
Top 100 A Novel In Quotes
#1. What could be more boring than a novel that tells you how to think about everything that happens in it?
Jonathan Dee
#2. The truth is, you have about three paragraphs in a short story, three pages in a novel, to capture that editor's attention enough for her to finish your story.
Nancy Kress
#3. If we think of the novel and the epic ... The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero
a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character.
Jorge Luis Borges
#4. I started a novel in the back of a notebook, and it was great because it looked like I was taking notes. And I just, I kept it up, it was sort of fantasy, it was part soap opera. It was utterly dreadful, but that's how I got hooked.
Jacqueline Carey
#5. Mum was thinking 'bout going back to study creative twatting writing. She had a novel in her, whatever the fuck that meant. She was going to do all the stuff that having me when she was twenty had stopped her from doing. She said I'd made her tits little and taken away her identity.
Caroline Smailes
#6. For better or worse, whether it is a sign of aesthetic complexity or of intellectual indecision, this novel [Frankenstein] offers equally fertile ground to those readers who like their meanings ambiguous and indeterminate and to those who prefer to discern a deeply important doctrine.
Richard T. Nash
#7. It was 1981. I was working on a novel. And I put that novel aside one day after I read a newspaper article. The story said there were 19 women still on the pension payroll who were Confederate war widows. They were women who very early in their lives had married very old men.
Allan Gurganus
#8. 10% of authors earn 75% of the royalties. If you're writing a Romance novel, your odds will be slightly higher at making back your investment. Throw in a few vampires, even better.
J.R. Young
#9. I like that we don't have to come out the first 10 minutes and score, you know, with joke, joke, joke. We can open it in a more novel way and keep playing different pranks as we go through the thing.
Bruce Vilanch
#10. Remember, despite the fact that this book is being sold as a 'fantasy' novel, you must take all of the things it says extremely seriously, as they are quite important, are in no way silly, and always make sense.
Rutabaga.
Brandon Sanderson
#11. Sometimes, as in a great novel, you cannot see until you get to the end that God was leaving clues for you all along.
Lauren F. Winner
#12. To a greater or lesser extent, every novel is a dialogized system made up of the images of "languages," styles and consciousnesses that are concrete and inseparable from language. Language in the novel not only represents, but itself serves as the object of representation.
Mikhail Bakhtin
#13. Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.
Jane Smiley
#14. In 1890, Donnelly published Caesar's Column, a dystopian science fiction novel set in the far-off 1980s, when the United States had become a capitalist tyranny controlled by a ruthless Jewish oligarchy.
Arthur Goldwag
#15. I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.
Octavia E. Butler
#16. I am an impatient, temperamental reader. Anything long-winded, high-flown or gushing irritates me, so does everything that is vague and indistinct, in fact anything that unnecessarily holds the reader up, whether in a novel, a biography or an intellectual argument.
Stefan Zweig
#17. Every day, I learn something new. I think one of the most exciting things for a writer is to work on a TV show. It's like a novel. You have a really long time to develop and learn about the characters, and you can just really keep digging in deeper, every week.
Elizabeth Meriwether
#18. Matthew Wiener on 'Mad Men' writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.
Salman Rushdie
#19. I don't take notes. I don't have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn't work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash.
Zadie Smith
#20. I'm not a lawyer, but I play one in my novel COPYRIGHT. I also play a serial rapist, a drug addict, a teenage boy and lesbian model.
Lori Lesko
#21. I'd been assured, at age 21 or so, by a well-known editor who saw the first part of The Secret History in what was basically its final form, that it would never be published because "no woman has ever written a successful novel from a male point of view."
Donna Tartt
#22. [The movies] make the sort of comment only a novel can make, an allusion to the world in which people live, the psychological and economic motivations, the influences of the period in which they lived.
Orson Welles
#23. You don't market-research a novel; you really are writing it for yourself. It's a hobby, in many ways. The problem becomes what you do when you're confronted by criticism. You just don't listen to it.
Bret Easton Ellis
#24. I've written short stories in first person, but you have so much more control writing in third person. Third person, you know what everybody's thinking. First person is very limiting, and I could never sustain a first person novel before.
