The Novel Quotes

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

What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.

It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

I don't see how anybody starts a novel without knowing how it's going to end. I usually make detailed outlines: how many chapters it will be and so forth.

The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.

I was 29 when I wrote my first novel. But I was 45 when I quit for good. I was a 16-year overnight success.

The 'information novel' shouldn't be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream.

When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I'm finished with a theme, I'm generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises.

If you haven't written a novel by the time you're forty you never will!

Even in traditional filmmaking, you're always trying to find novel ways of telling stories, and this is different.

I am excited by... the new novel by Samantha Hunt. She's a writer I really admire a lot.

Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.

In general, each form is a relief from the other forms. I can't write a novel after a novel. I just use up all the material each time, and I need to rest.

The idea to make hotel reviews the form of the novel came first. So I just started writing hotel reviews and tried to come up with a consistent voice.

Life matters more than any painting, novel, film, or great big diamond.

Novels, like human beings, usually have their beginnings in the dark.

If you like my novels, I commend your good taste.

How are we to write The Russian novel in America As long as life goes so unterribly?

Novel technologies for delivering .. vaccines can certainly find a market if they are more effective, less costly, less invasive or more convenient to use than the alternatives.

... the novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.

Jayne Anne Phillips . . . is at the height of her powers in Lark and Termite. . . . This is a major novel from one of America's finest writers.

My job on The Gunslinger Born was to take Stephen King's novel and transform it into a detailed, seven issue, scene-by-scene story.

My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

I write short stories when a little idea occurs to me, that I know isn't a part of a novel that will stand by itself and should be concentrated.

If you want meaning, you read poetry or a novel or something, you don't read song lyrics. You're supposed to listen to them with music.

A passion for any novel, and any character, can crystallise your ideas when you really need to be as open as possible as a performer.

The novel will never die, but it will keep changing and evolving and taking different shapes.

Nearly all novels are too long.

A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.

When you write a novel you have to live with the characters for a long time. So I prefer short stories. I never wrote anything more than 250 pages.

It was really a means-of-production problem. It costs so much to make films. With a novel, you can write the whole thing on a ream of paper from Staples for $4.

The R.I.P.D. picture is like a graphic novel, I guess. I don't know if it's like a typical kind of comic book. But there is great source material for those kinds of films.

My boyfriend suggested I write two pages a day. He wouldn't take me out if I hadn't done my two pages. That's how I wrote my second novel.

Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel

I know they are naught things, but I devour novels.” (p. 57).

The reason I love comics more than anything else is that the longest story will be just a few pages. With a novel, it takes so many pages to get to one thing happening.

As a student in England, I studied French and English literature. I read L'Etranger and the rhythm of the novel felt familiar to me - very African.

I always begin [a novel] with outlines, but they change and so do my endings and beginnings.

I couldn't decide on a title for my first novel and my editor came up with Everything Good Will Come. After that, I thought I should name my own books.A Bit of Difference seems just right.

I get stage fright with short stories. For me it feels like standup comedy: kill or die. I'm more confident when I begin a novel because I know I have space to fail.

Dare to ask, "Where is my novel too simple?"

For me, the main inspiration to write a story or novel is the voice of its central character, or the narrative voice of the story itself.

In terms of a "career," I never have long-term plans, and certainly don't want to spend several years, say, writing a "long" novel.

You can't do science in a novel, but you can do philosophy. Or, if you're really lucky, you can manage to pose a question in such a way that other people will take it on.

I don't like novels that tie everything up in a plot-y way. I always think that's not really true of life, particularly of people in power.

I don't talk about my books while I'm writing them: not even my husband knows what a novel's about until it's done.

Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.

I find coming up with a title the hardest part of writing a novel.

One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.