First Novel Quotes

#1. I always find the first thing that really bothers me when I start a screenplay is, I have to find a different form. You can't follow the form of the novel. It's a different thing completely. It's impossible. You just somehow have to find a structure for the whole thing. You have to crack that.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

#2. My first novel, 'Leaving Atlanta,' took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African-American children dead.

Tayari Jones

#3. From the moment I start a new novel, life's just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there's still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied.

Emile Zola

#4. My first novel, 'The Lions of Lucerne,' just poured out of me. It was an amazing feeling of accomplishment. My biggest fear and therefore my biggest obstacle to becoming an author had been, 'What if I spend all that time and the book is no good?'

Brad Thor

#5. There were no stars, only the darkness and an arctic chill that had intensified since the first thin, blood-red stripes of sunrise shimmered on the ocean's horizon.

P.J. Parker

#6. Last week I was just someone who had had a first novel published.

Jon McGregor

#7. I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.

Anthony Trollope

#8. Writing one's first novel, getting it sold, and shepherding it through the labyrinths of editing, production, marketing, journalism, and social media is an arduous and nerve-wracking process.

Paul Di Filippo

#9. Hardly anything is as exciting or as diverse, as strong a confirmation of life and hope and the universe's urge towards creativity, as a lively compost heap or the first draft of a novel.

Margaret Simons

#10. I spent the period reading the first novel assigned for English. And wow. If I hadn't realized I was in France yet, I do now. Because Like Water for Chocolate has sex in it. LOTS of sex.

Stephanie Perkins

#11. I was twenty-seven when I came up with the idea for my first novel.

Jane Green

#12. When my cousin Anil-da started telling us what he'd heard at the market about the groom's family, at my aunt Moina-pehi's wedding in January 2002, his eyes shone like inky marbles reflecting sunlight.

Aruni Kashyap

#13. 'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.

Sue Monk Kidd

#14. People have asked me why I made the first chapter of my first novel so long, and in an invented English. The only answer I can come up with that satisfies me is, 'To keep out the scum.'

Alan Moore

#15. A spectacular novel of colonial China that should put this first-time author on the map." - Kirkus Reviews

Milena Banks

#16. 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

#17. Set in a nameless colonial country, in an unspecified era, Katie Kitamura's second novel tracks the fortunes of a landowning family during the first waves of civil unrest.

Sarah Hall

#18. I became aware of a voice inside my head. [ ... ] It was only later that I realized that this voice was my own thinking, that this moment of anguish was my first inkling that I was a ceaseless monologue trapped within myself.

Yann Martel

#19. Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.

Brad Jensen

#20. A HUMAN ELEMENT is an elegant and haunting first novel. Unrelenting, devious but full of heart. Highly recommended.

Jonathan Maberry

#21. My fellow students there were very smart, but the really novel thing was that they actually seemed to put a lot of effort into their school work. By the end of my first semester there, I began to get into that habit as well.

Eric Allin Cornell

#22. Vonnegut's earliest novels hint strongly at his familiarity with Wiener's work, The Human Use of Human Beings, especially his first novel, Player Piano (1952), which shows his concern for the social implications of automation, the replacement of human beings with machines.

David Porush

#23. Rainbow Cloud strode forward like a hunting cat with the same strength of height and broad shoulders, the same rolling gait as First Light's father. They were indeed the same man, split in two at birth, so the family might be rewarded by twice the skill in hunting each brother possessed.

P.J. Parker

#24. In the past, the poverty they shared had a certain sweetness about it. When the end of the day came and they would eat their dinner in silence with the oil lamp between them, there was a secret joy in such simplicity, such retrenchment.

Albert Camus

#25. Frank Morley, who had worked in London at Faber and Faber, was the new head of Harcourt Brace, and he hired me to start in 1940. The early years at Harcourt were wonderful. Almost my first assignment was Virginia Woolf's novel 'Between the Acts.'

Robert Giroux

#26. I know there are writers who like to say that every novel is hard, and it doesn't get easier. That may be the case, and I've only written two. But the first, to me, was characterized by an enduring oscillation between perseverance and a profound doubt.

Rachel Kushner

#27. 'The Man in the High Castle' was not the first alternative history novel, nor even the first Nazis-win-the-war novel, but it is still probably the most influential book in the genre.

Adrian McKinty

#28. If your like a powerful modern thriller with an historical core in the Scandinavian style of many separate threads which eventually come together, Purple Killing will grip you. It is my latest book and a companion to Hitler's First Lady, but in a very different style. Set equally in the US and UK.

Malcolm Blair-Robinson

#29. My first novel - the novel I wrote before 'Midnight's Children' - feels, to me, now, very - I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I'm, you know, I'm happy for.

