The Novel Quotes

A novel is really like a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.

The writing in Mission to Paris, sentence after sentence, page after page, is dazzling. If you are a John le Carr fan, this is definitely a novel for you.

Whenever I start a novel, I'm always looking for two things: a bit of science that makes me go 'what if?' and a piece of history that ends in a question mark.

I also read modern novels - I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize.

At the end of the day you do have to write a short novel beforehand, called a script, before you can make a movie.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

My father was a frustrated writer. I think he wanted to write the great American novel.

SOON was the first novel where I used a rough outline. Usually I have characters and an idea and write as a process of discovery. Like working without a net.

The Chicago Way is a wonderful first novel. Michael Harvey has studied the masters and put his own unique touch on the crime novel. This book harkens the arrival of a major new voice.

Good travel books are novels at heart.

The novel since its origins has been the privatization of history... the history of private life ... and in that sense every novel is an historical novel.

Well I think after leaving prison, and having written three diaries about life in prison, it became a sort of a new challenge to write another novel, to write a new novel.

Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.

I hadn't written a love story before and I hadn't written a novel with a happy ending before.

For me, a novel relying too heavily on a single idea might be a dry, deadly thing unless it possesses an animating force.

You no longer have much in the way of knowing what to do in a big, epic novel about the future, because nobody knows what the hell is going to happen.

I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose.

I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life.

We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published.

The gift of literature is that, in some lucky cases, reading a novel or a story makes the reader more curious, more open-minded.

Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?

Mostly what happens in the novels never happened in real life.

I'm not interested in making a diagnostic novel or a concern. I'm 100 percent committed in fiction to the pleasure principle - that's what fiction is, and should be.

NOVEL, n. A short story padded.

I am writing my second novel for children for Simon and Schuster.

I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel

My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.

I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for 'The Namesake,' I felt that it had to be a novel - it couldn't work as a story.

Every time I read a Jane Austen novel, I feel like a bartender at the gates of heaven.

In most conventional novels, God is not allowed to be nuts. Nor are nuts allowed to be God.

I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.

I'm writing a novel about two actresses who go to New York, because that's what I know about. One has lost touch with reality, disappears and is picked up by a man.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist

I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing.

When readers close the covers on Running the Rift, I want them to understand that it is not a genocide novel but rather a story of hope and rebirth.

A kitsch novel describes the world not as it really is, but as it is hoped and feared to be.

It's not an accident that, while bookstores are all in a tizzy, one of the more lively and alive sections is the so-called "graphic novel" section, because those are harder to replace.

I've always felt that life is a novel, and part of it is written for you, and part of it is written by you. It's up to you to write the ending, ultimately.

Sir Walter, with his 61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career than most of his brethren.

I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.

While the novel-writer aims at an eminently natural method of transcription, the author of the short story adopts a very artificial one