New Novel Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. If there is a connection between Harry Potter and my new novel, it's my interest in characters.

J.K. Rowling

#4. Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before.

Zadie Smith

#5. My writing process hasn't changed - it's is the same whether I'm working on a Y.A. novel or, as now, a new novel for adults. A lot of reading, a lot of research if the subject warrants it, a lot of sticky notes and scraps of paper - and get to work.

Kathe Koja

#6. I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!

Italo Calvino

#7. 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

#8. I'm hoping to get started on a new novel.

Marv Levy

#9. It is publication week for my new novel 'The Sunshine Cruise Company.' Go me! Anyway, I may as well get the shameless plug over with right away - buy it. You'll like it. It's about a bunch of old ladies who rob a bank.

John Niven

#10. Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don't like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don't like it.

Umberto Eco

#11. And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.

Tobias Wolff

#12. Where readers of Murdoch can begin a new novel with a quiet confidence, opening a Burgess book is an exercise in anxiety: what the devil is he up to this time?

Thomas C. Foster

#13. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans.

Jane Austen

#14. The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is fantastic. It's volcanic and sexy and utterly unlike anything I've read before. It feels like the future in a dazzling way that has nothing to do with looking backward. It's been a long wait for a new novel from Mark Leyner, but worth it. Ten out of ten from me.

Douglas Coupland

#15. Let's get right to it: On page 5 of Paul Murray's dazzling new novel, 'Skippy Dies,' ... Skippy dies. If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go sounds audacious, it's nothing compared with the literary feats Murray pulls off in this hilarious, moving and wise book.

Jess Walter

#16. Lionel Essrog, the twitching, barking, gabbling narrator of Jonathan Lethem's new novel, 'Motherless Brooklyn,' is no movie-of-the-week novelty grafted onto a noir mystery. Maybe his Tourette's is a gimmick, but it's a gimmick with depth, with soul.

Gary Krist

#17. The bane of my existence is the synopses that publishers request for a new novel or series. That's where I'm really producing fiction - my final book never ends up looking like the synopsis.

Michelle Gagnon

#18. A new novel awaits my arrival, prepares for my careful inspection. Yet a novel is always a long dream that lives in me for years before I know where to go to hunt it out.

Pat Conroy

#19. I placed my new novel, 'The Book of Lost Fragrances', in Paris, knowing it would be a challenge. But the book belonged in the city that is one of the greatest perfume capitals of the world and has been since for more than three centuries.

M.J. Rose

#20. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.

Italo Calvino

#21. 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

#22. Where do you think my new novel is? In the waste basket. I can see myself that it's no good on earth, and when a loving author realizes this, what would be the judgment of a critical public?

Jean Webster

#23. Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one's elders, even to the point of ostracism; to define oneself, and by extension one's generation, as new, novel, ungovernable.

Joyce Carol Oates

#24. My new novel 'Red Hook Road' began many years ago as a short article in the newspaper.

Ayelet Waldman

#25. Yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.

Italo Calvino

#26. The novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) in a speech open to all, and to be free in a speech that never concludes.

Carlos Fuentes

#27. Starting a new novel is a little like starting a new relationship
you have to be prepared to commit for at least three years and put up with the domestic tedium as well as the emotional highs!

Tobsha Learner

#28. I am the woman with the cool vintage glasses ... I am the proud wife beside her husband ... I am the writer who has written a new novel.

Ann Hood

#29. I had finished a book yesterday and was in that annoying phase of still being so involved in its storyline that I was unable to commit to a new novel, although I had several waiting to be read.

Penelope Haines

#30. There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare.

Margaret Drabble

#31. 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

#32. For a musician, smelling a new violin was the equivalent of a reader smelling a new novel. It was a homelike scent that made you realize that the world wasn't a completely terrible place, that there was still beauty that existed.

Brittainy C. Cherry

#33. I'm working on a new novel, in its 3rd draft, but it's hard to write while doing 7th Heaven.

Stephen Collins

#34. He has his chin on his chest and his eyes down. He is thinking of his new baby, his new novel, tomorrow's dance contest. He is thinking of everything except what he is thinking about.

John Le Carre

#35. A locked-room problem lies at the heart of my new novel, 'In The Morning I'll Be Gone,' in which an RUC detective has to find out whether a publican's daughter who fell off a table in a bar that was locked from the inside was in fact murdered.

