The Novel Quotes

I have often heard that the novel is dead. But I see novels produced, I don't know how many a week, in France. I have the impression it's carrying along quite well.

Between history and the novel stands biography, their unwanted offspring, which has brought a great embarrassment to them both.

I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam.

Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.

A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock

A novel is a mirror walking down a road

You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.

The writer's job is not to write a novel, hold it up and say, “Here I am,” but to write a novel, hold it up and say, “Here YOU are.

It is so much hard work writing your first novel. You're not even sure that it is possible to do.

Everyone deserves to be the hero of a novel.

For some it is harder to write a novel than to row a bathtub across the North Atlantic.

Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Whenever I get lost in a novel I just throw a poem in. What it does is flare up, and it's so illuminated that I'm able to see where to go. I write between these illuminations.

It sounds boring, but anything is easy to start-starting a novel, starting a business ... it's keeping the thing going that is difficult.

The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become

You can make your superhero a psychopath, you can draw gut-splattering violence, and you can call it a "graphic novel," but comic books are still incredibly stupid.

A novel according to my taste, does not come into the moderately good class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love - and if a pretty woman, all the better.

There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.

You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.

Writing novels takes up about 100% of my available working time.

My guiltiest pleasure is reading a novel with a glass of wine. I love to read voraciously. I always have. And I love to lose myself in a good book.

My test of a good novel is dreading to begin the last chapter.

I've never taken any classes or had formal training in writing novels. At its most basic, I learned how to structure a novel.

The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.

In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be.

Pressed against her I can hear eternity -- hollow, lonely spaces and currents that churn ceaselessly, and the fallen snow welcomes the falling snow with a whispered "Hush".

Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.

The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.

In many ways, my entire graphic novel career was a long diversion. Originally, all I wanted to do was to be an underground cartoonist and maybe bring out a groovy underground mag.

A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

Arabs don't do crime fiction. I read crime fiction and I read Arabic literature, and I wish this was a novel I could have read in Arabic.

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.

Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.

I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.

When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.

Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.

My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they've read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!

A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot.

A romance novel should leave readers joyous. My books all have happy endings.

In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

Some authors, when starting a novel, imagine a place first. Others, a character starts taking shape in their head. I start with a hook, a situation, a 'what if.

The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.

Facebook is the novel we are all writing