The Novel Quotes

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

Rohinton Mistry's celebrated novel 'Such a Long Journey' was pulled off the syllabus of Mumbai University because local extremists objected to its content.

'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.

There are few punishments too severe for a popular novel writer.

You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.

I know this because Tyler knows this.

There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood.

Yes, after some time spent last year on other commitments, most of them speaking engagements, I am now about halfway through a novel that I hope will come out in 1998.

A discursive student is almost certain to fall into bad company. Ten minutes with a French novel or a German rationalist have sent a reader away with a fever for life.

There are things the story must have or else look incomplete. And these will almost automatically present themselves. When they don't, you are in trouble and then the novel stops.

Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.

I need as much of the business of making a film to be in my own workspace. It really ought to be a bit more like doing a novel, alone, at first. I'm feeling my way.

I sort of hate the novel when it doesn't push, restlessly, against the tradition and the traditional.

I've read in many a novel, that unless they've souls that grovel-- Folks prefer in fact a hovel to your dreary marble halls.

The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?

In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a characters and let his perceptions take over.

In the long term, you have to believe that movies and TV shows will be like the opera and the novel, pretty nichey businesses.

The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700.

How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?

Don't ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out.

I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable.

I certainly think we're going to see more and more graphic novels and more illustrated novels.

Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out if me with steel pipes.

A bookworm in bed with a new novel and a good reading lamp is as much prepared for pleasure as a pretty girl at a college dance.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels.

Writing a novel is like trying to solve a very long mathematical equation. Changing anything can change everything else.

It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.

Wonderful thing about novels is that sometimes we read a novel and we know the person in the novel more than we know people in our own lives.

The Holocaust is not a cheap soap opera. The Holocaust is not a romantic novel. It is something else.

In real life, coincidences happen all the time. In novels, they are leapt upon with fury.

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

No man that good-looking could be a bachelor. Life wasn't that kind.

Free time is a terrible thing to waste. Read a book.

How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.

Journalism can go right up to the door of the room in which the decisions are made. A novel can go inside the room - and inside the character's heads.

(The short story) is a form that has all the power of the novel - some would say more - but none of the self-importance.

A novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.

A first novel should be brash and ambitious, and announce the arrival of a new talent.

I was a total nerd growing up. I'd rather sit home and read a novel on New Year's Eve and say, 'Wow, I read the whole thing in one night!' That was my idea of a big time.

Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?

The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.

I've always got a book in my hands, a novel in my hands. The more I get into film, the more paranoid I get that I'm going to stop seeing things.

I believe that the memoir is the novel of the 21st century; it’s an amazing form that we haven’t even begun to tap…we’re just getting started figuring out what the rules are.

When I was young I longed to write a great novel that should win me fame. Now that I am getting old my first book is written to amuse children.

I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature.