From The Novel Quotes

#1. I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

Tobias Wolff

#2. 'Shetland' is adapted from the novel 'Red Bones.' The book is based around an archaeological dig, and the mystery starts with the murder of the elderly woman who crofts the land where the dig is happening.

Ann Cleeves

#3. The job of the screenplay is to identify and extract the essence of the story from the novel and reconfigure it for the screen, maintaining its essence in a different vehicle.

Barry Eisler

#4. Believe me, when I say;
There are no two powers
That command the soul.
One is God
The other is the tide.
-Anon
From the novel Abarat

Clive Barker

#5. The short story, free from the longuers of the novel is also exempt from the novel's conclusiveness
too often forced and false: it may thus more nearly than the novel approach aesthetic and moral truth.

Edith Wharton

#6. I'd read a book called A Reliable Wife not too long before leaving on the world's strangest trip, and as I climbed into bed, a line from the novel crossed my mind: 'He had lost the habit of romance.

Stephen King

#7. Sometimes in life you meet a femme fatale and you can refuse them nothing they treat you like dirt but even the dirt they dish out has a taste you can resist?
From the novel 'Adventures of a Dark Duke: The Pin

Russell C. Brennan

#8. Life seemed ideal to him right then, and he was happy for the first time in a long time, and it felt like the sun was shining from his heart. - from the novel Brainjob by David Sloma.

David Sloma

#9. 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

#10. Ever since the '70s, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were the godfathers of Scandinavian crime. They broke the crime novel in Scandinavia from the kiosks and into the serious bookstores.

Jo Nesbo

#11. Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel.

Carl Clinton Van Doren

#12. 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

#13. No matter how many miles I move away, my love will always remain within the boundary of your heart
Lines from Love Vs Destiny ...

Atul Purohit

#14. When I write a novel, I want it to be completely different from a screenplay. I'm very conscious of the difference, and I want novels to work purely as novels. Otherwise I don't see how they'll survive - why don't we just all go to the movies or watch television.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#15. 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

#16. When I give myself over to a good novel, I surrender to the truths fashioned from one writer's heart, mind and soul. I do not waste a nanosecond wondering whether what I'm reading 'really happened.'

Julia Glass

#17. 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

#18. I aspired from early on to write a novel, to be in the 'New Yorker,' to be on Broadway, and at least in a fleeting way, I got all those things.

Mark O'Donnell

#19. Reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.

Ann Patchett

#20. A novel is a great act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess. From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.

Pat Conroy

#21. Love is the connection between souls synchronized through heart beats.
Quote from my upcoming book 'Always Be MINE

Neha Daraad

#22. The kiss wove between gentle and frenzied, liquid and greedy, silken and primal, and he sucked every second of bliss he could from the forbidden pleasure.

Jami Gold

#23. Upon her butler's announcing the arrival of Mr Ravenscar, Lady Mablethorpe, who had been dozing over a novel from the Circulating Library, sat up with a jerk, and raised a hand to her dishevelled cap.

Georgette Heyer

#24. While passing through an obscure nook of Notre Dame cathedral, Victor Hugo noticed the Greek work for fate carved in the stone. He imagined a tormented soul driven to engrave this word. From this seed sprang his monumental novel "The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Alexander Steele

#25. I have a really good idea for a novel and would like to just kind of try my hand at fiction. I'm starting to kind of get a really good body of work going from a literary standpoint. As long as the audience is there, man, I'll keep cranking them out.

Corey Taylor

#26. 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

#27. Martin: Yes, I'd like to go home and do some work. I'm writing a novel about women from the women's point of view.

Caryl Churchill

#28. Every happy moments looks perfect till it gets messy

Sheeja Jose

#29. When I crawled down the rabbit hole into the pivotal event of my life--indeed the pivotal event of my generation--to write "Escape from Saigon - a Novel" I never expected it to be such an emotional journey into a life I left four decades ago.

Dick Pirozzolo

#30. Whenever I'd get howlin' over something, he'd grab my ass up from wherever I was and head straight for the john. Momma said my head would get banged up along the way, but she said it
was probably bein' dunked under water that made me stupid.

