The Novel Quotes

Any man's life, told truly, is a novel.

A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.

A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don't want to see how it was made.

A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.

Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational.

I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.

Life is not like a novel, but a novel can be like life. The best ones always are.

Richard Barager has written THE novel of the Sixties - a passion-filled, pitch-perfect, roller coaster of a tale about the decade that divides us all.

One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

Novel writing wrecks homes.

There're no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels, and then I read them again, and it's the best thing.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Good fiction must be entertaining- but what makes fiction special- and True- is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.

One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read.

The most difficult novel I have had to write in terms of just getting it done was The Vampire Lestat. It took a year to write.

A writer should bury his thoughts deep and convey them through the characters in his novel.

History is a novel for which the people is the author.

It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

A good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is without a doubt, hard work.

By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word.

I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.

Every novel is a debtor to Homer.

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

A novel is a book with a lot of pages.

At the time I begin writing a novel, the last thing I want to do is follow a plot outline. To know too much at the start takes the pleasure out of discovering what the book is about.

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

Every housemaid expects at least once a week as much excitement as would have lasted a Jane Austen heroine throughout a whole novel.

Through their capacity to manipulate symbols and to engage in reflective thought, people can generate novel ideas and innovative actions that transcend their past experiences

Houses are like books: so many of them around you, yet you only look at a few and visit or reside in fewer still.

The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy, the building of a house, the writing of a novel, the demolition of a bridge, and, eminently, the finish of a voyage.

A novel, basically, is writing one sentence — then, without violating the scope of the first one, writing the next sentence.

Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.

A journalist also needs to be disciplined, and so do I. I am, essentially, lazy. Without discipline I'd be just a mass of gummy bears on the sofa instead of on book tour with my eighth novel.

Writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

A successful novel should interrupt the reader’s life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog.

There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.

There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.

Every movie is a road movie. Every novel is a mystery. Every tortilla chip is sacred.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

A story is like building a chapel; a novel is a cathedral.

My sole literary ambition is to write one good novel, then retire to my hut in the desert, assume the lotus position, compose my mind and senses, and sink into meditation, contemplating my novel.

The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don't know what the hell is going on.

As you know, transforming such a big book [The Gunslinger Born] into graphic novel format is really a process of translation.