The Novel Quotes

The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.

Jane Austen we know never let two men converse alone in any novel because what they said would be unknown to her.

I . . . am always half afraid of finding a clever novel too clever--& of finding my own story & my own people all forestalled.

A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.

I binge write. I think it's because I started seriously writing by participating in National Novel Writing Month, an online-based challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn't novel.

I can only write one novel at a time. The author of the Perry Mason novels, Erle Stanley Gardner, often worked on four novels simultaneously, and produced a million words a year. I'm envious.

Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.

I've never discovered the idea for my next novel while I was still working on the current novel. Other writers don't suffer this.

My experience is that an original and compelling idea for a novel is a rare thing.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

I try to write books that are different from the books I've already written. I think one of the thing I really try to do is reinvent how a novel can be written.

When you work on a graphic novel or a film with people you've been together through a lot and you've exposed your secrets and weaker sides to each other.

The Buccaneers was an Edith Wharton novel, and she never finished it, and a screenwriter adapted it for television.

What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime novelist who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.

If I wanted to make money I would have written another novel.

I don't think I will write anything that could be even remotely considered a genre novel from this point on. I think I've graduated.

I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.

I have only one bit of advice to beginning writers: be sure your novel is read by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

I define a thriller as a big-stakes, multiple-viewpoint novel involving suspense, action, and mystery, in which the reader doesn't know everything but usually knows more than any single character.

He wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything except herself.

I was in love with a whirlwind, so when the girl threw me over, I went home and finished my novel.

The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.

Special qualities are required of the essayist. A poem or a novel may spring from the inner consciousness of an author. Reasoning poers must be brought to reinforce imagination.

Maybe I'd be a storyboard artist. Graphic novel/comic book artist. Backup dancer. Singer. It would be cool to focus on one of these full time. But I like seeing them all intertwine.

I write novels and other things.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.

The great modern novel of the comic-pathetic illusion of freedom is Confessions of Zeno .

I'm reading Barnaby Rudge, one of the less well-known Dickens novels. I've been a life-long lover of Charles Dickens ever since I think A Tale of Two Cities was the first Dickens novel I read.

It is clear that a novel cannot be too bad to be worth publishing. . . . It certainly is possible for a novel to be too good to be worth publishing.

In course of time my first novel appeared. It was a love story.

Before my first novel, I was dating a woman who later went to prison for bashing a guy with a hammer.

Where the novel makes use of material from my life it does so because it's aesthetically convenient, not because of any allegiance it has to any verifiable facts.

I want to write a novel so profound that it would suffocate a fly.

I have died and gone to the land of bad novels.

A Complicated Kindness is just that: funny and strange, spellbinding and heartbreaking, this novel is a complicated kindness from a terrifically talented writer.

The plot is not very important to me, though a novel must have one, of course. It's just a line to hang the washing on.

When I am writing a novel I try not to read great prose stylists into which I will fall.

If there is a connection between Harry Potter and my new novel, it's my interest in characters.

I wrote about four novels before I wrote a word of journalism.

Just as we bemoan the passing away of the Great Novel, a great novelist is likely to emerge, perhaps even from Denmark or Switzerland, to prove us wrong.

I can't wait for everyone to read 'Don't Look Back.' It's something very different for me, my first romantic suspense novel, so I'm very excited to be sharing the book, finally.

Comics are actually dubbed by euphemistic label of graphic novel, which became a big deal.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

I would never recommend my novel as a parenting guide. But we happen to live at a very hectic and hurried time, and I believe that many parents are too wrapped up in themselves.

People were always hungry, bullied, afraid, paranoid - so I just thought I'd show that in the novel in a kind of suffocating way.

Yes, it has made me happier. Finishing them has made me happier. Before I wrote the Potter books, I'd never finished a novel. I came close to finishing two.