth; we have only fragmentary knowledge of the people close to us: we see them come and go and scarcely have they vanished than their place is taken over by others: they form a long line of replaceable beings. Only the novel separates out an individual, trains a light on his biography, his ideas, his feelings, makes him irreplaceable: makes him the center of everything. — Milan Kundera

The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction. — Sara Sheridan

Whether we think of Disney's blonde beauty and her pumpkin carriage or Marissa Meyer's recent recasting of 'Cinderella' as a cyborg in the young adult novel 'Cinder,' we know that there are countless modern retellings of the tale. — Marie Rutkoski

The Emperor believed that these tyrannical methods had been necessary in order to forge the thriving, modern nation that France had finally become. He was so proud of his various accomplishments that he had even taken notes for a novel that he planned to write about a grocer named Benoit who returns to France after many years in America to discover the jaw-dropping wonders and Utopian delights of the Second Empire. Expecting to find misery and poverty, Benoit is thrilled and impressed by France's universal suffrage, by its cheap consumer products, its telegraph and railway systems, its well-paid soldiers, convalescent homes, pensions for disabled priests, and by any number of other enlightened social policies overseen by the Emperor."11 — Ross King

Joaquin Jackson's frank and colorful account of his long career as a modern-day Texas Ranger thrills like an action novel, yet the stories are true, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, but always gripping. I could hardly put the book down ... The writing is superb. — Elmer Kelton

The theologian is interested specifically in the modern novel because there he sees reflected the man of our time, the unbeliever, who is nevertheless grappling in a desperate and usually honest way with intense problems of the spirit. — Flannery O'Connor

We have a thriving subculture of 'independent' American movies that makes an impact on America as a whole roughly equivalent to that of a the modern literary novel. These are the films sincere viewers marry, whereas, once upon a time, movies were a lifetime of one night stands. — Edward Jay Epstein

In Conservatory of Death we see modern culture tired and kicking at the end of a rope. It is perhaps the first "deathpunk" novel. — David Kerekes

I have some art, but I am a hobbyist. I would not consider myself an expert but in the course of writing this novel I became very familiar with the various movements in American Modern Art from 1900 onwards. — Nicholas Sparks

Another example is the modern political order. Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality. The entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction. Anyone who has read a novel by Charles Dickens knows that the liberal regimes of nineteenth-century Europe gave priority to individual freedom even if it meant throwing insolvent poor families in prison and giving orphans little choice but to join schools for pickpockets. Anyone who has read a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn knows how Communism's egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of daily life. — Yuval Noah Harari

Though a modern woman's computer is more intimate than her bed ... — Elizaveta Mikhailichenko

Writing a modern novel in a national language hence means writing with the awareness that you inhabit the same world as others around the globe. You see the same world map and the same world history as your contemporaries elsewhere, though how each of you interprets and relates the same historical events may vary greatly. — Minae Mizumura

To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it's incredibly valuable. — Cal Newport

Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don't want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons. — Roman Payne

over the centuries Dante has been variously "constructed" - as lover, statesman, neo-Platonist, proto-Protestant, Romantic visionary, Byronic hero, Pre-Raphaelite, father of his country, theologian in verse, precursor of the modern novel, and, finally, altissimo poeta, the consummate poet. — Peter S. Hawkins

If your like a powerful modern thriller with an historical core in the Scandinavian style of many separate threads which eventually come together, Purple Killing will grip you. It is my latest book and a companion to Hitler's First Lady, but in a very different style. Set equally in the US and UK. — Malcolm Blair-Robinson

This probably sounds ridiculous. Like a modern Edith Wharton novel or something. — Sierra Simone

There is not now, nor I suspect will there ever be, a le Carre novel with ninjas in it. Most serious novelists are wary of including ninjas in their writing. That's a shame, because many much-admired works of modern fiction could benefit from a few. — Nick Harkaway

Humanity's debut novel you could say. Love, sex, blood, and tears. A journey to find eternal life. To escape death. It was written over four thousand years ago on clay tablets by people who tilled the mud and rarely lived past forty. It's survived countless wars, disasters, and plagues, and continues to fascinate to this day, because here I am, in the midst of modern ruin, reading it. — Isaac Marion

The historical novel gives us perspective on our modern lives and helps us connect with the story, which we are continuing ourselves. — Mary Pope Osborne

Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end. — Philip Larkin

I think it's degrading of you, Flora,' cried Mrs Smiling at breakfast. 'Do you truly mean that you don't ever want to work at anything?'
Her friend replied after some thought: '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. Besides, I shall be.'
Mrs Smiling drank some coffee in silent disapproval.
'If you ask me,' continued Flora, 'I think I have much in common with Miss Austen. She liked everything to be tidy and pleasant and comfortable around her, and so do I. You see Mary,' - and here Flora began to grow earnest and to wave one finger about - 'unless everything is tidy and pleasant and comfortable all about one, people cannot even begin to enjoy life. I cannot endure messes. — Stella Gibbons

