The Novel Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ideas can come while reading a good novel.

Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.

I can't think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.

Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

I certainly think we're going to see more and more graphic novels and more illustrated novels.

I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable.

Don't ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out.

How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?

The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700.

In the long term, you have to believe that movies and TV shows will be like the opera and the novel, pretty nichey businesses.

In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a characters and let his perceptions take over.

The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?

I've read in many a novel, that unless they've souls that grovel-- Folks prefer in fact a hovel to your dreary marble halls.

I sort of hate the novel when it doesn't push, restlessly, against the tradition and the traditional.

I need as much of the business of making a film to be in my own workspace. It really ought to be a bit more like doing a novel, alone, at first. I'm feeling my way.

Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.

There are things the story must have or else look incomplete. And these will almost automatically present themselves. When they don't, you are in trouble and then the novel stops.

A discursive student is almost certain to fall into bad company. Ten minutes with a French novel or a German rationalist have sent a reader away with a fever for life.

Yes, after some time spent last year on other commitments, most of them speaking engagements, I am now about halfway through a novel that I hope will come out in 1998.

I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with.

I know this because Tyler knows this.

You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.

There are few punishments too severe for a popular novel writer.

'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.

Rohinton Mistry's celebrated novel 'Such a Long Journey' was pulled off the syllabus of Mumbai University because local extremists objected to its content.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

Everything that I write comes when it wants to, out of its own need and it dictates its form. I don't say, "I am going to write a novel."

I can't do a linear novel. I'm just going to write what I need to write.

I can't stand it when people say, "If you're writing a novel, you should read this and that." Because it's like giving someone another person's prescription. How do you know that's what they need?

The crime novel has always been my favourite genre.

In the '40s and '50s, a lot of teachers and librarians saw the graphic novel as the enemy of reading.

History begins in novel and ends in essay.

I never discuss a novel while I'm writing it, for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it.

Living in an entirely different physical as well as biotic environment, such a population would have unique opportunities to enter new niches and to select novel adaptive pathways.

Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.

Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list.