Salman Rushdie

#30. 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

#31. I want to write more books, see my first novel made into a film, fight more campaigns, work in more countries. I want to be able to recall experiences that have endured for their pleasure and range and intensity.

Alastair Campbell

#32. 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

#33. 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.

Michael Connelly

#34. The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

Donna Tartt

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

Jan Karon

#36. I had a few stories and longer pieces published, but my first proper novel came in 2003, called 'Dead I Well May Be.'

Adrian McKinty

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

Michael Connelly

#38. Because I worked as a newspaper reporter for about 14 years before attempting my first novel, I learned to write under almost any circumstances- by candle light, in longhand, in African villages where there was no power, under shelling in Kurdistan.

Geraldine Brooks

#39. Recently SCHISMATRIX became my first novel to come out in Finland. Perhaps there's a quality in a good translation that can't be captured with the original.

Bruce Sterling

#40. When I receive a new novel from a hopeful publisher - "hoping that I like the book as much as he does" - I check first of all how much dialog there is, and if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang.

Vladimir Nabokov

#41. When my first novel was published, I went in great excitement round bookshops in central London to see if they had stocked it.

Antony Beevor

#42. I started my career as a novelist. 'Veronica Mars' was first imagined as a novel.

Rob Thomas

#43. I did not have any philosophy at all when I wrote the first novel. I was just wanting to capture experiences that I thought would be inspiring for Indians who are trying to break free from the very high-pressured family environments and do their own thing.

Karan Bajaj

#44. I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

J. A. Jance

#45. Andi Teran's first novel is vivid and fully realized, an entire universe expertly condensed into the pages you hold in your hands. Ana herself is a complicated delight, and by the end of the book I wanted to scoop her up into my arms.

Emma Straub

#46. The first novel that I wrote was because I was having very interesting sorts of experiences, for Indians of my generation.

Karan Bajaj

#47. Just about everybody has written a first novel that they throw away before writing their actual first novel.

Daniel Handler

#48. When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.

Karl Marlantes

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

Charles Palliser

#50. Reading is fuel for the brain. Writing is fuel for the spirit ...

Megan S. Johnston

#51. I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

Nell Freudenberger

#52. What is the distance between here and there, between now and then, between right and wrong? In Greg Baxter's pellucid first novel, 'The Apartment,' it may be simply the length of a day - but a day in which one travels surprisingly far, literally and figuratively.

Stacey D'Erasmo

#53. 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

#54. My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: 'If she writes anything else, do let us know.' Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed.

Colm Toibin

#55. 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

#56. In 1996, when my first novel, 'Masquerade,' was published, I knew international thrillers - or spy novels, if you prefer - had been the domain of male authors for decades.

Gayle Lynds

#57. Before my first novel, I was dating a woman who later went to prison for bashing a guy with a hammer.

Gary Shteyngart

#58. My first job was to run a concessions cart. Later, I found a position at the Pacific Film Archive. Thus began a long series of jobs, each one slightly better than the last, that continued for a decade, until I sold my first novel, and still goes on, even now.

Mona Simpson

#59. 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

#60. Publishers send me a lot of first novels because my first novel was the defining novel of my career, and I guess a lot of people want my benediction or something.

Jay McInerney

#61. for the first time in a popular novel I was reading about wrongdoing by the then-sacred institution, the FBI. I was reading open criticism and accusation of J. Edgar Hoover himself. I was reading it not from the typewriter of a young radical but from that of an old novelist.

Rex Stout

#62. Sometimes, a novel is like a train: the first chapter is a comfortable seat in an attractive carriage, and the narrative speeds up. But there are other sorts of trains, and other sorts of novels. They rush by in the dark; passengers framed in the lighted windows are smiling and enjoying themselves.

Jane Smiley

#63. People often call 'If I Stay' my baby novel, and I have to correct them. It's not my first book. It's just the first one anybody paid attention to.

Gayle Forman

#64. The first teacher, the first kiss, and the first crime. I've always been hindered by my dislike for repetition. The first time you do anything, it's creative, but from then on it's just work.

Elizaveta Mikhailichenko

#65. When I first met my husband, he was sculpting Vilnius out of clay - a sort of Vilnius, anyhow: a map of an imaginary European city based on the Lithuanian capital - to illustrate his second novel.

Elizabeth McCracken

#66. Thanks to the comic book publishers. Batman and Captain Marvel were responsible for my learning to read at least a year before I showed up at school. They got me interested in writing. Started my first novel at about eight. The title: 'The Canals of Mars.'

Jack McDevitt

#67. You write your first novel with the desperation of the damned. You're afraid that you'll never write anything else, ever again.