Tamora Pierce
#25. I think authors are just realizing there's no real reason to feel limited to a narrow set of genre rules in their writing. There's no reason a mystery novel can't have fantastic elements in it. Similarly, there's no reason why your epic fantasy series can't have elements of a mystery.
Patrick Rothfuss
#26. I can get really obsessive. I like writing many drafts, and I try not to because it is very time-consuming, especially when you're working on a novel. But I do like to take a story and reorder it, put things in different places. This allows me to see things in a new and sometimes surprising way.
Carol Windley
#27. I am persuaded that not a novel in ten thousand is of any use to a child to fit him for life. The most are of use only to unfit him
to blunt his senses and infect him with the writers' poor silly sentiments. Nine out of ten novelists deserve to be prosecuted under an Adulterated Emotions Act.
Storm Jameson
#28. Can you write 200 words a day? 100? 50? In six months, 50 words a day is 9,000 words. That's 2-3 short stories. If you did 200 words every day, in three months that's 36,000 words. That's half a short novel.
Holly Black
#29. I don't trust novels with points, do you? If a novel is only about a point, the writer should just say it in as few words as possible so we can take it in and go back to watching 'The Bachelor' on television.
William Lashner
#30. The God Factor Saga is a complex blockbuster in genre of This Present Darkness meets Anne of Green Gables. This saga is a romantic, suspenseful, apocalyptic, and inspirational novel tucked into the stories of children who grow up to be men and women with Divine purpose.
J. Nell Brown
#31. My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.
May Sarton
#32. If I sit down to write a young-adult novel, then I'm going to write either to the punch-pulling expectation of what I can't do, or I'm going to go the other way and think about what can I sneak in to be 'down with the kids' - which would be excruciating.
Patrick Ness
#33. 'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.
John Irving
#34. By the way, the best place to find names for fictional characters, if you are ever foolish enough to write a novel, is in a Bradshaw or an ABC. All the nicest people always sound like railway stations.
Beverley Nichols
#35. My hobby is to make up these "false stories". The stories that I create impact the public in a completely different form... It's enjoyable when it proceeds just as I expect it to. - A-ya
Suzumu
#36. A good approach is to allow one dream per novel. Then, in the final revision, go back and get rid of that, too.
Howard Mittelmark
#37. A great believer in precedent,' Della Street said. 'I think if he were ever confronted with a really novel situation he'd faint. He runs to his law books, digs around like a mole and finally comes up with case that's what he calls on all fours and was decided seventy-five or a hundred years ago.
Erle Stanley Gardner
#38. I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to 'unreliable.'
Charles Palliser
#39. You can't screw up your own suicide and then expect the universe to give you presents wrapped in the skin of a wonderful boy. That's just not the way it works.
Heather Demetrios
#40. This was my one brush with love. Was it love? It felt awful enough. I spent another two years crawling around in the skin of it, smoking too much and growing too thin and having stray thoughts of jumping from my balcony like a tortured heroine in a Russian novel.
Paula McLain
#41. I'm not the most prolific writer in the world, and, sadly, writing a novel involves a lot of effort.
Tibor Fischer
#42. Reconsidering Happiness captures all the contradictory impulses of falling in and out of love-the lust and wanderlust, the contentment and restlessness, the secret loyalties, the hard compromises. Sherrie Flick has written a wise and elegant novel.
John Dalton
#43. Randy stared into the glass he held in his hand, gazing into its cobra eyes. A double shot of thirty-year-old single malt whisky. You can't be an alcoholic when you only drink top shelf. Right?
Ted Magnuson
#44. Besides it's not as though the prisoner can truly die, any more than a character in a novel can. You can always flip back to the first page, can't you?
Django Wexler
#45. I'd like to say I'm not dressed up for anyone in particular, but that would be a lie.
Lisa Daily
#46. Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you ...
Alexander Chee
#47. Talking about ideas for a novel is a bit like showing pictures of the ultrasound if you're pregnant. Until they're out in the world, they can only be wonderful to you.
