The Novel Quotes

The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.

It was a great place to write a novel about book burning, in the library basement.

It is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation.

He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.

Writing is a particular kind of frustration, which is why when I was making the structure for the novel I visualized it for myself with a color-coded board so I could see it.

Writing a novel is always complicated, it's not like you snap your fingers and go, 'Ah, I know what I'll write'. For me, a lot of the time, I have to write and as I write, I learn about the story.

When I write a novel I start each morning by reading for 20 minutes.

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

I was 29 when I wrote my first novel. But I was 45 when I quit for good. I was a 16-year overnight success.

The 'information novel' shouldn't be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream.

When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I'm finished with a theme, I'm generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises.

If you haven't written a novel by the time you're forty you never will!

Even in traditional filmmaking, you're always trying to find novel ways of telling stories, and this is different.

I am excited by... the new novel by Samantha Hunt. She's a writer I really admire a lot.

Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.

In general, each form is a relief from the other forms. I can't write a novel after a novel. I just use up all the material each time, and I need to rest.

The idea to make hotel reviews the form of the novel came first. So I just started writing hotel reviews and tried to come up with a consistent voice.

Life matters more than any painting, novel, film, or great big diamond.

Novels, like human beings, usually have their beginnings in the dark.

If you like my novels, I commend your good taste.

How are we to write The Russian novel in America As long as life goes so unterribly?

Novel technologies for delivering .. vaccines can certainly find a market if they are more effective, less costly, less invasive or more convenient to use than the alternatives.

... the novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.

Jayne Anne Phillips . . . is at the height of her powers in Lark and Termite. . . . This is a major novel from one of America's finest writers.

My job on The Gunslinger Born was to take Stephen King's novel and transform it into a detailed, seven issue, scene-by-scene story.

My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

I write short stories when a little idea occurs to me, that I know isn't a part of a novel that will stand by itself and should be concentrated.

If you want meaning, you read poetry or a novel or something, you don't read song lyrics. You're supposed to listen to them with music.

A passion for any novel, and any character, can crystallise your ideas when you really need to be as open as possible as a performer.

The novel will never die, but it will keep changing and evolving and taking different shapes.

Nearly all novels are too long.

A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.

When you write a novel you have to live with the characters for a long time. So I prefer short stories. I never wrote anything more than 250 pages.

It was really a means-of-production problem. It costs so much to make films. With a novel, you can write the whole thing on a ream of paper from Staples for $4.

The R.I.P.D. picture is like a graphic novel, I guess. I don't know if it's like a typical kind of comic book. But there is great source material for those kinds of films.

My boyfriend suggested I write two pages a day. He wouldn't take me out if I hadn't done my two pages. That's how I wrote my second novel.

The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.

If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.

Matthew Wiener on Mad Men writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.

Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.

I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character.

One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.

When I am writing novels I don't read a lot of novels so I try to catch up in-between.

If you're doing a classic play, where if you do a Chekhov, you do the words as written. You can't do that with a novel; you have to do your version of the words as written.

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.