Novel Impact Quotes

To this day, 'The Duke and I' remains particularly close to my heart; I felt it was the novel in which my writing took a huge leap forward.

One novel that I think is an overriding influence in my life is 'All the King's Men,' the most beautiful book written in the U.S.

I think my novel, 'Walden Two,' has made people stop and look at the culture they have inherited and wonder if it is the last word or whether it can be changed.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.

In high school, I read 'Silas Marner' and I was very attracted to this character - he was very rundown and he'd just stop, and things would happen around him.

When I was writing my first novel, 'Where the Line Bleeds,' which had young black men as its main characters, I was very invested in telling the story and also very worried about the effects the story would have.

Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.

When I was in grad school, I had to admit I hadn't read Toni Morrison. My teacher, the novelist Colum McCann, said I had to. I read 'Beloved' and 'Song of Solomon.' Pretty incredible.

I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much

A great novel is worth one thousand films.

Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.

You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it.

It was the ponderous battering ram of his novels that opened the way through the genteel reticences of American nineteenth-century fiction. . . Without [Theodore] Dreiser's treading out a path for naturalism none of us would have had a chance to publish.

Steve Yarbrough is a writer of many gifts, but what makes Safe from the Neighbors such a magnificent achievement is its moral complexity. . . . Safe from the Neighbors does what only the best novels can do; after reading it, we can never see the world, or ourselves, in quite the same way.

If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest.

If you connect emotionally with the plight of those characters, ou feel what they feel and you walk away with a sense of understanding and empathy, and hopefully, something has been illuminated for you. And I tink that's what happendd for a lot of readers with my novels.

'One Hundred Years of Solitude' convinced me to drop out of Harvard graduate school. The novel reminded me of everything my Ph.D. program was trying to make me forget. Thank you, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth.

'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.

I would have to say the novel 'War and Peace' influenced me more than any other book. This greatest of novels demonstrated to me the enormous power of literature and fired me up with a desire to become a writer, to participate in what I considered then to be the greatest of all endeavors.

My favorite novel is 'To Kill a Mockingbird' because of its broad sweep, its tackling of big issues in ways that even young minds can make sense of and for the heart of the characters, who span a wide range of ages. I reread it every year.

Size matters in fiction, but so does lack of size. Everything else being equal, fat novels tend to be perceived as serious, very thin ones as more honest, more real. Writers address these age-old expectations by filling their big books with philosophy and cramming their little ones with feeling.

I do like books to be quite an intense experience, and that's the kind of novel I respond to as a reader.