The Novel Quotes

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.

Poison Pill is a great reading. The novel ranges from Russian oligarchs to the American worlds of drug research and the equity markets, all of it in a mode of high suspense.

I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.

Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them.

Wrote a science fiction novel about a man who wins an argument with his wife, but it was rejected for being too farfetched.

All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.

All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

Writing a story is kind of like surfing, as opposed to the novel, where you use a GPS to get somewhere. With surfing, you kind of jump.

A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.

I'm working on a new novel, in its 3rd draft, but it's hard to write while doing 7th Heaven.

I don't call myself an 'industrial designer,' because I'm other things. Industrial designers want to make novel things. Novelty is a concept of commerce, not an aesthetic concept.

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

The Apple Pie Hubbub was a significant novel for me, because that's when I first started using verbs.

When you write a novel, you make other people see your imaginary friends.

Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: You have to learn the rhythms of respiration - acquire the pace. Otherwise you stop right away.

Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.

The same parts of my brain get as excited as when I study bio or read a novel and write a paper on it.

Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.

I think humor is key [to a successful middle-grade novel]. Kids like to read for entertainment, and the best way to entertain kids is to make them laugh.

The place for truth is not in the facts of a novel; it is in the feelings.

I wouldn't mind my book being called an African novel if it didn't invite lazy readings.

I once owned a collection of 77 novels that won the Pulitzer. The only good novel of the bunch was The Grapes of Wrath.

To remain pure, a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.

I never think about a movie when I'm writing a book, because I think only two things could happen and both of them are bad. You write a lousy novel and a lousy film.

The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story - and then your story!

The summer I finished my first novel Ghana Must Go, I drove across west Africa: from Accra to Lomé to Cotonou to the deliciously named Ouagadougou.

I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.

Be quick, but don't hurry.

It would ha' been a good deal easier, if ye'd only been a witch.

If she spoke, she would tell him the truth: she was not okay at all, but horribly empty, now that she knew what it was like to be filled.

Before trying a novel I wrote a couple of plays.

The novel is a penetrating study of morals and ethics.

The short story is still like the novel's wayward younger brother, we know that it's not respectable - but I think that can also add to the glory of it.

Your life story is a novel; and people, though they love novels wound between two yellow paper covers, are oddly suspicious of those which come to them in living vellum.

Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.

I am a businessman at the end of the day. I have grown up with Excel sheets. I start out writing my novel with spreadsheets and the milestones in each chapter highlighted.

I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel.

I know for a fact that - it's just the way our biases work now in the industry of literature, but certainly a short story collection does not receive the same kind of attention as a novel.

I do see an interest in writing for Twitter. While publishers still do love the novel and people do still like to sink into one, the very quick form is appealing because of the pace of life.

There is no such thing as too ordinary to write about, whether that's life or a scene in a novel. What's interesting to people, whether it's memoir or fiction, is the truth.

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.

First electricity, now telephones. Sometimes I feel as if I'm living in an H.G. Wells novel.

For me Oliver Twist is a political novel. It is a furious critique of the treatment of orphans and poor children who were forced to spend their early lives in ghastly institutions.

My first novel is loaded with food references largely because my cupboards were bare, and I was writing hungry.

A screenplay is not a finished product; a novel is. A screenplay is a blueprint for something - for a building that will most likely never be built.

A Hot Fudge Sundae and a trashy novel is my idea of heaven.

And this is the way a novel gets written, in ignorance, fear, sorrow, madness, and a kind of psychotic happiness as an incubator for the wonders being born.

The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.