The Novel Quotes

An image often propels the novel, gets it started. For me, it's an image that has a lot of emotion connected to it.

Nobody can be so beautiful from the outside and so hollow from inside. Not even in a third-rate novel.

There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better.

The key to finding your remarkability is to think about what makes you surprising, interesting, or novel.

If I had the luxury of working as a full time writer, I think you would see novels appearing on a much more regular, and frequent, basis.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year

Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.

I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.

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.

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.

I love to tell stories. I love to tell stories the way I tell them, not the way anybody else tells them. I am all the time writing a novel.

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.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

I find that in a novel I can get more of life, perhaps not such intense life, but certainly more of life than in poetry.

Sometimes, as in a great novel, you cannot see until you get to the end that God was leaving clues for you all along.

I probably listen to Burn more than any of them, because it was so new me, so novel. To see my name on an actual record was such an incredible feeling.

Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.

Neither transitions nor transformations will be manageable without novel forms of global governance and markets

I have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.

She had always been an unashamed reader of novels.

Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.

Rereading a favorite novel first read 5, 10, or 20 years ago, is a measure of our travel, how far we've come; it's a way of visiting an earlier self.

When I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.

My medium is prose, not the novel.

I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, but now I want a Russian novel, a 50-page description of you sleeping.

In a novel, on the other hand, you not only have to describe the rooms, but the clothes, the characters and what they are thinking. It's a much more in-depth process

The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.

Axiom : Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.

He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.

There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

In a novel, the biggest symbiosis exists between plot and character. In a song, it would be the lyrics and the melody.

My idea of a good novel was one you made enough money out of to buy a greenhouse.

What I love is how pissed off Jane Eyre is. She's in a rage for the whole novel and the payoff is she gets to marry this blind guy who's toasted his wife in the attic." -Angela Argo "Blue Angel

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. (…) A good novel editor is invisible.

When we look at a painting, listen to a piece of music, read a novel, or watch a movie we are taking in the artist's composition. The composition is the totality of the work.

I really want to write a novel. I also want to learn to play the mandolin.

I don't categorize myself as an 85-year-old woman who has written an erotic novel. I categorize myself as a writer who's written an erotic novel.

When I'm working on a serious and solid book ... I read about a detective novel a day. It's the best legal dope in the world. It makes you feel good until the next morning you can work again.

Bonsai won the Chilean Critics Award for best novel of the year in 2006and it's easy to understand why.

I lose patience with long stories. I get people who go, "Crumb, do some long stories, do a graphic novel." Novel-schmovel.

The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself.

I'm always telling myself as I write that I'm not really writing a novel; I'm just going to fool around with a character or an idea.

The strange thing about writing is that it's so easy to write a novel. It is really easy. But it's getting there to the point where it's easy that's hard. The hard part is to get there.

In real life, things don't all end at the nice same place. To keep the story real, there has to be kind of a ragged edge at the end of a novel.

If I had a bowler hat, I'd take it off to the author of this beautifully crafted steampunk novel.

I get up in the morning with an idea for a three-volume novel and by nightfall it's a paragraph in my column.

I had an American journalist say to me, "Is it true you wrote the whole of the first novel on napkins?" I was tempted to say, "On teabags, I used to save them.