Adrian McKinty

#36. 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

#37. Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.

Barbara Kingsolver

#38. In Kamby Bolongo Mean River damage and delusion walk hand in hand, and everything we think we know is gradually called into question. Reading like a cross between Samuel Beckett's 'The Calmative' and Gordon Lish's Dear Mr. Capote, Robert Lopez's new novel gets under your skin and latches on.

Brian Evenson

#39. On November 18 of alternate years Mr Earbrass begins writing 'his new novel'. Weeks ago he chose its title at random from a list of them he keeps in a little green note-book. It being tea-time of the 17th, he is alarmed not to have thought of a plot to which The Unstrung Harp might apply.

Edward Gorey

#40. I have 50 or 60 pages on the [new] novel but I still expect to be a long time at it. It's a theme that requires prayer and fasting to make it get anywhere. I manage to pray but am a very sloppy faster.

Flannery O'Connor

#41. When I start a new novel and find myself diverted by domestic activities, many of which I genuinely enjoy, I panic that I will never write another word.

Christina Baker Kline

#42. A bookworm in bed with a new novel and a good reading lamp is as much prepared for pleasure as a pretty girl at a college dance.

Phyllis McGinley

#43. Exceptional estimable, good, nice, dear people they all were but they all, unluckily, kept asking me about the new novel, and that was excrutiating.

Robert Walser

#44. I've written a lot of books now; I've been published for over 30 years. I hope with every book I learn something new, and with every new novel I try to improve the process of writing.

Charlaine Harris

#45. Every time I start a new novel, it seems like an impossible undertaking. If I tried to do too much too quickly, I would get lost and feel overwhelmed. I have to go slow, and give things a chance to take form and grow.

Louis Sachar

#46. I could not put your new novel down. At 950 pages and weighing in at over ten lbs. I couldn't even pick the goddamned thing up!

Fred Barnett

#47. The history of the human race has been one long quest to find new, novel things, and then kill, eat, or enslave them. There's a reason the aliens haven't made an appearance yet, is what I'm saying. The

Seanan McGuire

#48. It almost feels like a movie or a- I know it's been said many times - that cable television is the new novel kind of thing - but it does feel like that.

Christian Cooke

#49. If I'm hanging around too much, my wife and kids say, 'Hey, why don't you go downstairs and start a new novel?'

Nick Cave

#50. The new novel is sought more eagerly, and devoured more greedily, the New Testament.

Thomas Guthrie

#51. How to start new novel: stare at blank doc, get coffee, stare, check facebook, stare, crack knuckles, stare, tweet, you get the idea...

Mary C. Moore

#52. This is not the proper place to begin speaking of this new passion of Ivan Fyodorovich's, which later affected his whole life: it could all serve as the plot for another story, for a different novel, which I do not even know that I shall ever undertake.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#53. 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

#54. I may have one more 'Star Trek' novel in me, but it would be in the old universe, not the new one.

Diane Duane

#55. She's a lovely young woman from upstate New York, but you should be very thankful for those romance-novel-reading, tween-movie-watching women. They've had a big hand in making our town a success." "And Julian's love life, once he learned to spray himself with glitter.

Kristen Painter

#56. The dedication of Don Winslow's novel 'The Cartel' is nearly two pages long: a list of journalists who were either murdered or 'disappeared' in Mexico between 2004 and 2012 - the period covered in this hugely hypnotic new thriller.

Alan Cheuse

#57. 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

#58. Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it's seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I don't share that pessimism because I think it is one of the great inventions of the human spirit.

Richard Flanagan

#59. I feel like I have a lot of novel ideas, but they often come up while I'm already in the process of working on a book. You have to watch out with the slutty new idea.

Matt De La Pena

#60. I was a total nerd growing up. I'd rather sit home and read a novel on New Year's Eve and say, 'Wow, I read the whole thing in one night!' That was my idea of a big time.

Beth Broderick

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. Here the sky is wrapped in silk. The breathings of so many men and animals, and the smoke of your coal, and the fog, oh, it is too much. The Paris sky is perfect. A man must see clearly, to see something new.

John Pipkin

#64. Once you break someone's heart, you are forever its master.