Clare Boylan
#48. I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.
Amy Waldman
#49. 'The Sound of Things Falling' may be a page turner, but it's also a deep meditation on fate and death. Even in translation, the superb quality of Vasquez's prose is evident, captured in Anne McLean's idiomatic English version. All the novel's characters are well imagined, original and rounded.
Edmund White
#50. The larger truth, the universal truth that you can give in a novel, is far greater than what you can give through journalism.
Oriana Fallaci
#51. Richard Wright, a Mississippi-born negro, has written a blinding and corrosive study in hate. It is a novel entitled "Native Son".
David L. Cohn
#52. I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.
Bruce Coville
#53. Like a clock of life on which the seconds race, the page number hangs over the characters in a novel. Where is the reader who has not once lifted to it a fleeting, fearful glance?
Walter Benjamin
#54. Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.
Rachel Kushner
#55. Eventually, I decided that if I was going to really write a novel, I couldn't do it in New York City while holding down a job. You need a constant money source to live in New York City unless you're independently wealthy, which I'm not.
Rachel Kushner
#56. It's easy in a novel to be completely unambiguous about the relationship between animal and daemon simply by stating it outright; whereas you get very few opportunities to do this in an elegant way in a film.
Chris Weitz
#57. I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.
Richard Flanagan
#58. She meant you have to live a story for a time.'
'And?'
'And then you can write it, in time. What have you lived?'
'Kind of a personal question for Twitterland.'
'Kind of the perfect question to answer in fiction.
L.L. Barkat
#59. 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.
Mike Svob
#60. Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
Patrick White
#61. I believe a novel must first of all be a good story. My hope is that the spiritual message is woven in so well, is such a part of the fabric of the story and of the characters' lives, that it is subtle but meaningful. This is difficult to do well and is something I constantly endeavor to improve.
Julie Klassen
#62. Writing in a near frenzy is wonderful and freeing, but for me, it did not result in a nice, shiny novel. Instead, what I have is a mess.
Erin Morgenstern
#63. Consider yourself a functional character in someone else's novel - a background character - a person on the street - that's the perspective ...
John Geddes
#64. I can't envision an honest war novel that left war in a positive light.
Kevin Powers
#65. Nobody's perfect. They are weak, with ugly hearts, and they quickly turn to jealousy. They try to knock others down. It's so odd . . . In the world we live in, the greater a person is, the more difficult his or her life becomes.
Wataru Watari
#66. It's getting a little chilly in here! Why don't we sit by the fireplace and I'll tell you the story of how I single handedly killed the Medina boys!
Angel Ramon Medina
#67. The first novel I wrote was a monster - clocking in at 180,000 words - but it died a death, a death it deserved. It was called 'The Gods First Make Mad.' It was a good title, but it was the only good thing about the book. I didn't let that put me off.
Wilbur Smith
#68. We did photograph albums, best dresses, favourite novels, and once someone's own novel. It was about a week in a telephone box with a pair of pyjamas called Adolf Hitler. The heroine was a piece of string with a knot in it.
Jeanette Winterson
#69. Those words are from Lynda Barry's novel 'Cruddy.' I've carried them with me for some time. There's a lot in my life I wasn't expecting. One is the realization that I stood at this pulpit and delivered a reading for my own graduation ... 15 years ago. Unexpectedly, I'm old.
Jack Dorsey
#70. In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.
Dana Spiotta
#71. Yes, it had been a perfect match, except for the fact that he had been perfectly in love with someone else.
Sarah MacLean
#72. I think the worst and most insidious procrastination for me is research. I will be looking for some bit of fact or figure to include in the novel, and before I know, I've wasted an entire morning delving into that subject matter without a word written.
James Rollins
#73. Every first thing is always a miracle. The first person you fall in love with. The first letter you receive. The first stone you throw. And in my conception of the novel, the letter becomes important. But what's more important is the fact that we need to continue to tell each other stories.
Colum McCann
#74. 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.
Charles Stuart Calverley
#75. The script for what would eventually become my first graphic novel, 'Cairo,' sort of came to me in kind of a bolt of lightning within 24 hours of having moved to that city. Just a jumble of characters and narratives and interesting things that I was seeing and experiencing for the first time.
