The Novel Quotes

Blood Riders is a novel like you've never read before - part Western and part horror and one-hundred percent sweet excitement. It's vivid and high-velocity, too. I couldn't put it down.

Reaching deep into the heart of the reader, Cindy Woodsmall pens a beautifully lyrical story in her debut novel When the Heart Cries.

I don't think comics necessarily think in literary terms. There is an element of developing your stage persona and your comedic voice, but I don't think comics see it like a character in a novel.

It was like being in a Jane Austen novel, but one with far less clothing.

After you've been working fairly intensively on a novel for six months you never want to see the damn thing again.

People don't like to say comic so they say Graphic Novel, despite the fact that I don't think the true Graphic Novel has been written anywhere.

I mistrust the term graphic novel because it sounds like a good thing to put on a tee-shirt. That's why the French like them.

Whether early or late, the Parker novels are all superlative literary entertainments.

I've heard some readers saying they wished the story was longer, and I completely understand that desire - we all like to sink into a nice, long novel.

Dreiser wanted to write the next great American novel, and his desperation pervades [ Sister Carrie ] like an unsavory pit stain.

I, alas, must present myself somewhat ignominiously as a chef in a busy kitchen. Somewhere a novel is bubbling on a back burner, an old attempt at history may come out of the freezer.

I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.

When the polar ice caps melt, my recording studio will rise up like an ark, and I'll float off into the drowned world like a character from a J.G. Ballard novel.

The new novel is sought more eagerly, and devoured more greedily, the New Testament.

A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.

Ive always got a novel under way, but if I try to work on it every day, exclusively, I falter. So I always keep more than one thing going.

Since I cant write the greatest American novel, Im going to write the longest American novel.

Starting a new novel is a little like starting a new relationship - you have to be prepared to commit for at least three years and put up with the domestic tedium as well as the emotional highs!

Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if "X" happened? That's how you start.

My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life.

Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.

As for writing about temptation, there's no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.

Writing a novel is not so much a project as a journey, a voyage, an adventure.

John Irving once told me he doesn't start a novel until he knows the last sentence. I said, 'My God, Irving, isn't that like working in a factory?'

A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.

I read a lot. I am an inveterate reader. I always have a novel going.

I have no doubt that 'On the Road' is a Great American Novel. But I'm also certain my students will do fine without it.

In the time it takes American literary titan William H. Gass to write a novel, other artists have been born, completed their life's work and died. That may be an exaggeration, but only a slight one.

A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

My first novel was a challenge to myself. No one had an inkling that I was working on it.

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.

to write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.

My intention was never to write a "trans novel" - which is perhaps an effective strategy for writing a trans novel.

I don't yet know what style will be required for my next novel, but my sense is that each book will involve a new relationship to language.

Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.

All great novels are great fairy tales.

There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.

The Great Gatsby, the finest novel ever written.

The novel may stimulate you to think. It may satisfy your aesthetic sense. It may arouse your moral emotions. But if it does not entertain you it is a bad novel.

A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

I won't read novels while writing novels.

The best project is one that asks a novel question.

The graphic novel form really interests me and I like the freedom that format offers.

I always loved comic books and I'm still a great fan of the graphic novel.