Cole Alpaugh

#31. Many of us can't go home again, whether home is Seville, Cabo Sur, Nastas, Havana, or Kansas City. Thus, we must recognize that home really lies in the eternal peace, dormant or conscious, that dwells in each human heart ... Quote from "Ms. Quixote Goes Country", a truthful novel.

LEVega

#32. To be honest with you, I don't have the words to make you feel better, but I do have the arms to give you a hug, ears to listen to whatever you want to talk about, and I have a heart; a heart that's aching to see you smile again.
lines from Love Vs Destiny ...

Atul Purohit

#33. When I write a novel, every word is mine. I welcome suggestions from my editor, but in the end, I make all the final decisions.

Louis Sachar

#34. 131/ Writing a novel is like having a baby. I know because I've had both, and the experiences were hellish. By comparison, the torture of the damned - plunged into excrement, boiled in blood, beheaded, set upon by harpies - are like love nips from your yippy little dog.

Kim Addonizio

#35. I find that a lot of my best character stuff and ideas come unwittingly from novels. In scripts, it's a lot about the outward signs of whatever's happening - you have the end result. Whereas in a novel you get a buildup of the whys and wherefores, and you're let into the backstory.

Alison Pill

#36. 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

#37. The shock was akin to that of buying, out of duty, a novel written by a dull and uninspired acquaintance and finding there passages of heartrending beauty and rapture that one could never imagine coming from such a tedious person.

Andrew Sean Greer

#38. 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

#39. The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

V.S. Pritchett

#40. 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

#41. Christy Barritt's novel, Hazardous Duty, is a delightful read from beginning to end. The story's fresh, engaging heroine with an unusual occupation hooked me, and I couldn't put it down. I highly recommend Hazardous Duty.

Colleen Coble

#42. When I'm writing a novel, which is what I like to write, I get up early, sit zazen, make a pot of green tea. I wear wrist cuffs to keep my wrists warm and minimize irritation from extended contact with the surface of my desk. I sit down and write.

Ruth Ozeki

#43. 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

#44. I felt clueless and nervous--pretty much the same way I'd been feeling ever since I came back from Italy.

Maria Grazia Swan

#45. The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life.

Angus Wilson

#46. As the sweaty, alcohol fuming bodies press in on me from all directions I decide that my ideal of a good time is reading a good novel, alone

Rita Stradling

#47. Which suggested to me that a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation's vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal.

Ralph Ellison

#48. The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.

David Shields

#49. 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

#50. I swear from the bottom of my heart I want to be healed. I want to be like other men, not this outcast whom nobody wants.

E. M. Forster

#51. Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.

Flannery O'Connor

#52. Herschel Grynszpan's life was enigmatic, elusive and tragic. The traces he left on the historical record are just sufficient to tantalize and baffle historians. Harlan Greene has woven from these threads a riveting novel, erotic, haunting, and profoundly moving.

Janette Turner Hospital

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. Nobody can be so beautiful from the outside and so hollow from inside. Not even in a third-rate novel.

Marlene Van Niekerk

#56. The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it's not like I'm writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it 'a novel,' it separates it from other books.

Aleksandar Hemon

#57. Occasionally, I just need to escape from my work or be reminded of the comparative bliss of my own life, so I pick up a novel.

David Macaulay

#58. 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

#59. I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.

Alan Rickman

#60. Rachel Hauck is an award-winning, USA Today bestselling author. She is a RITA and Christy Award finalist. The Wedding Dress was named Inspirational Novel of the Year by Romantic Times. Rachel lives in central Florida with her husband and two pets and writes from her ivory

Rachel Hauck

#61. Travel is very useful and it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our own journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength. It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It's a novel, simply a fictitious narrative.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine

#62. It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.

Elie Wiesel

#63. The contemporary crime novel is, at its best, a novel of character. That's where the suspense comes from.

Val McDermid

#64. 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

#65. My novel is about the history of the world, told from the point of view of a column of stone.
(from "Wherein We Enter the Museum")

Kit Reed

#66. My springboard is always the script. Even if the script is taken from a novel, I often haven't read the novel ...

John Hurt

#67. Charlotte Bronte borrowed liberally and sloppily from Joseph Sheridan le Fanu when penning Jane Eyre. The originality of this classic novel is tarnished as a result.

