The Novel Quotes

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

It is better to live presently. By living thus, perhaps we can learn to understand the nature of this fragile coexistence we share with the world around us.

When I was young, I knew William Burroughs really well. And William's secret desire, which he never quite did, was to write a straightforward detective novel.

The historical novel gives us perspective on our modern lives and helps us connect with the story, which we are continuing ourselves.

He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.

I do not know what to say in a case so surprising, so unlooked for and so novel.

The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.

Every novel worthy of the name is like another planet, whether large or small, which has its own laws just as it has its own flora and fauna.

Personally, I do not believe that it is the duty of any man or woman to write a novel. In nine cases out of ten, there would be greater merit in leaving it unwritten.

I belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor.

I don't think it's possible to write a good novel around a negative personality.

My objectives are very limited. I want to do the best I can with the talent God gave me. I hope to goodness that every novel I do gets better and better, not worse and worse.

Keep on the lookout for novel ideas that others have used successfully. Your idea has to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you're working on.

I never plan my novels because if I know what is going to happen, it bores me rigid. I let the story tell itself.

We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works

I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.

People in the know say The Giver was the first young adult dystopian novel.

Let nothing novel be introduced!

My thoughts went round and round and it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be of the 'stream of consciousness' type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink.

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination.

I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'

I wrote a novel about Israelis who live their own lives on the slope of a volcano. Near a volcano one still falls in love, one still gets jealous, one still wants a promotion, one still gossips.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

He who spends too long regretting his ruined crop will be neglect to plant next year's harvest.

Reading a novel is just a much more involving and intimate experience than the act of watching a film. I mean, you literally get inside of a novelist's head, and you invest many hours to do so.

The smallest quantity of alcohol scares away novel ideas.

It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.

I'm a novelist at heart. My sole intention is to write the best novel possible. I don't think about the film potential at all.

A Marxist has never written a good novel.

Writing a novel is like building a wall brick by brick; only amateurs believe in inspiration.

The fundamental purpose of a novel like Count Julian is to achieve the unity of object and means of representation, the fusion of treason as scheme and treason as language.

The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.

Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.

Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility.

Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.

Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.

My first film goes into production in October. It's called White Boy Shuffle and it's based on a novel about a young black kid and it's sort of reminiscent of Catcher in the Rye.

Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.

Few novels or plays could exist without at least one troublemaker in the group, and perhaps life couldn't either.

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

Here was a fragment of Goddess myth that, through all its permutations, had somehow escaped being turned on its head. It was the perfect springboard for the sort of novel I wanted to write.

I am almost six-novels-old. It took me until the third novel to call myself a writer.

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.

In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.

San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.