The Novel Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 only way to write a novel is to proceed as if you had all the time in the world.

I read all the time. Sometimes I get asked if I've thought about writing a novel.

I just don't care about popular culture. It looks to me pointless and superficial. If I had free time I'd rather read a 19th century novel.

Each piece of writing I undertake, whether a story, novel, play, or poem, begins with an image.

Only another writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It's an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself.

It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.

When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.

The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel.

Seminaked men!” Jacky trilled. “With swords,” Kat purred. “It is a romance novel!

I've read all of Sarah Waters's novels which have been translated into Korean.

When I write, I get glimpses into future novels.

You write your first novel with the desperation of the damned. You're afraid that you'll never write anything else, ever again.

I was heavily influenced by my first attempt at a novel. I started a fantasy novel back in high school, and... well... it really sucked. It was a plotless, clichéd mess.

Writing a good query letter has very little to do with writing a good novel. But if you can't write the one, it makes it really hard to get the other published.

There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.

For me a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

Have the courage to analyze great emotions to create characters who shall be lofty and true. The whole art of the analytical novel lies there.

Crafted with care and with love, this beautifully constructed novel reveals hard truths and difficult secrets. Diana Davidson is a writer of great honesty and integrity, a writer to trust.

I wish I could spend six years writing one novel.

Write a novel if you must, but think of money as an unlikely accident. Get your reward out of writing it, and try to be content with that.

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

Many different substances, as distinct to the practiced eye as stone and wood, go to the making of a novel, and it is necessary to see them for what they are.

I wanted to write a novel. At 12 I knew, I am a writer. I said it to nobody.

Every novel starts with a theme, and I am constantly looking for big ideas.

If a novel or a story works, you don't stop thinking about it; it doesn't truly end.

I'm constantly trying to figure out how to crack that mystery; how to make a novel that has a sense of immediacy of a short story. I try to do that and I'll try it again, but I'll never get it.

What you can do with a short story that you can't do with a novel is punch someone in the gut, in the best of ways.

A lyrical, brave and complex novel that takes enormous risks and pulls them all off.

As far as I am concerned, I write novels, and other people can do the labelling.

The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.

Though my short stories are the more readable, my novels do have more to say; and they will, if anyone has the patience for it, repay a rereading.

No one will ever write a fantasy novel better than The Hobbit.

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.

Listening to Eric Taylor is better than reading a Larry McMurtry novel and easier on the eyes.

I read all of Ayn Rand's novels when I was 17.

One of the most puzzling things about a novel is that "the way it really was" half the time is, and half the time isn't, the way it ought to be in the novel.