The Novel Quotes

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).

A novel which has been too much worked over often goes flat, and no amount of laborious revision can take the place of careful planning beforehand.

If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.

Wouldn't that be wonderful if I could do that? And that way, I could walk with the muse, rather than walk without her. The novel would write itself.

It feels like every single song is a chapter from a truly important novel.

I wish my life was a John Grisham novel. His heroes always seem to be one step away from death but come up with a brilliant plan. Unfortunately, real life can’t be wrapped up with a nice little bow

Try writing...a list, a letter, a journal, a novel, a declaration.

I do quite extensive research for most of my novels.

The truth is, I wrote a novel when I was 23. It's hideously bad. Truly rotten.

Working on an essay versus a novel is like the difference between seeing to that curtain and seeing to New Jersey.

If writers stuck to firsthand experience, novels would be pretty limited.

Initially I only decided to try and write a novel because I wasn't getting enough screenwriting work. It wasn't a long-held ambition, and certainly the idea came first.

That was always my hope that that is exactly what I would do. It was always part of the dream of this story - to write the novel and then direct the movie.

Writing a novel is a lot like directing a movie because you are creating a world and a tone, you are creating a large canvas and all the details.

You should spend more time with your families; write that novel you've always wanted to write. You know, the one about the fearless reporter who stands up to the administration. You know - fiction.

Reading a good poem can give me a far bigger kick than a novel. But it's not something I can keep doing. It would be like shooting up 10 times a day.

Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.

Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair

There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all.

I think of my novels as entertainments.

I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.

The novel should be understood as a structure built to accommodate the greatest possible amount of cool stuff.

I'm not suggesting that ours [series] is unique in that, but they can begin to have that depth, that gravity, they can spend some time, so it's a bit more like reading a good novel, if you like.

Writing a first novel takes so much effort, with such little promise of result or reward, that it must necessarily be a labour of love bordering on madness.

Even the crudest, most derivative novel is an expression of the author's hopes and fears and ideas about good and evil.

The spirit of Jane Eyre looms over Once Upon a Day. Lisa Tucker keeps the plot of this gothic novel bubbling with tons of juicy family secrets.

If the novel is dying, I see no chance that dismembering it will revive it.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

It was an old fashioned house --the sort of house in fact, as Strange expressed it, which a lady in a novel might like to be persecuted in.

The Eleventh Plague hits disturbingly close to home An excellent, taut debut novel.

No wonder you want to be a writer. How can you not, with all that behind you? You practically are a novel already.

I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

England offers new comforts. I could write a novel there.