But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we'll find out - and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out - what happened. — Ali Smith

Modern drug based medicine is as incomplete as a novel written with three vowels. As discordant as a symphony constructed using only some of the notes. High dose nutritional therapy is the much needed missing part of our vocabulary of healthcare. The fight against disease needs all the help it can get. — Andrew W. Saul

At the emergence of the modern novel with Rabelais and Cervantes, all kinds of things were possible in a long-form prose work. Within a couple of hundred years, most of those possibilities were abandoned in favor of a text that efficiently transmitted sentiments. — Teju Cole

Oddities only strike ordinary people. Oddities do not strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life. This is also why the new novels die so quickly, and why the old fairy tales endure for ever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal; the centre is not central. Hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately, and the book is monotonous. You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons. The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world. The sober realistic novel of to-day discusses what an essential lunatic will do in a dull world. — G.K. Chesterton

It would not be a good place for the heroine of a modern novel to stay at. The heroine of a modern novel is always "divinely tall," and she is ever "drawing herself up to her full height." At the "Barley Mow" she would bump her head against the ceiling each time she did this. — Jerome K. Jerome

In modern novels I try to not let myself get away and to be here, and that's why I write about my life and myself. But even when I do that there's an element of disappearing to a place that's not me. It's "the selflessness of writing". It seldom happens, but when it does it's worth quite a lot. — Karl Ove Knausgard

I'm not a twentieth-century novelist, I'm not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst, and I'm not an intellectual. — John Irving

It seemed some pulp-novel version of a European hub, equal parts Renaissance-age Florence and modern day Paris with a heavy helping of Las Vegas and New York - at least, that was the way she thought of it. It was so far beyond description and unrelatable to any other place that she grasped desperately at straws trying to puzzle out how she'd tell the tale she'd no doubt live tonight. — Alaria Thorne

He writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated lo neliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born. — Renata Adler

It is as difficult to suppose a person intending to write a modern English, as to suppose him writing an ancient English, novel; that is a label which begs the question. One writes the novel, one paints the picture, of one's language and of one's time, and calling it modern English will not, alas! make the difficult task any easier. — Henry James

You hate the very source of your life, it's ultimate basis - for there's no denying it, 'sex is fundamental. And you hate it, hate it.' 'Me?' It was a novel accusation. Spandrell was accustomed to hearing himself blamed for his excessive love of women and the sensual pleasures. 'Not only you. All these people.' With a jerk of his head he indicated the other diners. 'And all the respectable ones too. Practically everyone. It's the disease of modern man. I call it Jesus's disease on the analogy of Bright's disease. Or rather Jesus's and Newton's disease; for the scientists are as much responsible as the Christians. So are the big business men, for that matter. It's Jesus's and Newton's and Henry Ford's disease. Between them, the three have pretty well killed us. Ripped the life out of our bodies and stuffed us with hatred.' Rampion — Aldous Huxley

The rise of the buffered identity has been accompanied by an interiorization; that is, not only the Inner/Outer distinction, that between Mind and World as separate loci, which is central to the buffer itself; and not only the development of this Inner/Outer distinction in a whole range of epistemological theories of a mediational type from Descartes to Rorty;' but also the growth of a rich vocabulary of interiority, an inner realm of thought and feeling to be explored. This frontier of self-exploration has grown, through various spiritual disciplines of self-examination, through Montaigne, the development of the modern novel, the rise of Romanticism, the ethic of authenticity, to the point where we now conceive of ourselves as
having inner depths. — Charles Taylor

A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel. — Chaim Potok

Everyone assumed it had to be some sort of biography, because if you are a woman and use yourself as a character, it has to be some sort of confessional, whereas if you're a man, you're actually doing some post-modern play on the novel, some critique on identity with lots of references to Foucault. — Jeanette Winterson

The Watch is a powerful tale, courageous both in concept and creation: an ancient tale made modern, passed through different narrators in extraordinary shape-shifting prose that makes this not just an important novel, but a remarkable read. — Aminatta Forna

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements. — J.G. Ballard

James Buchan's The Persian Bride combines a moving love story, a political thriller, and a history of modern Iran in a beautiful novel about the relationship of two people caught up in the Iranian revolution: John Pitt, a young man from England who arrives in Isfahan, Iran, in 1974, and seventeen-year-old Shirin, one of John's students, whose father is a general in the shah's army. — Nancy Pearl

The wildest ride in modern crime novel exoticum. A novel so steeped in milieu that it feels as if you've blasted to mars in the grip of a demon who won't let you go. Read this book, savor the language-it's the last-and the most compelling word in thrillers. — James Ellroy

