After Novel Quotes

#1. He wanted to know about day-to-day life in America, what people ate and what consumed them, what shamed them and what attracted them, but he read novel after novel and was disappointed:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#2. 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.

Jeffrey Archer

#3. To sing a song is quite different than to write a poem. I'm not and never will be a novelist, but to write a novel is not the same thing as writing a play. There is a difference in form, but essentially what you're after is the same thing.

Sam Shepard

#4. I started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to write.

James Rollins

#5. The novel has become the leading hero in the drama of literary development in our time precisely because it best of all reflects the tendencies of a new world still in the making; it is, after all, the only genre born of this new world and in total affinity with it.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#6. After being dry for a couple a weeks, three cocktails went down quicker than a boner in a busted rubber.

Brian Azzarello

#7. My foray into young adult lit was by no means planned. I wrote the first 'Alfred Kropp' book as an adult novel, which everyone loved but no one would publish - until I changed my protagonist from a thirty-something P.I. into a 15-year-old kid. After that, it was off to the races, and I am so glad.

Rick Yancey

#8. You know," Kavita begins, "I think I can pick out my own furniture. I am an artist after all. I do have some taste."
"No you don't." Nick plainly states. "No man has taste. Besides, I didn't pick it out, she did. Wives are good for things like that.

Carroll Bryant

#9. I calculate the breadth of Steven's shoulders, now wider than mine;
watch him tear open the Blokus game he likes to play with me after school;
count the hours between now and Dad coming home to take over
and I am only a little afraid
of the night.

Stasia Ward Kehoe

#10. I was born January 6, 1937, eight years after Wall Street crashed and two years before John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the plight of a family during the Great Depression.

Lou Holtz

#11. After fifty years of living, it occurs to me that the most significant thing that people do is go to work, whether it is to go to work on their novel or at the assembly plant or fixing somebody's teeth.

Thomas McGuane

#12. We talked to each other as you'd talk to a stranger you'd met while drunk after the barman calls for last orders, sure you wouldn't remember the other's face in the morning. (69)

Elina Hirvonen

#13. A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.

Julia Alvarez

#14. People often ask me if I am the book's Pakistani protagonist. I wonder why they never ask if I am his American listener. After all, a novel can often be a divided man's conversation with himself.

Mohsin Hamid

#15. What am I to you?'
Sophiel smiled.
'The sun. You are my sun, like Astrid said. My sun, that lights up my life. That looks after me with its fiery rays. I only have to turn towards it for it to set fire to my heart.

A.O. Esther

#16. When you start a novel, it is always like pushing a boulder uphill. Then, after a while, to mangle the metaphor, the boulder fills with helium and becomes a balloon that carries you the rest of the way to the top. You just have to hold your nerve and trust to narrative.

Jim Crace

#17. And what is gossip anyway?Just fragments of sad accounts, maneuvered and mutilated year after year for our sinful pleasure.

Kanza Javed

#18. I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

Penelope Lively

#19. Within months after reading the novel 'The Hunger Games,' I went from telling my mom that I could see myself as this character to actually getting the role. My mother reminds me that if I could manifest such an important role just because I wanted it so much, all of my dreams are possible.

Amandla Stenberg

#20. The choreographic process is exhausting. It happens on one's feet after hours of work, and the energy required is roughly the equivalent of writing a novel and winning a tennis match simultaneously.

Agnes De Mille

#21. People often need to describe things quickly and so they use a shorthand. The problem is that after they use a label, they begin to think only in terms of the label instead of the totality of the experience a novel provides.

Akhil Sharma

#22. Tragedy, after all, is the invisible hand that spawns reflection, and reflection bears its fruit in the deepening of one's character.

Richard Harris

#23. We'll have to go back there one day, the both of us. You can show my all your favorite places."

"Silly man," I laughed and pulled his face down to mine. "You are my favorite place.

E.M. Denning

#24. I knew nothing about the technique of story writing, and now, after eighteen years of writing, I still know nothing about the technique, although with the publication of my new novel, "Tarzan and the Lost Empire", there are 31 books on my list.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

#25. The child who believes there is life after a novel ends.