Andrew Barger

#68. 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

#69. There was something wonderful about a blank sheet of notepaper. The lines were there, just waiting to be filled, and the page could turn into anything from a grocery list to the opening of The Great American Novel. The possibilities were endless.

Joanne Fluke

#70. Part of what I love about novels and dogs is that they are so beautifully oblivious to economic concerns. We serve them, and in return they thrive. It's not their responsibility to figure out where the rent is coming from.

Ann Patchett

#71. 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

#72. Good Lord. His appearance was nearly a caricature of the dark and brooding hero from every gothic novel.

Tarun Shanker

#73. 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

#74. I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.

Flannery O'Connor

#75. Life is about trusting your feelings and taking chances, losing and finding happiness, appreciating the memories, learning from the past, and realizing people change.

Atul Purohit

#76. Once I had started, I discovered the secret pleasure of writing a novel. It's such an immersive, deep commitment. With short stories, you're continually having to start again from scratch, but with a novel you only need one good idea every few years.

Debra Dean

#77. When you're writing a novel - at least the way I write is I work from what I would call 'emotional atmosphere,' ambiance to ambiance.

Oscar Hijuelos

#78. I so envied the world around me. Don't get me wrong, I loved my own life too, but that didn't stop me from wishing I could close my eyes and slip into someone else's life. You know, explore the world with different eyes, a different heart.

Marilyn Grey

#79. Steve Yarbrough's Safe from the Neighbors will take your breath away. Ambitious, funny, sad, smart, and beautifully crafted, it's everything a novel should be.

Richard Russo

#80. P.O. Box Love is a wonderfully engrossing and romantic novel that takes the reader from Milan to New York and back again through the letters Federico and Emma mail to each other. Paola Calvetti's book will captivate your mind and steal your heart."

Isabella Rossellini

Paola Calvetti

#81. In 'Pictures from an Institution,' Randall Jarrell was able to transcend the academic novel by simply ignoring it, writing a comedy with no plot at all beyond his own pleasure in language and humanity itself.

Cathleen Schine

#82. 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

#83. The Airwitch had gone from reading nothing in his life to never stopping, buying every novel or history book he could get his hands on.

Susan Dennard

#84. Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

Eugenio Montale

#85. Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.

Salman Rushdie

#86. The punter sweated on top of Marina, his lips all over her young body, his tongue slipping out from rows of crooked teeth, pushing hungrily from between his shrivelled lips like a clam from a shell, a bottom feeder searching for salty nutrition.

Tom Conrad

#87. The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella
and was necessary to it.

Ian McEwan

#88. The 370-year-old antique shop Trifles and Folly is the heart of 'Deadly Curiosities,' my new urban fantasy novel from Solaris Books.

Gail Z. Martin

#89. What's novel today is the outspoken way that powerful donors admit and even champion the fact that gift-giving is a useful vehicle for preserving privilege, something that distinguishes them from earlier donors.

Linsey McGoey

#90. There is no denying that we are suffering from a collective neurosis and the novel which does not face this is not a novel of our time.

Anais Nin

#91. Awake and asleep the novel is with you, dogging your footsteps. Strange formless bits of material float out from the ether about you and attach themselves to the main body of the story as though they had hung suspended in air for years, waiting.

Edna Ferber

#92. On a pitch black, starless night, a solitary man was trudging along the main road from Marchiennes to Montsou, ten kilometres of cobblestones running straight as a die across the bare plain between fields of beet.

Emile Zola

#93. The last thing I want to hear from a crotch, I yell, is Walt Whitman!

Ron Whipple

#94. This is a work of fiction.
If certain characters resemble people in real life, it is because certain people in real life resemble characters from a novel.
Nobody, therefore, is entitled to feel included in this book.
Nobody, by the same token, to feel excluded.

Fernando Del Paso

#95. 'The Dice Man' is an anti-establishment cult novel, and you don't normally make studio films from such dark comedy material.

Luke Rhinehart

#96. 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

#97. In the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.

E. M. Forster

#98. I think the idea of creating a character from scratch, one that has not been done in a novel or an existing story, is immensely exciting, terrifying and ultimately rewarding.

Darren Boyd

#99. Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.

Iain Banks

#100. Special qualities are required of the essayist. A poem or a novel may spring from the inner consciousness of an author.. reasoning poers must be brought to reinforce imagination.

Flora Thompson