How O Write A Novel Quotes

#1. I used to write stories a lot because you had to fill your hours some other way than watching television. So my imagination was vivid, and I used to write a lot of stories. I wrote a novel, which I still have, which is so awful.

Robert Osborne

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. Better and happier those who, recognizing that everything is fictitious, write the novel before someone writes it for them and, like Machiavelli, don courtly garments to write in secret.

Fernando Pessoa

#6. Sometimes I write less than I'd like but do research. Other times, editor's notes or a copy-edited manuscript or page proofs for a forthcoming novel mean that I need to put my attentions elsewhere for a day or two, but I always come back to writing.

Jane Lindskold

#7. If you write a book set in the past about something that happened east of the Mississippi, it's a 'historical novel.' If you write about something that took place west of the Mississippi, it's a 'Western'- and somehow regarded as a lesser work. I write historical novels about the frontier.

Louis L'Amour

#8. Writing a novel is not at all like riding a bike. Writing a novel is like having to redesign a bike, based on laws of physics that you don't understand, in a new universe. So having written one novel does nothing for you when you have to write the second one.

Daniel Alarcon

#9. 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

#10. Well, when I was a young writer the people we read were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And to begin with, I was a bit of a copycat writer and very derivative and tried to write a novel using their voices, really ... I keep it out of print.

Mordecai Richler

#11. Want to know what it feels like when your soul bleeds? Write a novel.

Carl Henegan

#12. I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times.

Flannery O'Connor

#13. Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

Martin Amis

#14. I'm not sure that it's possible to write a novel about people who don't transgress or stumble, people who don't surprise themselves with the things they do, people who can explain all their actions with perfect logical consistency. At least it's not possible for me to write that sort of novel.

Tom Perrotta

#15. Be patient and write honestly from your heart.

Ora Rosalin

#16. Writing an essay is like a school assignment: I have my topic, I organize my thoughts, and I write it. I have complete control over what I'm doing. Writing a novel is like setting out on a journey without knowing who or what I'll encounter, how long it's going to take, or where I'm going to end up.

Tawni O'Dell

#17. Flannery revealed she had been working on the novel "a year and a half and will probably be two more years finishing it." She described her writing habits in a letter dated July 13: "I must tell you how I work. I don't have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing.

Flannery O'Connor

#18. No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

Alice Hoffman

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.

Ernest Cline

#22. If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

V.S. Naipaul

#23. 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

#24. For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.

Charles Palliser

#25. I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.

Francois Mauriac

#26. I tried to write a coming of age novel, but I wasn't deep enough to get past the third chapter.

Rick Robinson

#27. One has to be just a little crazy to write a great novel

John Gardner

#28. I try to write about a woman finding her self-respect, valuing herself, and liking herself again. But what one desperately wants now is to write a proper novel.

Kate O'Mara

#29. It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.

Lawrence Durrell

#30. Having the urge to write a novel, especially if you've yet to be published, is like having a medical condition impossible to mention in polite company - it's a relief simply to know there are fellow-sufferers out there.

Robert Harris

#31. If I was to write a novel about the paranormal, I think I would want to use a ghostwriter for greater impact.

Michael Kroft

#32. I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel.

Umberto Eco

#33. Are you sorry? Do you wish you could do it all again and go off and write novels instead of being a teacher?
No. You can't trade what is for what might have been.

Lurlene McDaniel

#34. For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know.

Anthony Marra

#35. When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours.

Sidney Sheldon

#36. Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

Oscar Wilde