The Novel Quotes

Many people have a novel inside them, but most don't bother to get it out.

My view of an excellent novel was probably set in the golden age of fiction in the 19th century: narrative, character and voice are of equal importance.

I get very weird and defensive about what I'm working on - I wouldn't even tell my secretary what the next page of my novel was about.

You are accidentally leaving your DNA all over everything in a novel because it's all coming from you.

I keep telling myself I should try very hard to write a novel of about 210 pages... I don't seem to be capable of it, but I keep hoping it will happen.

He brought his great hand to rest on an early edition of Bram Stoker's novel and smiled, but said nothing. Then he moved quietly away into another section.

I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it.

All my friends who wanted to write had got nowhere trying to write the great European novel. So I deliberately steered clear of that and set out to write something story-led.

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.

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

It's important to write a mystery novel where the takeaway is not a giveaway - where something could be read over and over.

I've often thought I would like to try to write a conventional novel, but I just don't know enough about the real world to write one.

But I always seem to finish a book and then think, oh God, I've got to pay a tax bill, so I'd better write a novel, so I tend not to stop and learn word processing.

Am I worried people will say I'm repeating myself? Sure. One thought I had was to publish it as a novel but eventually I just decided to do what I wanted to do.

Steve Yarbrough is a masterful storyteller-one of our finest-and Safe from the Neighbors is a masterpiece. . . . This is a spellbinding, powerful novel.

The biggest downside to being a novelist is writing the novel.

For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination.

Im sick of the foodies who need every morsel that goes into their mouth to be a Picasso painting, a Giacometti sculpture, a Proust novel, evoking the world with each crumb.

I have a different purpose in writing each novel. Some of them seem more similar than others, but the purposes are always different.

the great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.

I think the path to becoming a writer has become more through the novel. It's easier to get a novel published than a book of stories, obviously, especially through big publishers.

The first seven years that I wrote fiction, I sent out stories and a novel and made a total of $25.

I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs.

Surely the novel should be a form of art - but art was not enough. It must contain not only the perfection of art, but the imperfection of nature.

I don't fret over lost time - I can always use the situations in a novel.

Believe it or not, I sold my first novel, Crank, with only seventy-five pages complete. It was in verse then, and it was hard-hitting then.

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

A lot of people have come up after Brookland and asked, "What happens to her at the end of the novel?" and I will very politely say, well, here are the two possibilities.

A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.

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.

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.

If you have to deal with our friends at ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it's like a Kafka novel. Files just disappear.

I want to be an art-hero - I want to change the form of the novel.

Writing a novel, I am making is an object that has a life and identity of its own, apart from me.

I wrote the novel [Room], and then I thought, "This could work on film, and I want to be the one to do it." So I went ahead and drafted it.

Of course I planned to write the Great American Novel; that lasted about a week, at which point I decided I had nothing to say that could possibly qualify. So I wrote a romance instead.

When you get ready to write your novel, outline it first. There's nothing worse than getting halfway through and realizing you've painted yourself in a plot corner.

Seriously, I think what all the puzzling over parenthood I had to do to write [a novel] ROOM taught me is that children can thrive in a remarkable range of situations.

Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.

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

Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.

Trollope wrote so many novels and other works that they tend to crowd each other out.

If Im going to invest the time in a novel, I want something more than the entertainment you get out of most genre fiction.

I have resolved to pick one novel and just read it over and over again for the rest of my life, because I cannot remember anything anymore.

I guess I've always been an aspiring novelist. I went to Princeton and wrote a novel for my thesis.

The novel remains a very special form for me.

When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.

In a novel, the only budgetary limitations are that of your imagination.

In a novel, the relationship between writer and reader is such a pure one.

I've always wanted to write a novel. It's overwhelming and daunting, and it's one of those things that every writer fantasizes about doing.