John Green

#26. 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

#27. A brief short story may require only a few paragraphs after the climax. On the other hand, in his massive novel 'The World According to Garp,' John Irving's denouement consisted of 10 separate sections, each devoted to an individual character's fate and each almost a story in itself.

Nancy Kress

#28. The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine

#29. It's just the garbage in/garbage out trick. If you're not taking any fiction in, good or bad, then how can you be spitting any back out (good or bad)? I can't even imagine trying to write without reading. Really, I can hardly write a novel at all if I'm not reading just book after book.

Stephen Graham Jones

#30. Novels teach the youthful mind to sigh after happiness that never existed.

Oliver Goldsmith

#31. For a writer, New York works well. Literary work is very elitist. I worked two hours a day, maximum, and the time after that was very agreeable. I walked a lot with pleasure. Those two hours augmented the day. I wrote more here than in Paris, an entire chapter of a new novel.

Ismail Kadare

#32. I'm a sucker for any band named after a work of literature. Los de Abajo take their name from Mariano Azuela's famous novel 'The Underdogs,' and that says a lot about who they are and the music they make.

Daniel Alarcon

#33. The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all - in the end the vast majority of them simply aren't that great, and are destined to be forgotten.

Lev Grossman

#34. After I finished college, I got a job on Wall Street as a derivatives trader, but after a couple years of it, I was calling in sick in order to work on my novel.

Philipp Meyer

#35. [A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.

Richard Peck

#36. She recalled how Pauline had fallen off a bus one night, late, went skidding into Creedmoor. In a novel, it would have portended the fall they were all about to take

Alice McDermott

#37. After all, the fundamental question of philosophy (like that of psychoanalysis) is the same as the question of the detective novel: who is guilty?

Umberto Eco

#38. I've come to realize that however blue my circumstances, if after finishing a chapter of a Dickens novel I feel a miss-my-stop-on-the-train sort of compulsion to read on, then everything is probably going to be just fine.

Amor Towles

#39. Maybe I would have become an actor. I was a very outgoing kid, but being in the hospital - being outside of social action for so long - turned me into an observer. Actually, right after I got out of the hospital, I did start writing a novel, but the book was so transparently about me that I stopped.

Brent Runyon

#40. People have quite a simple idea about 'Anna Karenina.' They feel that the novel is entirely about a young married woman who falls in love with a cavalry officer and leaves her husband after much agony, and pays the price for that.

Tom Stoppard

#41. After you've read a novel, you only retain a vague memory of its contents. You remember the atmosphere, the odd image or phrase or vivid cameo.

Arthur Smith

#42. Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was 26, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was a star-struck impulse.

Anne Lamott

#43. They did it quite a lot after that first encounter" ... when Jill remembers first meeting the dashing Baron.

Lisa McKnight

#44. I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it.

Joan D. Vinge

#45. It's cold enough to freeze the cliches off a Dan Browne novel. (Thought of that when working in the garden just after getting yet another 'thanks but no thanks'.)

Patsy Collins

#46. Johnny Flora "The Spell of Zalanon" > quotable quote (edit)
"Every page of a great novel should be crafted like a beautiful melody, to linger on long after the music stops playing."
- Johnny Flora "The Spell of Zalanon

Johnny Flora

#47. After college, I was living in New York and wrote furiously, a huge novel that I knew was a failure. I hoped that the book would work, but to be honest, I think I knew it would never work, even as I was finishing it.

Chang-rae Lee

#48. I was very fortunate that my first novel captivated the imaginations of so many readers who asked for a sequel. After that, one book led to another as I discovered other facets to my characters I wanted to investigate further.

Jennifer Chiaverini

#49. My Writers Guild of America card is one of my proudest possessions. I was given it after being invited to write the script for a film of my last novel, 'Me Before You,' which is being made by MGM. Whenever I look at it, I think, 'I'm a Hollywood writer!'

Jojo Moyes

#50. In general, each form is a relief from the other forms. I can't write a novel after a novel. I just use up all the material each time, and I need to rest.

