The Novel Quotes

I am a toggler. I always have three or four projects going, short stories alongside novels and essays. When one project is terrible, there's somewhere else hopeful to look.

My father thought a novel was a broken short story. There's something to that. Many of my favorite novels are novellas. The authors of brief things must reckon with the precision of language.

In writing I found a way to make silence and to be silent. The short story has a lot more silence than the novel and that is its success.

Writing a novel is like knocking on a door that will never open. You are so desperate to get in, you will say or do anything. You feel: please take my novel.

I don't think I'll write a large novel again because it was like being in jail for me. Even though that's the funniest book I've ever written, it was the saddest period of my life.

It's difficult for me to have a large story, a very large story - a novel is a large story. I'm used to writing and doing these little miniature paintings.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

[ Lady Susan novel by Jane Austen is] extremely difficult to adapt. I worked on it for years, for, like, ten years, before I started showing it to people. This was my back-burner project.

John Irving once told me he doesn't start a novel until he knows the last sentence. I said, 'My God, Irving, isn't that like working in a factory?'

A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.

I read a lot. I am an inveterate reader. I always have a novel going.

I have no doubt that 'On the Road' is a Great American Novel. But I'm also certain my students will do fine without it.

In the time it takes American literary titan William H. Gass to write a novel, other artists have been born, completed their life's work and died. That may be an exaggeration, but only a slight one.

A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

My first novel was a challenge to myself. No one had an inkling that I was working on it.

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.

to write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.

My intention was never to write a "trans novel" - which is perhaps an effective strategy for writing a trans novel.

I don't yet know what style will be required for my next novel, but my sense is that each book will involve a new relationship to language.

Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.

All great novels are great fairy tales.

There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.

The Great Gatsby, the finest novel ever written.

The novel may stimulate you to think. It may satisfy your aesthetic sense. It may arouse your moral emotions. But if it does not entertain you it is a bad novel.

A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

I won't read novels while writing novels.

The best project is one that asks a novel question.

The graphic novel form really interests me and I like the freedom that format offers.

I always loved comic books and I'm still a great fan of the graphic novel.

HBO and I have a deal to at least try to make a television series from the Leonid McGill stories. We're going to start with the first novel, 'The Long Fall'.