Novel Analysis Quotes

Ford Maddox Ford's 'The Good Soldier' is my favourite novel. I first read it in the 1950s and have read it about 20 times since. It's possibly the best-constructed book in the English language.

What I've tended to do is to use my own experiences to get into someone else's mind, like in Wuthering Heights.

One doesn't read Jane Austen; one re-reads Jane Austen.

Every reader of the Dreiser novels must cherish astounding specimens--of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so many lumps of sodium hyposulphite.

I love Javier Marias; I love his novel 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.'

George Saunders's 'Lincoln in the Bardo' is a hands-down masterpiece - the subject of Abraham Lincoln and the genius of this author is a perfect union.

Michael Koryta isn’t just one of the finest authors working in the crime genre today. He’s simply one of today’s finest authors, period. His stories are taut, compelling, and beautifully rendered. His understanding of human nature-the good, the evil, and all the gray between-is masterful. THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD is Koryta at his best.

In some ways, 'Mansfield Park' is 'Pride and Prejudice' turned inside out.

'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is a masterpiece because it is an episodic novel that has a rigorous form - an unprecedented combination. From the very beginning we know the town of Macondo will endure only a century, so there is a limit to the length of the narrative.

Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.

When a newspaper columnist wants to write about a novel, the rule is that you're supposed to have a 'hook,' an excuse, a timely reason to bring up the book in question.

Reading it now for the seventh or eighth time, I am more convinced than ever not merely that The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s masterwork but that it is the American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country’s writers.

The Mathematician's Shiva is a brilliant and compelling family saga full of warmth, pathos, history, and humor, not to mention a cast of delightfully quirky characters, and a math lesson or two; all together, a winning equation! When Rojstaczer writes about mathematics, you'd think he was writing about poetry.

Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves.

On reading the first part of Anthony Powell's four-part masterpiece, 'A Dance to the Music of Time,' I was struck by one of the characters - an irritating peripheral character- who keeps showing up in the main protagonist's life.

Critics who do the weekly recap, I find that kind of absurd. That's like reviewing chapters in a novel.

From my point of view, 'Stranger in a Strange Land' isn't just a science fiction masterpiece; it also happens to be one of my favorite books ever.

Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.

You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.

The contemporary crime novel is, at its best, a novel of character. That's where the suspense comes from.

Jill Eisenstadt's comic second novel, 'Kiss Out,' is a work of such extravagant wackiness, eccentricity, and exuberance that any attempt to squeeze it into the confines of a simple plot summary seems doomed to failure and is possibly pointless.

The actual Blue Rose murders, which lie at the core of the three novels, yield various incorrect solutions which assume the status of truth.

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel. The ambiguity of that is, he's writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way.

As much as I revere great writing, and am still humbled by it, literary activities are no longer esoteric to me. When I read a great novel - something that I could never have written myself - I'm still looking at it a little bit like a technician.