The Novel Quotes

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

I'd much prefer my books to shoes...In the summer I sometimes take walks without shoes but never without a novel.

I think you can tell, when you meet someone, whether they read novels or not. There is some little hollowness if they don't.

It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.

Fun has to do with habitual activities but then also terrifically novel or unusual ones. It works as a sort of strange milkshake of those concepts.

We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.

This isn't a particularly novel observation, but the world is full of people who think they can manipulate the lives of others merely by getting a law passed.

Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.

What I think is the most important thing to learn about any instrument is the basics of music. Learn your ABCs before you write a Hemingway novel.

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.

Life is about trusting your feelings and taking chances, losing and finding happiness, appreciating the memories, learning from the past, and realizing people change.

Through care taken over trends, the desire to be novel and affectation knowledge, we repudiate our art, our instinct, our own way of doing things; it is absurd and stupid

If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don't they will feel betrayed.

The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.

There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters.

All of my novels are democracies.

If I could read your mind, what a tale your thoughts could tell. Just like a paperback novel, the kind that drugstores sell.

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more.

I've read every one of Donald Goines' books. So as soon as I heard there was an opportunity for one of his novels to be turned into a movie, I jumped at the opportunity.

We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.

It is never too late or too soon. It is when it is supposed to be.

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

I read novels but I also read the Bible. And study it, you know? And the more I learn, the more excited I get.

I am a writer who has written about the life of my people, the character of my people. What I can say is that the greatest hero of the Brazilian novel is the Brazilian people.

It goes without saying that a fine short poem can have the resonance and depth of an entire novel.

Stuart Rojstaczer writes with enormous wit, style and empathy, and The Mathematician's Shiva is a big-hearted, rollickingly funny novel that's impossible to put down. A tremendous debut.

I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.

Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.

The choreographic process is exhausting. It happens on one's feet after hours of work, and the energy required is roughly the equivalent of writing a novel and winning a tennis match simultaneously.

The devil is always discovering something novel against the truth.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.

It might be more useful, if not necessarily more true, to think of photography as a narrow, deep area between the novel and film.

I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.

When you read a novel, your own imagery is the most important. It's what makes reading such a wonderful thing.

The ordinariness of living to be old is too novel a thing to appreciate.

The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.

In a novel, the author gives the leading character intelligence and distinction. Fate goes to less trouble: mediocrities play a part in great events simply from happening to be there.

Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote.

I think Melbourne is by far and away the most interesting place in Australia, and I thought if I ever wrote a novel or crime novel of any kind, I had to set it here.

You need a theme in a picture book just as much or maybe even more than you need it in a novel.