Not To Write A Novel Quotes

#1. The writer's job is not to write a novel, hold it up and say, "Here I am," but to write a novel, hold it up and say, "Here YOU are.

Rita Mae Brown

#2. Is it not superfluous to write more than one novel if the writer has not become, say, a new man? Obviously, all the novels of an author not infrequently belong together and are to a certain degree only one novel.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

#3. I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.'

Tim O'Brien

#4. Perhaps writing a story or a novel was not something that should be done for money, or to win praise, but for the sheer sensual pleasure of it. I liked that idea. It made me want to write lots of stories, to give myself that pleasure.

Vanessa Wu

#5. If you write a good action sequence well in a novel, you're already writing it for film, because the only way to do it well is to use some of the same tricks. They're rhetorical, not visual, but it's the same move.

Justin Cronin

#6. I never conceived of not writing a novel. I believed - oh, God, I believed, it was an article of faith! - I was born to write a novel.

Cynthia Ozick

#7. My work is less violent because we tend to write what we want to read ... and I'm not that interested in gruesome books. Any violence, to fit in well with a crime novel, has to have compassion.

Ann Cleeves

#8. A novel must be judged on its merits, not on how hard the journey was to write it.

Johnny Rich

#9. 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

#10. Before Arthur, I'd dismissed altogether writing fiction. You only have so many semi-sharp arrows in your quiver, I'd told myself, and I was not going to be able to write a novel.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#11. 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

#12. My blackness is spreading, Alice. I've been seeing and hearing things that can't be there or anywhere. At night, when I'm not hallucinating mad women, I can feel depression starting to burn me around the edges. If I sink into it, I'll have to give this thing up and write a novel.

Hanif Kureishi

#13. Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels.

Jose Saramago

#14. You may be able to write a novel, you may not. You will never know until you have worked very hard indeed and written at least part of it. You will never really know until you have written the whole of it and submitted it for publication.

Ngaio Marsh

#15. I'm not a 'long writer' and have never wanted to write a novel or even a novella. Poetry, like flash fiction, provides a readily accessible canvas to play with. Whether to express an emotion or share a vignette, these forms are often interchangeable.

Marge Simon

#16. Personally, I do not believe that it is the duty of any man or woman to write a novel. In nine cases out of ten, there would be greater merit in leaving it unwritten.

Agnes Repplier

#17. Moral philosophy is very largely a branch of fiction. Despite this, a philosopher has yet to write a great novel. The fact should not be surprising. In philosophy the truth about human life is of no interest

John N. Gray

#18. But I always seem to finish a book and then think, oh God, I've got to pay a tax bill, so I'd better write a novel, so I tend not to stop and learn word processing.

Jilly Cooper

#19. In many ways, it's easier to write a book. You have more latitude with structure, and you have the freedom to luxuriate within the internal lives and musings of your characters. But where a screenplay does not always demand great prose, a novel lives or dies by it.

John Fusco

#20. I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel I need to, and that's a luxury.

Zadie Smith

#21. It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political.

Jonathan Coe

#22. When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not very much care, how it is to end.

Anthony Trollope

#23. You are afraid to write your first novel because you say " I am not a talented great writer " But you forget that nobody was born a talented great writer.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

#24. Writing a novel is always complicated, it's not like you snap your fingers and go, 'Ah, I know what I'll write'. For me, a lot of the time, I have to write and as I write, I learn about the story.

Reif Larsen

#25. Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership.

Susan Vreeland

#26. Do not think us as traffic cops, or even driving instructors. Think of us instead as your onboard navigation system, available day or night, a friendly voice to turn to whenever you look up, lost and afraid, and think How the fuck did I end up here?

Howard Mittelmark

#27. It's important to write a mystery novel where the takeaway is not a giveaway - where something could be read over and over.

Jimenez Lai

#28. In my brief writing life, it means I am still lucky that I have at least one more novel to complete. I do not expect that a story will arrive just because it is time to write another novel. It doesn't happen that way.

David Bergen

#29. There are people who say they want to write novels. They think, 'I'll learn my craft on the romance novel.' If you don't love the genre, it's going to show, and it's not going to be a good book.

Julia Quinn

#30. I do not believe that I will ever write an adult novel from an animal's point of view unless someday it becomes suddenly appealing to me to make a narrator a mentally ill pet. Never say never.

Andrea Seigel

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that. On occasion? Sure. As relaxation? Great. But not full time - And a lot of people are doing that. And while they're doing that, I'll go ahead and write another novel.

Ray Bradbury

#36. 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

#37. I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.

May Sarton

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. I still write the occasional short story, and poked at a novel once, but it's just not what I want to do.

George Murray

#41. 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

#42. To be motivated to write a novel, I need to be unable not to write.

Johnny Rich

#43. Don't force yourself to write. Some people can write a novel in a few months, whereas for others it can take over a year. I'm lucky to be one of the former - but, even so, if I'm not in the mood to write, I won't. I'll go off, do something else and come back to it when I'm ready.

Cecelia Ahern

#44. Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don't often make up a writer's main body of work, and that's not because they don't see the market for it.

James Lasdun

#45. Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical label
to conclude that I am writing about myself. But one must never not write a certain kind of novel out of fear of what the reaction to it will be.

John Irving

#46. Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.

Joyce Carol Oates

#47. I'm not the protagonist of a novel or anything...
I'm just a normal college student who likes to read...
But...
If I were to write a book with me as tge main character...
It would be...
...A tragedy.

Sui Ishida

#48. When I was 30 or so - by that time I had become an assistant D.A. - I decided I would try to write a novel. To be clear: I did not decide to become a novelist. Honestly, it never crossed my mind that I could actually earn a living as a professional novelist.

William Landay

#49. The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel - one that reads like a mystery to most people. They're not going to learn slash q-z any more than they're going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.

Steve Jobs

#50. It's not as though I decided to sit down and write a mystery novel so I could capitalize on my parents' success.

Jesse Kellerman

#51. If you set out to write an adjective novel, you're setting out to write a mediocre novel; your allegiance is to the adjective, not to the story, and then that just sucks all the joy right out of it.

Patrick Ness

#52. I'm not looking to write the great American novel, win a Pulitzer or teach history. I write to entertain my readers.

Dorothy Garlock

#53. I tell writers not to think about writing short stories or novels. Just write one good scene. And then a novel becomes a bunch of good scenes stacked on top of each other.

Joe Hill

#54. I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross; that its to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. [VW]

Vita Sackville-West

#55. 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

#56. In modern novels I try to not let myself get away and to be here, and that's why I write about my life and myself. But even when I do that there's an element of disappearing to a place that's not me. It's "the selflessness of writing". It seldom happens, but when it does it's worth quite a lot.

Karl Ove Knausgard

#57. I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe.

Elizabeth George