A Novel In Quotes

#1. I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that language was the medium of understanding. Of course that's not possible, but it's some sort of idealized goal.

Paul Auster

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. One did not drink sherry before the evening, just as one did not read a novel in the morning.

Barbara Pym

#5. Writing a novel, in an unplanned and unpredictable way, makes you engaged; it takes you into yourself, and it becomes something between you and the character for a moment, and then you move back into the structure of the book. I love those moments, because they are completely unbidden.

David Bezmozgis

#6. 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

#7. A novel in progress doesn't have a clear, forward process. It's messy, like a beloved, balky child.

Kay Kenyon

#8. Writing a novel in general is like trying to reach a mountain top you'll never quite reach - so you try again and maybe get a little closer.

Harlan Coben

#9. Every reader re-creates a novel - in their own imagination, anyway. It's only entirely the writer's when nobody else has read it.

Susan Hill

#10. 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

#11. To write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.

Virginia Woolf

#12. I'm omnivorous in my tastes, fiction and non-fiction, always several books on the go, though I'll read a novel in a day or two.

O.R. Melling

#13. I think very visually, and I just never thought I had a novel in me.

Sadie Jones

#14. A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

Helen Dunmore

#15. Don't force yourself to write. Some people can write a novel in a few months, whereas for others it can take over a year. I'm lucky to be one of the former - but, even so, if I'm not in the mood to write, I won't. I'll go off, do something else and come back to it when I'm ready.

Cecelia Ahern

#16. The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted ... To write a book set in the present, circa 2013, is to write about the distant past.

Gary Shteyngart

#17. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really.

Philip Roth

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. Writing doesn't come real easy to me. I couldn't write a novel in a year. It wouldn't be readable. I don't let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.

Charles Frazier

#21. If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn't concern the central issues, it wouldn't be worth publishing.

Alan Paton

#22. As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.

Joyce Carol Oates

#23. I always, always wanted to be the Dungeon Master because that's where the creativity lies - in thinking up places, characters and situations. If done well, a game can be a novel in itself.

Sharyn McCrumb

#24. You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?

Peter Watts

#25. A novel in which the reader will ask many questions concerning Mayan antiquity.

Peter J. Wetzelaer

#26. It is not mysterious to be home on a Saturday night, reading a novel in a pile of smelly golden retrievers.

E. Lockhart

#27. I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

Amity Gaige

#28. Only a crazy man would write a novel in Lincoln's voice.

Jerome Charyn

#29. I began to write short pieces when I was living in a room too small to write a novel in.

Angela Cartwright

#30. When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.

Daphne Du Maurier

#31. Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.

John Fowles

#32. Reading a novel in which all characters illustrate patience, hard work, chastity, and delayed gratification could be a pretty dull experience.

Thomas Perry

#33. I feel like I've got a novel in me somewhere, but that's something ... I was just talking to a buddy of mine about it, who's a writer as well, and he's nearly done with his first novel, and it's taken him 11, 12 years to do it. And I can totally understand; it's a long process.

Corey Taylor

#34. Personally, I do not believe that it is the duty of any man or woman to write a novel. In nine cases out of ten, there would be greater merit in leaving it unwritten.

Agnes Repplier

#35. I think that setting a novel in a small town taps into a sense of nostalgia among readers. People tend to believe life is different in small towns, and frankly, it is different.

Nicholas Sparks

#36. I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel. I showed her four or five chapters of what would become 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' and to my surprise she auctioned them off.

Kate Atkinson

#37. With Mr. Montgomery, I set out to see what it would be like to write a novel in 30 days. It was hell! I'd do it again in a minute.

Nadlee Thims

#38. When I sit down with a novel in my hand I want to enjoy the experience. That means having fun. Too many books take themselves too seriously and even a drama needs to have it's lighter moments to make the dark parts more intense.

Clayton J. Callahan

#39. The turning point was when I hit my 30th birthday. I thought, if really want to write, it's time to start. I picked up the book How to Write a Novel in 90 Days. The author said to just write three pages a day, and I figured, I can do this. I never got past Page 3 of that book.

James Rollins

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

Ray Bradbury

#41. Suddenly I was struck motionless: I was living through the first chapter of a novel in which I was the heroine; she was still almost a child, but we, too, were growing up.

Simone De Beauvoir

#42. It's a lot to expect of yourself, to write a novel in a year. Anyway, you don't write a novel, you write a scene, and then another scene.

Janet Fitch

#43. I'm pretty hardcore. I stick exactly to what I'm doing. So I write a novel in one period, and then I'll write stories in another period. I only work on one thing at once, because I'm afraid that I wouldn't finish what I'd started.

T.C. Boyle

#44. I haven't published a novel in six years; instead, I fill my departmental hours casting words of praise into the bureaucratic abyss. On multiple occasions, serving on awards committees, I was actually required to write LORs to myself.

Julie Schumacher

#45. Don't be offended if you encounter some good-natured ribbing; the idea of
writing a novel in a month deserves to be laughed at.

Chris Baty

#46. I wrote a novel in my early twenties; I won a high school prize - my short story got published, and I got 50 dollars, which was a huge deal.

Sue Miller

#47. I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

Neil Gaiman

#48. What could be more boring than a novel that tells you how to think about everything that happens in it?

Jonathan Dee

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. [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

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. '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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to 'unreliable.'

Charles Palliser

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. I'm not the most prolific writer in the world, and, sadly, writing a novel involves a lot of effort.

Tibor Fischer

#85. 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

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. I'd like to say I'm not dressed up for anyone in particular, but that would be a lie.

Lisa Daily

#89. Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you ...

Alexander Chee

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. '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

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.

Richard Flanagan