Rick Moody

#51. My father managed to change his entire life after I wrote a novel about his brutal regime as a family man. It took resoluteness and courage for my father to change, and I need to acknowledge that.

Pat Conroy

#52. Themes only arise after a novel is written, and people begin to try to talk about it.

Rachel Kushner

#53. Mattie, I'm sorry to drag you away." "Don't worry about it. It's late. My mother always said nothing good happens after midnight." I barked out a surprised laugh. "Your mother, clearly, is not a Sidhe.

Belinda M. Gordon

#54. A voice yelled after me but it was wayward and might have been a cry out of someone's nightmare.

Sarah Dunant

#55. I couldn't decide on a title for my first novel and my editor came up with Everything Good Will Come. After that, I thought I should name my own books.A Bit of Difference seems just right.

Sefi Atta

#56. In books and movies, the stories always end when the two people finally have their romantic kiss. The happily-ever-after part is just assumed

Gayle Forman

#57. All my life I have been trying to learn, to read, to see and hear, and to write. At sixty-five I began my first novel and after the five years, lacking a month, I took to finish it, I was still traveling, still a seeker.

Carl Sandburg

#58. After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I'd much rather listen always.

Richard Flanagan

#59. I believed, after writing 'Mrs. Kimble,' that I knew how to write a novel. I quickly discovered that I only knew how to write that novel. 'Baker Towers' was a different beast entirely; and I felt as though I had to learn to write all over again.

Jennifer Haigh

#60. After the initial critical learning period of youth is over, the areas of the brain that need to be 'turned on' to allow enhanced, long lasting learning can only be activated when something important, surprising, or novel occurs, or if we make the effort to pay close attention.

Norman Doidge

#61. I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

William Faulkner

#62. Satisfaction involves an active pursuit- it is the emotional reward we get after adapting to a new situation or solving a novel problem.

Mark Andrews

#63. The funny thing about me is I'm kind of schizophrenic, because after four or five nights in a row of going out to parties, I just have to be alone. I hate people and feel like they're keeping me from what I really want to do, like write a fabulous novel, which I probably never will.

Bob Colacello

#64. After immersing myself in the mysteries of the Electoral College for a novel I wrote in the '90s, I came away believing that the case for scrapping it is less obvious than I originally thought.

Jeff Greenfield

#65. I knew it was a risk but what I was after was a novel that is about the feeling that comes with a coincidence in real life - that you feel as if something divine has intervened and has arrived with a message.

Alexander Chee

#66. I have never written a novel yet ... without doing 40,000 words or more and finding they were all wrong and going back and starting again, and this after filling 400 words with notes, mostly delirious, before getting into anything in the nature of a coherent scenario.

P.G. Wodehouse

#67. You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more."
("The Castle")

Michael Connelly

#68. When I was pregnant, I had the romantic idea that after the baby was born I would not only take up reading in earnest again, but also write a novel while my daughter slept in her Moses basket. Of course, I barely had time to keep up with my magazines until she started sleeping properly.

Kate Beckinsale

#69. After spending the last few years working on a serious novel set in Chechnya, I was drawn to both the brevity and casualness of Twitter, and wrote a series of tweets titled 'The Erotic Inner Life of Mr. Bates from Downton Abbey.'

Anthony Marra

#70. I wrote 'Airborn' after completing three books about bats. I loved my bats, but what a treat it was to write about humans again. They could eat food other than midges and mosquitoes, they wore clothing, they slept in beds - all this struck me as wonderfully novel.

Kenneth Oppel

#71. Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.

Umberto Eco

#72. The White Hand did not fry all the brain. He fried some
from the right hemisphere and some from the left. The
remaining brain, The White Hand wrapped in tin foil,
carefully. Tomorrow is, after all, another day, and food should be kept
in storage so it won't go bad.

Siberian Hellhole By Michael Mulvihill

#73. Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

Charles McCarry

#74. 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.

James Patterson

#75. 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

#76. Sex was the main component of her thoughts now. But love - and her desperate longing for it - had vanished from her heart like a migraine after a painkiller.

Augustine Sam

#77. Usually, I start thinking about my next novel soon after completing the latest, and it can take anywhere from a month to 6 months to come up with a story.

