The Novel Quotes

There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare.

I think reading a novel is almost next best to having something to do.

The language of the novel differs from the just-the-facts language of the old tales. It's robust and earthy, sometimes even baroque.

I don't like 'graphic novel.' It's a word that publishers created for the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad. Comics is just a way of narrating - it's just a media type.

I never wanted to make a graphic novel. As soon as you become a 'writer,' you have to be intelligent all the time... I like the fact that I have the right once in a while to say silly things.

The language in a comic book or a graphic novel and the cinematographic language are really not the same language. They are false brother and sister. It's not at all the same.

If you enjoy math and you write novels, it's very rare that you'll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance.

If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.

I'm in that very preliminary stage of wondering how exactly to "pressurize" the novel in some way I've never considered before.

The beauty of my work is that my sets cost nothing. That's what I love about being a writer of novels.

Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.

You can't sort of write the novel as if you're taking dictation from heaven.

Often it doesn't occur to you what kind of novel you're writing until quite late on.

Yeah, I just finished a novel. Man those things take forever to read.

I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.

love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.

For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.

Growth provides novel experiences for youth; decay the same, alas, for age.

When I'm there, it's pure silence. There are other writers there, too, and I get super competitive. I have this weird fear that some guy next to me is writing this amazing novel, so I got to compete.

I feel like I have a lot of novel ideas, but they often come up while I'm already in the process of working on a book. You have to watch out with the slutty new idea.

When I have my students do erasures, I'm always amazed by the way their voice comes through, whether they're doing an erasure of a romance novel or an encyclopedia. Your sensibility will out.

I would love to collaborate on a graphic novel with an artist - I'm terrible at drawing but I really love that genre.

Writing novels is where I'm most comfortable. It's a very intimate experience.

It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same time

I like to read dramatic novels and I absolutely love magazines.

In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.

I don't really consider any of my novels 'crime' novels.

The woman who led [downed airmen] was named Andrée De Jongh and her story - one of heroism and peril and astounding courage - became the inspiration for my novel.

I think The Nightingale is my best, most mature, most moving novel, but maybe that's just because I love these characters. I love the setting.

I was very afraid to write a novel - it was a dream for a very long time, and it was one of the few things that I was afraid to try.

Over a four-month period, I sat down and wrote every day. And then there was a novel, and all of a sudden, there were agents and offers.

I love Richard Yates, his work, and the novel, Revolutionary Road. It's a devastating novel.

No Way Back is my kind of novel - a tough, taut thriller - Mofina knows the world he writes about.

This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren't.

I wrote a graphic novel called 'Soul Stealer' with big, beautiful, epic artwork by Chris Shy. It grew into a trilogy.

Novels seem to exist because of this need to know and connect, and so story becomes charged with necessity.

Horror and supernatural novels give you a lot of what you look for in a crime novel, just with a twist that was very fresh for me as a reader.

I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.

You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.

My novels are all ideas.

NaNo[ National Novel Writing Month] is an awesome opportunity to stretch your writing muscles and gives you permission to write in a way you probably wouldn't do in a normal circumstance.

The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.

Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality.

The novel is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a territory of play and of hypotheses.

No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?

Writers need restrictions. If somebody just says, "Hey, do you want to write a novel, or an article, or a movie, or a short story, you get shut down."

In Italian, the word for novel is romanzo, "the romance." The English is "novel" - something new. Both of those elements, experimentation and love, are fundamental to the form.

We think of the romance novel as a lesser form of literature, but I don't think that's true. Love is a very important aspect of human life and worth exploring.