The Novel Quotes

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.

Good novels are not written, they're rewritten!

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

"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.

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.

A novel means a new way of doing a story

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.

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.

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

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.

To be a classic, a novel should be original.

The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile.

I did not know at first that it would be a series; I discovered after the first novel that I had more to say about it, so I did another. And another, and then the readers demanded yet more.

I don't very often read novels.

Who are those ever multiplying authors that with unparalleled fecundity are overstocking the world with their quick succeeding progeny? They are novel-writers.

I never know exactly where I'm going with a story, whether it's a short story or a novel. If I did I'd soon grow bored of it. The fun, for me, is in the finding out and the making sense of it.

You know, the point of a novel - or to me, the point of a novel, the gift of a novel is to go really deeply inside people's lives and inside their personal experiences.

You can't really imagine every moment of a movie in the same way that you wouldn't expect a novelist to envision every sentence of his 800-page novel.

I think the trick of writing a good picture book manuscript is to leave that space for illustration. An illustrated novel can do the same thing.

Film is a medium of clear lines and broad strikes - which can be fantastic - but compared to the subtleties and nuances of a novel, it doesn't even get close.

I started writing when I was a journalist. But every time I sat down to write a novel or a story, I ended up writing about myself, which was incredibly annoying and self-involved.

For me, having it all is being paid to write novels.

The book that made a lasting impression was the one my mother gave each of us when she decided we were ready for our first "adult novel," Lucy Maud Montgomery's The Blue Castle.

At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.

What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism

If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.

Writing a novel is agony.

But when I close my eyes, I'm more like THIS under the surface: I'm laughing and scheming and dreaming.

To read a novel is to wonder constantly, even at moments when we lose ourselves most deeply in the book: How much of this is fantasy, and how much is real?

and all I could think was that I would like to spend every morning for the rest of my life waking up beside her

The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again.

When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours.

The heart is a place with worm holes made by feelings you aren't supposed to have but do.

I didn't know that once you've proven yourself useful to the wrong people, you'll never be free again.

Our souls need music, Robert, as our bodies need touch.

It was disconcerting that being in love felt lonelier than lonelines.

You try spending six months sitting at somebody's bedside, waiting for them to die and then tell me that the happy-ending love story isn't one of God's good gifts.

In the original novel [ Anthem], the story unfolds in the mind of a single character. Maybe that's why Ayn Rand called the work a poem.

Ever since the '70s, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were the godfathers of Scandinavian crime. They broke the crime novel in Scandinavia from the kiosks and into the serious bookstores.

Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.

Getting 10,000 listeners for a free podcast novel is a lot easier than selling 10,000 hardcover novels at $25 a pop.

Ever since I was in my teens I had plans at one point in my life to write a novel.

Some writers can produce marvelous plots without planning it out, but I can't. In particular I need to know the structure of a novel: what's going to happen in each chapter and each scene.