Nicholas Sparks

#78. Misunderstanding and distrust - the predominant elements of a novel. Without them, everyone lives happily from beginning.

Carmen DeSousa

#79. In my 20s, I became obsessed with the role-playing game 'Romance of the Three Kingdoms,' named after a classical Chinese novel, and later 'The Sims,' a life-simulation game, and 'StarCraft,' a science-fiction game.

Kim Young-ha

#80. After all it was for one justice which is short..., but the journey up to this justice was very long.
(Red 2008 Film)

Deyth Banger

#81. I hope you don't mind my joining you, said Leanne. I minded. After all, she'd tried to kill me. A girl in a novel would say it was hard to believe, but it wasn't.

Franny Billingsley

#82. I did not know at first that it would be a series; I discovered after the first novel that I had more to say about it, so I did another. And another, and then the readers demanded yet more.

Piers Anthony

#83. I don't start a novel until I have lived with the story for awhile to the point of actually writing an outline and after a number of books I've learned that the more time I spend on the outline the easier the book is to write. And if I cheat on the outline I get in trouble with the book.

John Grisham

#84. I always try to give good ratings to books I have read unless it is really bad. Being a writer I know how a bad rating feels. Sometimes it is better to encourage a writer rather than discourage them. After all the next book they write could be a World Renown novel like Harry Potter.

William Roach

#85. I love you, Silvia. I have always loved you. I loved you before forever began and I'll love you still after forever ends.
Oliver

Melodie Ramone

#86. TV does a thing that film can never do. It takes you to a place that no novel written after the late 19th century can. You can just go through people's lives; it's like a marriage.

Joss Whedon

#87. After 100 years, films should be getting really complicated. The novel has been reborn about 400 times, but it's like cinema is stuck in the birth canal.

Harmony Korine

#88. 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

#89. There was a time, after I earned my graduate degree and before I sold my first novel, when it looked like I might have to get an office job.

Jesse Kellerman

#90. When I'm writing a novel or doing other serious writing work, I do it on a schedule that dictates writing either 2,000 words a day or writing until noon. After I hit whichever mark comes first, then I can give my attention to everything else I have to do.

John Scalzi

#91. Sick children inevitably become arrested: You are fated to live out your days as the child you were when diagnosed, the child who believes there is a life after a novel ends.

John Green

#92. After all, isn't the purpose of the novel, or of a museum, for that matter, to relate our memories with such sincerity as to transform individual happiness into a happiness all can share?

Orhan Pamuk

#93. I tend to write longer narrative pieces after I've finished writing a novel - when the fiction's finished and put away, and I have a chance to take all the ideas that are buried inside of my novels and work with them directly.

Dinaw Mengestu

#94. My first novel was turned down by half a dozen publishers. And even after having published five or six books, I wasn't making enough money to live on, and was beginning to think I'd have to give up the dream of being a full-time writer.

Ian Rankin

#95. The revolutionaries failed to institute the novel forms of social and political organization they hankered after; Workers would not accept a ten-day week, or state-appointed priests, or rectangular departements, or the cult of the Supreme Being.

Alan Ryan

#96. Theoretically there's no reason one should get [writer's block], if one understands that writing, after all, is only writing, neither something one ought to feel deeply guilty about nor something one ought to be inordinately proud of.

John Gardner

#97. As a civilian, I know nothing about combat, the Marine Corps experience or modern man's struggle adjusting to peace after war. I only know what's been shared with me; confidences I would never betray, nor use as details in a novel.

Tiffany Madison

#98. A novel is a conversation starter, and if the author isn't there for the after-party, both the writer and the reader are missing a lot.

Maggie Stiefvater

#99. A fine memoir is to a fine novel as a well-wrought blanket is to a fancifully embroidered patchwork quilt. The memoir, a logical creation, dissects and dignifies reality. Fiction, wholly extravagant, magnifies it and gives it moral shape. Fiction has no practical purpose. Fiction, after all, is art.

Julia Glass

#100. I read the final Wallander novel, 'The Troubled Man,' not long after it was published.

Kenneth Branagh