literary tropes Quotes

There are no new stories. It all depends on how you handle them. In romances the characters are going to fall in love with each other; you know that when you see the syrupy cover. It's how get there that's the fun.

When a man writes a romance, the woman dies. When a woman writes one, it ends all tidy and sweet.

All tragedies are finished by a death, All comedies are ended by a marriage.

When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.

I was under the impression that if you've read one vampire series for young adults, you've read them all.

My heroines are always virgins. They never go to bed without a ring on their fingers; not until page 118 at least.

I like to play with tropes.

Why should every single character be an honor student who goes around helping others and never doing anything wrong? Is that like the rule or something?

Let's have some good, old-fashioned literature, with a virgin and a moral.

'All Quiet on the Western Front' is just sort of there isn't it? Every single trope of the First World War, and anti-war writing in general, is in there.

It had come about ex­act­ly in the way things hap­pened in books.

Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.

Anyone who had ever read a novel knew that governesses were supposed to be meek and downtrodden.

I had always thought that the idea of love at first sight was one of those things invented by lady novelists from the South with three names.

So much of the literature we had to read for high school English class was filled with victimized, tragic, symbolic women who spurred the plot forward with their inevitable shunning/death/shunning-followed-by-pregnancy-followed-by-death timelines.

I suppose as long as novels last, and authors aim at interesting their public, there must always be in the story a virtuous and gallant hero; a wicked monster, his opposite; and a pretty girl, who finds a champion. Bravery and virtue conquer beauty; and vice, after seeming to triumph through a certain number of pages, is sure to be discomfited in the last volume, when justice overtakes him, and honest folks come by their own.

A certain critic -- for such men, I regret to say, do exist -- made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained 'all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.' He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.

An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive atthe precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary.

All of women's stories in the 19th century had either one of two endings: you either had the good Jane Austen marriage at the end and you were happy; or you had the terrible Henry James savage downfall because of your own hubris as a woman, or you've made some great error leading you down a path to ruin. One is the story of love that's successful and the other is the story usually of reckless love that goes terribly wrong that destroys the woman.