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

#65. The novel, as a living force, if not as a work of art, owes an incalculable debt to what we call, mistakenly, the new psychology, to Freud, in his earlier interpretations, and more truly, I think, to Jung.

Ellen Glasgow

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. Sometimes I come across as superficial. Of this I am aware. However, you may be confident that inside my head I am forever plumbing new shallows, finding novel ways to express the obvious, reheating old jokes.

John Dolan

#69. There are a lot of very good New York novels, but there's no single all-encompassing novel, the way you could look at any number of Dickens books and say we know London as a result of that.

Pete Hamill

#70. One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.

John Irving

#71. I probably listen to Burn more than any of them, because it was so new me, so novel. To see my name on an actual record was such an incredible feeling.

David Coverdale

#72. Talk to me. Say something, anything," he pleaded quietly as if he was trying to tame a wild animal.
"There's nothing to say."
He looked up and lowered his eyebrows on his eyes. "Why did you kiss me?

Stephanie Witter

#73. Novels are pirated all the time, but it's hard to imagine that you're at work and you open up the attachment that your brother sent you and it's the new Phillip Roth novel.

Adam Mansbach

#74. Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee! There are just three big cities in the United States that are 'story cities'- New York, of course, New Orleans, and, best of the lot, San Francisco.

Frank Norris

#75. And on bad days, when his aura of sadness blazed like an alarm he couldn't turn off, I felt like I was doing everything wrong.

Lindsey Frydman

#76. I have an idea for a new book. It's a novel about a beautiful yet sensitive author whose spirit is crushed by her domineering editor. Do you like it?

Annie Barrows

#77. 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

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

Megan S. Johnston

#79. To a man who is uncorrupt and properly constituted, woman always remains something of a mystery and a romance. He never interprets her quite literally. She, on her part, is always striving to remain a poem, and is never weary of bringing out new editions of herself in novel bindings.

James Parton

#80. Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

#81. Ethan: "I'm not asking you to continue that night."
Karis: "Then what are you asking?"
Ethan: "For a whole new night.

Monique DeVere

#82. His fierce appreciation of female beauty, the unrelenting desire he felt for their company, the pleasure he both derived and sought to give, had led him in and out of quite a few bedroom doors.

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

#83. 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

#84. While writing a novel, I don't read anything new in fiction. I am too engrossed.

Jane Gardam

#85. I'd never read a romance novel about conjoined twins. It was a huge market that had never been tapped. I had just come up with the new Twilight,

Robyn Peterman

#86. But now and then there appears a novel which opens up a new world not by revealing what is strange, but by revealing what is familiar.

George Orwell

#87. I'm writing a novel about two actresses who go to New York, because that's what I know about. One has lost touch with reality, disappears and is picked up by a man.

Julie Walters

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. Each time I write a new piece, whether a novel, a picture book, a speech or anything, really, it has so much to do with what I'm going through personally or a problem I'm trying to work out. When I wrote my novel 'Baby,' my three children had all just gone out the door.

Patricia MacLachlan

#91. Respect can be as elusive as the unicorn. I know something of this because I write books that are set in the Middle Ages, and the historical novel is often seen as the unwanted stepchild in the fictional family. I know even more about respect - or the lack thereof - because I live in New Jersey.

Sharon Kay Penman

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

Stuart Woods

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. Beware: I'm unafraid to host a big spoiler party--a novel that can be truly "spoiled" by the summary of its plot is a novel that was already spoiled by that plot.

James Wood

#96. And although he recognized that tenderness was not the same as passion, and certainly not equivalent to love, for now it seemed to him a suitable substitute.

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

#97. Quietly, under my breath, I mumbled a name and it wasn't the name of the girl waiting in the other room.
In my mind I pictured Brooklyn's sounds as she came and I jerked in my hand, coming and coming.
Something had to give.

Stephanie Witter

#98. I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn't novel.

Ernest Gaines

#99. Many athletes are seeking new and novel ways of pushing their limits, and the challenge of running back-to-back races is certainly one way to test the boundaries.

Dean Karnazes

#100. I closed my eyes and immediately I pictured Brooklyn's full lips parted on a moan, her eyes glassy and her pupils dilated, her cheeks flushed and her body ... her smoking body bared only for me.

Stephanie Witter