Novel Quotes

[ Lady Susan novel by Jane Austen is] extremely difficult to adapt. I worked on it for years, for, like, ten years, before I started showing it to people. This was my back-burner project.

HBO and I have a deal to at least try to make a television series from the Leonid McGill stories. We're going to start with the first novel, 'The Long Fall'.

I always loved comic books and I'm still a great fan of the graphic novel.

The graphic novel form really interests me and I like the freedom that format offers.

The best project is one that asks a novel question.

I won't read novels while writing novels.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.

The novel may stimulate you to think. It may satisfy your aesthetic sense. It may arouse your moral emotions. But if it does not entertain you it is a bad novel.

The Great Gatsby, the finest novel ever written.

There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.

All great novels are great fairy tales.

Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.

I don't yet know what style will be required for my next novel, but my sense is that each book will involve a new relationship to language.

My intention was never to write a "trans novel" - which is perhaps an effective strategy for writing a trans novel.

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.

to write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.

My first novel was a challenge to myself. No one had an inkling that I was working on it.

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel.

A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

In the time it takes American literary titan William H. Gass to write a novel, other artists have been born, completed their life's work and died. That may be an exaggeration, but only a slight one.

I have no doubt that 'On the Road' is a Great American Novel. But I'm also certain my students will do fine without it.

I read a lot. I am an inveterate reader. I always have a novel going.

A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.

John Irving once told me he doesn't start a novel until he knows the last sentence. I said, 'My God, Irving, isn't that like working in a factory?'

Reading a good poem can give me a far bigger kick than a novel. But it's not something I can keep doing. It would be like shooting up 10 times a day.

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

If the novel is dying, I see no chance that dismembering it will revive it.

The spirit of Jane Eyre looms over Once Upon a Day. Lisa Tucker keeps the plot of this gothic novel bubbling with tons of juicy family secrets.

Even the crudest, most derivative novel is an expression of the author's hopes and fears and ideas about good and evil.

Writing a first novel takes so much effort, with such little promise of result or reward, that it must necessarily be a labour of love bordering on madness.

I'm not suggesting that ours [series] is unique in that, but they can begin to have that depth, that gravity, they can spend some time, so it's a bit more like reading a good novel, if you like.

The novel should be understood as a structure built to accommodate the greatest possible amount of cool stuff.

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.

I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

I think of my novels as entertainments.

There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all.

Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair

Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.

It feels like every single song is a chapter from a truly important novel.

I do quite extensive research for most of my novels.

Try writing...a list, a letter, a journal, a novel, a declaration.

I wish my life was a John Grisham novel. His heroes always seem to be one step away from death but come up with a brilliant plan. Unfortunately, real life can’t be wrapped up with a nice little bow

The truth is, I wrote a novel when I was 23. It's hideously bad. Truly rotten.

Wouldn't that be wonderful if I could do that? And that way, I could walk with the muse, rather than walk without her. The novel would write itself.