The Novel Quotes

I think that too often we, film directors, think that a big epic novel and feature film are the same. It's a lie. A feature film is much closer to a short story actually.

Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites.

I do one Xanth novel a year, because at the moment that is all that publishers will accept; they don't want any other type of fiction from me, so Xanth pays my way.

No novel is a clone of any preceding one, though with a background cast of characters and things that has grown to thousands, there are many familiar aspects.

My first published novel, American Rust, took three and a half years of full-time work to write. But I wrote two apprentice novels before that.

When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.

To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I wish I could spend six years writing one novel.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

When I write, I get glimpses into future novels.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Gritty and witty, The Chicago Way is done the classic Raymond Chandler Way. Harvey's taut plot, snappy prose, and memorable characters make this debut novel a real winner.

I feel like my brain is more geared towards a novel than it is to a movie.

All good writing is built one good line at a time. You build a novel the same way you do a pyramid. One word, one stone at a time, underneath a full moon while the fingers bleed.

For children: I'm writing a picture book about the Big Dipper and a novel about a cricket, a firefly and a vole. For grownups: I'm writing poems.

The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism.

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one.

The ingredients that make a good poem often differ from those that make a good essay and from those that make a good novel.

My first book was the most successful debut novel in the UK ever and every one of my books has reached number one in the UK. Clearly the British know brilliance when they see it.

If life were a novel, then dead would mark the end of the first chapter.

A novel is too much of a commitment. I tend to peruse Twitter - I check to see if I had any mentions and read the latest messages.

I sold my very first novel when I was 24 or 25 years old.

I read mostly fiction, a lot of 19th-century novels.

Sylvie's knowledge, like Izzie's, was random yet far-ranging, 'The sign that one has acquired one's learning from reading novels rather than an education.

I really have to think of the things fiction can do that film can't and play to the strengths of the novel. With a novel you can get right inside somebody's head.