Today the crime novelist has one advantage denied to writers of 'straight' or 'literary' novels. Unlike them he can range over all levels of society, for crime can easily breach the barriers that exist in our stratified society. Because of these barriers the modern literary novel, unlike its 19th-century predecessors, is often confined to the horizontal, dealing only with one class. But crime runs through society from top to bottom, and so the crime novelist can present a fuller picture of the way we live now. — Allan Massie

The great modern novel of the comic-pathetic illusion of freedom is Confessions of Zeno . — Italo Svevo

When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions. — J.G. Ballard

I was captivated by Sherrie Flick's meticulous and intelligent study of Margaret and Vivette, and the men they share. Reconsidering Happiness is a courageously intimate novel about the young women of modern America, their friendships, their betrayals, and their anxious cravings for everything from sex to pastry. — Jim Crace

The age of clear answers was over. So was the age of characters and plots. Despite her journal sketches, she no longer really believed in characters. They were quiant devices that belonged to the nineteenth century. The very concept of character was founded on errors that modern psychology had exposed. Plots too were like rusted machinery whose wheels would no longer turn. A modern novelist could no more write characters and plots than a modern composer could a Mozart symphony. It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer's morning, the sensations of a child standing at a window, the curve and dip of a swallow's flight over a pool of water. The novel of the future would be unlike anything in the past. — Ian McEwan

While I was drawn to the Renaissance, my first (unpublished) novels took place in modern times. When the subject of alchemy started creeping into my stories, an astute mentor observed that the bits about alchemy might fit better in another time frame. When I finally decided to weave the pieces about the medieval science into historical settings, a successful novel began to emerge. (And I dusted off that art history book, and put it to use once again.) — Mary Pope Osborne

The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, "To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls." Another one said, "To describe blow-jobs artistically. — Kurt Vonnegut

Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state. — Umberto Eco

Woolf thought hard and continuously about the gravity, the scale, and the impact of these changes, and about the need for new literary forms to confront and interpret them. She was in the vanguard of a new generation of novelists for whom the traditional conventions of the novel no longer served to represent modern realities: the crumbling of established social and political orders, the sexual disquiet and jagged nerves, the moral revolt and cultural revolutions, the agitation for rights long denied, freedom unreasonably curbed or stupidly repressed. — Virginia Woolf

I saw it all suddenly while I was reading Howards End . . . Forster's the only one who understands what the modern novel ought to be . . . Our frightful mistake was that we believed in tragedy: the point is, tragedy's quite impossible nowadays . . . We ought to aim at being essentially comic writers . . . The whole of Forster's technique is based on the tea-table: instead of trying to screw all his scenes up to the highest possible pitch, he tones them down until they sound like mothers'-meeting gossip . . . In fact, there's actually less emphasis laid on the big scenes than on the unimportant ones: that's what's so utterly terrific. It's the completely new kind of accentuation - like a person talking a different language . . . . — Christopher Isherwood

I've got an idea for a modern day faerie tale that I think would made a great short novel. But I just don't have the time to work on it right now. I'm way too busy with the 'Kingkiller Chronicles' and being a new dad. — Patrick Rothfuss

This is also why the new novels die so quickly, and why the old fairy tales endure for ever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal; the center is not central. — G.K. Chesterton

Remember this: a simple pen is much more swift and much more precise than a camera. That's my advice to both beginning and experienced authors: don't write with a camera. A camera is slow. All these modern writers usually make the same mistake - they write books with a film in mind. When you read their works, you don't hear the voice of a real author, you hear that horribly cheesy Hollywood voice-over. Frankly, that's not a novel, it's a movie script. If you write books, use a pen. A pen is swift, it has tempo, you can kill people with it. You cannot kill people with a camera, you can only perhaps bore them to death with it. — Martijn Benders

They do think the world is some kind of science-fiction novel, then. Do you realize how fervently most people will believe in the promises of technology, even when those promises fly in the face of common sense? — Dexter Palmer

Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness. — Charles Lamb

In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties. — Milan Kundera

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 postal inspectors also solved crimes. James Holbook's Ten Years Among the Mail Bags; or, Notes from the Diary of a Special Agent of the Post-Office Department, published in 1855, became a best seller and is thought to have helped inspire the modern detective novel, with its tales of mail robbers and malefactors who tried to use the public mails for nefarious purposes. "A mail bag is an epitome of human life,"' Holbrook wrote in the opening section of his book. "All the elements which go to form the happiness or misery of individuals--the raw material so to speak, of human hopes and fears--here exist in a chaotic state." Someone had to protect it. — Devin Leonard

Can you not see, [ ... ] that fairy tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforward; but that this everlasting fiction about modern life is in its nature essentially incredible? Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is-what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is-what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos. — G.K. Chesterton