The Novel Quotes

I knew the basic outline of the novel [The Dissemblers] and would write whatever scene of the book I felt particularly excited about at the time.

A novel is a way to rethink and rewrite and re-envision the past, and also a way to speak to people who haven't been born yet about what we think about right now.

I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.

Daisy had known the novel was silly even as she had read it, but that had not detracted one bit from her enjoyment.

To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.

More often than not, real life is so rich, complex and unpredictable that it would seem completely implausible in the pages of a novel.

Post-apocalyptic novels tell you that in the future there is some great war. I would tell you that most cops say that it's going on right now.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written

If I'm hanging around too much, my wife and kids say, 'Hey, why don't you go downstairs and start a new novel?'

I don't remember learning to read, but the first thing I remember reading is a science fiction novel.

When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity - a novel, for example - I write every day.

The idea for a novel is like a little tiny fire in a dark night. And, one by one, the characters come and stand around it and warm their hands.

I feel like humor is a part of life. I don't think it comes through as much in the novels as it does in my head.

It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.

For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel.

I want to make albums that are like a Murakami novel or a Terrence Malick film - something that explicitly states its own world.

Just looking at pictures used to be considered cheating. No longer. The graphic novel is booming. Comics, heavily illustrated texts, books with no words are now accepted as reading.

Nothing was solved when the fight was over, but nothing mattered.

A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

(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.

I always wanted to write. While I was on a long surf trip, supporting myself with various day jobs, I was working hard on a novel. My third novel, in fact.

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.

There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is 'idiot'.

A novel should be as like life as a painting, but not as like life as a piece of waxwork.

The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.

It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel

The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.

I had decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover.

In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.

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.

I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.

Screenwriting is a much more collaborative effort. When you write a novel, it's just you, with input from your editor.

Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.

The essay form has superceded the novel as the vehicle that best suggests the prevailing apocalyptic gestalt, and as the talisman that is most able to repel the onset of paralysing dread.

A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play.

The story is a piece of work. The novel is a way of life.

The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.

What I like to write about is stuff I know. I don't think I could write a novel. I don't think I have it in me to come up with those kinds of characters.

Like Broadway, the novel, and G-d, feminism has been declared dead many times

[Heresy is] the dislocation of a complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein.

Everyone deserves to be the hero of a novel.