The Novel Quotes
There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.
My springboard is always the script. Even if the script is taken from a novel, I often haven't read the novel...
There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.
I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.
If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.
When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.
Coca-Cola can get really fresh output because it is getting people who are outside the traditional model and they are combining ideas in very novel ways.
We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.
Design is about crafting an experience that is unfamiliar enough to feel novel, yet familiar enough to instill confidence.
I have a backlog of novels which I would love to be working on and would be working on if I were not obliged to hold down a full time job.
If you want to write the next great novel, but you think, No, this won't work because no one will buy it or it won't be any good, then you talk yourself out of taking a risk.
Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.
As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
I love to read about anger. A "feel bad" book always makes me feel good. And no other novel in the history of literature is more depressing than Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children.
It is simply much easier to infuse life, feeling, and higher truth into a novel than a non-fiction work, to find the license to write truth without being wedded to fact.
There is, in my mind, no higher compliment to pay a non-fiction book than to say it reads like a novel.
It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political.
My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game.
History is a novel which did take place; a novel is history that could take place.
An unforgettable tale of love, lust, faith, betrayal, and redemption. A powerful, mesmerizing suspense novel-a tour de force!
To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.
Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.
It is important for me to discover the ideal title, for without this title the story or novel isn't quite in focus.
Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.
When I'm really involved or getting towards the end of a novel, I can write for up to ten hours a day. At those times, it's as though I'm writing a letter to someone I'm desperately in love with.
Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.
I always joke that every novel is really about the same thing: one person's struggle against society.
I do always know where I'm going in my books. I know the endpoint. I've written only two thousand words of my next novel but I know what the ending will be already.
I personally feel I still have so much to learn as a writer; each novel is better than the one before, just because I'm getting better at it.
Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.
Each novel is harder than its predecessor because I must work harder at not repeating myself. However, I enjoy the challenge. This is the greatest job in the world.
No matter how enormous a novel may become, the physical act of reading determines that there's no way it can become a communal experience. To read is intimate. It's almost masturbatory.
I don't really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that's my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving.
A HUMAN ELEMENT is an elegant and haunting first novel. Unrelenting, devious but full of heart. Highly recommended.
The greater the novel, the more it is apt to embody the special, non-replicable properties of the written medium.
I read Butterfly’s Child in one day, totally hooked. It is a captivating novel of love, guilt, sin, justice—and how all these things are, in time, transformed surprisingly and inevitably.
You want a novel to tap as directly as possible into your most unspeakable preoccupations. And in America, in particular, cricket is pretty unspeakable.
Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That's the way I do it, anyway.
Rather than a teaching tool, I think a novel is more of a witnessing entity. A witnessing entity? What is that? I just want the reader to step in and experience it as a story.