Patricia Duncker

#68. The book that made a lasting impression was the one my mother gave each of us when she decided we were ready for our first 'adult novel,' Lucy Maud Montgomery's 'The Blue Castle.'

Hallie Ephron

#69. 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

#70. Ernest Cline lives in Austin, Texas, where he devotes a large portion of his time to geeking out. This is his first novel.

Ernest Cline

#71. I started blogging in 2006 when I had sold my first novel but it had not yet been published, in those anxious months in between while I learned the whole process.

Laini Taylor

#72. It's hard to make a living as a novelist. My first novel 'Tapping the Source' made quite a splash in Hollywood, and people started asking if I wanted to write scripts. I quickly realized I could make a lot more money that way.

Kem Nunn

#73. 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

#74. Doing crime films ... maybe it's to some extent a matter of taste. Certainly my first novel had a criminal element and was about the similarity of criminals and artists. Pretextually, it was sort of a money bag thriller. But it was aggressively not what it seemed to be. It was kind of Duchamps.

William Monahan

#75. 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

#76. The other one was filled with loud and obnoxious tourists. Always boasting on winning a sand castle competition and seeing who could get tanned first. What a whacky bunch of people.

Erica Sehyun Song

#77. Every time she meets him, she feels like he was a new paper ready to be drawn. And she could clearly remember how the first time she met him, he was like a sketch paper filled with grey and blue and black, all mixed up together forming a confusing storm,

Basma Salem

#78. I wrote my first novel in eighth grade for a boy named Kenny on whom I had an unrequited crush and who sat behind me in social studies.

Kate Christensen

#79. In the summer of 2010, I was working on a version of 'True Detective' that I was thinking might be my next novel, and it was told in these two first-person voices; Cohle and Hart's voices.

Nic Pizzolatto

#80. Kids never jumped head first from the top ledge. Never. It seemed forever before
Stoney came back to the surface. Most of the white bubbles had already disappeared.

Cole Alpaugh

#81. A great book increases my heartbeat as if I'm prey, melts my insides in anticipation of a first kiss, immerses me in its depths.

Carmen DeSousa

#82. The first novel I wrote, 'The White House Mess,' was a comic novel. It came out in 1986. It was a parody in the form of a White House memoir.

Christopher Buckley

#83. 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

#84. Since my first novel was rescued from a slush pile, it makes me sad that most publishing houses no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts. Nor are many willing to take chances on novels that are not deemed immediately "marketable."

Katherine Paterson

#85. First of all, the novel should be a critique of the novels that have come before it in a language that broadens the audience of American literature. Second, it's really got to be invested in a number of what-if questions.

Kiese Laymon

#86. When Edna O'Brien's first novel, 'The Country Girls,' was published in 1960, her family and neighbors in the small Irish village where she was born tossed copies into a bonfire expressly set for that horrifying purpose.

Alan Cheuse

#87. A first novel should be brash and ambitious, and announce the arrival of a new talent.

Stuart Woods

#88. And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.

John Irving

#89. To be shockingly original with your first novel, you don't have to discover a new technique: Simply write about people as they are and not as the predominantly liberal and humanist literary establishment believes that they ought to be.

John Braine

#90. I am a former newspaper reporter turned church secretary turned vampire novelist. I wrote my first complete novel, 'Nice Girls Don't Have Fangs,' at night while I was working as the receptionist for a Baptist church. That was an interesting conversation with the pastor.

Molly Harper

#91. I first tried a novel when I was 14. First finished one when I was 16. First started working on stuff that had a chance of being salable in my early 20s, then didn't write much fiction at all because I was in grad school.

Harry Turtledove

#92. My first novel, 'John Crow's Devil,' freed me up to write about the past, and 'The Book of Night Women' freed me up to have a book totally based on voice and being very spontaneous.

Marlon James

#93. Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

Joan Didion

#94. Once built, the Montauk was so novel, so tall, it defied description by conventional means. No one knows who coined the term, but it fit, and the Montauk became the first building to be called a skyscraper.

Erik Larson

#95. I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

Toni Morrison

#96. I wrote my first novel in the same conditions as most first novelists - I had a full-time job, I shared an apartment, I had no time - and so I became a compulsive outliner of everything. Ever since then, my process has consisted of trying to forcibly rid myself of that compulsion.

Jonathan Dee

#97. In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.

Oscar Wilde

#98. It had been fourteen years and I hadn't had anything published. I had 250 rejection slips. I got my first novel published and it was called Kinflicks. It turned out to be a best seller.

Lisa Alther

#99. If your novel seems to be dragging, one of the first places to look is at the heart of your lead character. Is he giving up too easily? Has she been taking it too long? Are there too many scenes where he's thinking and not doing? - James Scott Bell

Anonymous

#100. 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