G. Willow Wilson
#76. Life has a time limit. And we are changing all the time. So are our ambitions, desires, and purposes . . . The important thing is to find something that never changes in you.
Fumio Obata
#77. Frankly, anybody who's going to kill themselves because of a bad review has no business writing a novel in the first place.
Robert Galbraith
#78. There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.
John Irving
#79. I'll write to you. A super-long letter, like in an old-fashioned novel
Haruki Murakami
#80. My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.'
Martin Amis
#81. I don't like jokes in speeches. I do like wit and humor. A joke is to humor what pornography is to erotic language in a good novel.
James C. Humes
#82. A novel is really like a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.
Katherine Anne Porter
#83. I don't fret over lost time - I can always use the situations in a novel.
Jerzy Kosinski
#84. All I could think about was the heat of his soft lips, the way they fitted so wonderfully as I was coaxing him to open them some more, just enough to let my tongue slip in and taste him. I needed a taste, needed to complete this fantasy of mine.
Stephanie Witter
#85. When you get ready to write your novel, outline it first. There's nothing worse than getting halfway through and realizing you've painted yourself in a plot corner.
Janet Evanovich
#86. I might've found a way to cure them." Crystal said in a jumble of words.
"Cure them? Permanently?"
"Yes sir."
He thought about this a moment before speaking, "You've got two weeks, can you do it by then?"
"That's plenty of time sir, thank you.
Julia Barkey
#87. I do have the sense that, although there may be no one way to write a novel, there are many novelists who are in fact part of some sort of larger literary community, whether in the form of a writing group or an MFA program, to name two of the more common forms.
Hanya Yanagihara
#88. I placed my new novel, 'The Book of Lost Fragrances', in Paris, knowing it would be a challenge. But the book belonged in the city that is one of the greatest perfume capitals of the world and has been since for more than three centuries.
M.J. Rose
#89. Despite its challenges, the novel offers an opportunity to live in one story for years of your imaginative life. There's a tremendous richness to that.
Rebecca Makkai
#90. Whether your audience is in a sweaty basement club or nestled in a favourite armchair, good money has been paid, and attention has got to be grabbed if you are not to be heckled off the stage or find your novel discarded in favour of the latest volume of 'Fifty Shades of Whatever.'
Mark Billingham
#91. A first novel of astonishing force, craft and beauty, The Headmaster's Wager conjures up a dizzyingly evocative wartime Saigon in the story of Percival Chen, a Chinese schoolmaster in Vietnam. This extraordinary book made me weep. Read it.
Janice Y.K. Lee
#92. I turned my thoughts to a still more novel mode ... to compose pictures on canvas similar to representations on the stage ... my picture is my stage, and men and women my players exhibited in a 'dumb' show.
William Hogarth
#93. Why do Jesus and Mary only appear on Mexican food? Huh? Answer me that? Nobody ever sees the face of God in a California roll.
Ken O'Neill
#94. Attributing to another author, Writing a novel is like setting a goal and walking there in your sleep.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#95. A lot of people have trouble with their second novel - the dreaded sophomore jinx. I wrote three books in between the two novels, and they just weren't very good.
Claire Cameron
#96. People think that they will sit down and produce the great American novel in one sitting. It doesn't work that way. This is a very patient and meticulous work, and you have to do it with joy and love for the process, not for the outcome.
Isabel Allende
#97. 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.
Robert MacNeil
#98. I grew up in Southern California, so the whole concept of a local music history is still kinda novel to me.
John Darnielle
#99. In my ideal world, my next novel would have a first printing of, say, 2,500 hardcovers for reviewers, libraries, collectors, and autograph hounds. The publisher could print more copies if they get low. And simultaneously, or six weeks later, the book would be available in paperback.
Christina Baker Kline
#100. I don't see myself as a very important person. But I was the second woman to write a novel in Iran, and I have written most of the novels about Iranian women. In this way, maybe I have a good place in Iranian literature.
Shahrnush Parsipur
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