The Novel Quotes

Writing a novel in general is like trying to reach a mountain top you'll never quite reach - so you try again and maybe get a little closer.

You have to wait for your mind to catch up with whatever it is it’s working on; then you can write a novel.

A novel must be a rich forest known at the start only by instinct.

Facebook is the novel we are all writing

In a story, the craftsmanship is fully exposed. A novel is like charity; it covers a multitude of faults.

I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.

The experience of writing 'The Kite Runner' is one I will always think back on with fondness. There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again.

My first novel, Leaving Atlanta, took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African-American children dead.

Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.

The novel is never really in the first draft. The novel really happens in the revisions.

When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time.

If only a group of people were more important to me than the idea of a Novel, I might begin a novel.

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

Will Shatner, Jonathan Frakes of Star Trek have already put novels out.

I invented the historical spy novel.

Usually people who do bad things make good writers.I did a lot of bad things, which is why my novels are interesting.

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.

Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.

I don't think the 'what' distinguishes a good novel from a bad one but rather the 'how.'

There are some short essays that are very grave, and most contemporary novels are lighter than air.

Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music hall song and a few bad novels.

I think with something like Watchmen you can genuinely call that a graphic novel because it has the weight and the intent of a proper novel and it also is the complete story.

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

If you have one strong idea, you can't help repeating it and embroidering it. Sometimes I think that authors should write one novel and then be put in a gas chamber.

I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.

The incredible stability in inflation is really a novel human experience. And the inflation is being the result of money.

We could live like counts. ... If all that money is out there, I might as well hack a little on the side and put the novel off.

This story is not and never was meant to challenge anyone's faith; however, if one's faith can be shaken by stories in a humorous novel, one may have a bit more praying to do.

A novel means a new way of doing a story

It's very important to set your place in a concrete environment. I think Chekhov said that the important thing when you have a play or any kind of novel is to set the roots in a concrete place.

"The Lucky One" is at its heart a romance novel, elevated however by Nicholas Sparks' persuasive storytelling. Readers don't read his books because they're true, but because they ought to be true.

Secrets. Need to disguise. The novel was born of this.

A good novel cannot be too long or a bad novel too short.

The Pacific Northwest, and particularly Whidbey Island, is extremely suited to be a location in a novel.

Whether I'm in front of the camera, behind the camera, at my computer writing a novel or a screenplay, as long as I get to entertain someone out there, I'm happy.

A novel is often a longer process in handling self-doubt.

The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life.

I would like to do a novel where some curse turns that into how the world really is - a blessing or a curse, I don't know which.

Good novels are not written, they're rewritten!

I couldn't sit down and write a novel or a short story - even now - because of my dyslexia. But I learned narration through movies.

The novel is very much alive, indeed. In Toronto at the Sixth Annual International Festival of Authors (October 1985) I listened to novelists by the dozen.

If someone said, I want to translate your novel into Igbo, I would say, Go ahead. But when I write in the Igbo language, I write my own dialect. I write some poetry in that dialect.

For a bookworm like Mother, a Brontë novel sister was better than a biological one.

The novel's not organized like a screenplay. If you shot the novel, you'd have a twelve-hour movie.

I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.