Top 42 Novel Line Quotes
#1. I guess if I was made responsible for every single line of dialogue in a game and every single piece of textual visual detail, every sign or piece of graffiti, then yes, I think that would be comparable to the time and effort required to write a very long novel, indeed.
Richard K. Morgan
#2. Novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Trying something, and when that doesn't work, trying something else. Welcoming clutter Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won't find the finish line for a year or two, or five ...
Richard Russo
#3. We were written for one another, and I wouldn't change one line in our romance novel. The good, the bad, the in between. It's ours. We own it.
Gail McHugh
#4. I swear to Vishnu, if this doesn't work, I'm going to stab you in the throat with a Pipette.
Kyoko M.
#5. There is a fine line between a genius and an idiot and that line is possibility.
Ni Mao
#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
#8. Every novel is brand-new. It's never been written before in the history of the world. At the same time, it's merely the latest in a long line of narratives - not just novels, but narratives generally - since humans began telling stories to themselves and each other.
Thomas C. Foster
#9. The DNA of the novel - which, if I begin to write nonfiction, I will write about this - is that: the title of the novel is the whole novel. The first line of the novel is the whole novel. The point of view is the whole novel. Every subplot is the whole novel. The verb tense is the whole novel.
Mary Kay Zuravleff
#10. Writing my novel 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943.
Richard Flanagan
#11. [A novel by Henry James] is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently place, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string.
H.G.Wells
#12. All good writing is built one good line at a time. You build a novel the same way you do a pyramid. One word, one stone at a time, underneath a full moon while the fingers bleed.
Kate Braverman
#13. Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.
Jack Prelutsky
#14. Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.
Italo Calvino
#15. Everyone needs a place to let go and unwind from life, mine happens to be where pencil meets paper.
Brandy Nacole
#16. For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.
Paul Auster
#17. The artist Paul Klee described drawing a picture as taking a line for a walk. I have borrowed his words to explain my approach to writing; when I write a novel it is like I am taking a thought for a walk.
Aminatta Forna
#18. The plot is not very important to me, though a novel must have one, of course. It's just a line to hang the washing on.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
#19. It was only after five years in the army, when I was having to do a very boring job in a very boring place, that I thought: 'Why not try writing a novel?' partly out of youthful arrogance and partly because there had been a long line of writers in my mother's family.
Antony Beevor
#20. I live intimately with my characters before starting a book. I cut out pictures of them for my wall. I do time lines for each major character and a time line for the entire novel: What is going on in the world as my characters struggle with their problems?
Walter Dean Myers
#21. I can be really silly when I'm not actually writing silliness, and I have to rein that in. Pynchon, in my opinion, sometimes tells elaborate shaggy dog stories just to work up to a pun or punch line. My challenge is to use humor and wordplay to reinforce the emotional core of the novel.
Mary Kay Zuravleff
#22. Ida was a natural historian who knew how to throw in enough fiction to keep up dramtic tension. And she was replete with details, like a big fat colorful nineteenth-century historical novel, inching forward slowly ... Ida's narrative line, like her waistline, was ample.
Marissa Piesman
#23. I don't mind my friends calling me "Thornes," but the fact of people calling me "Prickly Thornes" draws the line.
Simi Sunny
#24. If a poem is concentrated, a closed fist, then a novel is relaxed and expansive, an open hand: it has roads, detours, destinations; a heart line, a head line; morals and money come into it. Where the fist excludes and stuns, the open hand can touch and encompass a great deal in its travels.
Sylvia Plath
#25. My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.
Edward Abbey
#27. Writing does not exist unless there is someone to read it, and each reader will take something different from a novel, from a chapter, from a line.
Claire Fuller
#28. There is a fine line I have to walk throughout the writing process in a novel. It is this line between drama and melodrama, and it is this line between evoking genuine emotional power and being manipulative.
Nicholas Sparks
#29. Randy stared into the glass he held in his hand, gazing into its cobra eyes. A double shot of thirty-year-old single malt whisky. You can't be an alcoholic when you only drink top shelf. Right?
Ted Magnuson
#30. Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present.
Leslie Fiedler
#31. You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.
Joan Didion
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. I lack the skill to hold a story line for the length required for a novel or even a short story. I have never had an idea that could withstand a hundred thousand words, or even ten thousand words of rubber meeting the road.
Henry Rollins
#35. It's said that there's three sides to a story: yours, mine, and the truth. Check out God in Wingtip Shoes and The Prison Plumb Line to explore all three.
Yvonne J. Medley
#36. First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.
Richard Ford
#37. To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die.
Salman Rushdie
#38. The terror, which would not end for another 28 years-if it ever did end-began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
Stephen King
#39. Remember that a good football novel has to have the same ingredients as any other good novel: drama, convincing and interesting characters, a strong story-line, and some kind of magic in the writing.
Mal Peet
#40. One word at a time, makes a novel at the finish line."
- Vik Tory Arch
Vik Tory Arch
#41. Who says only long tedious novels are good to read when all that can be summed up in one line
Priyansh Shah
#42. I think about entrance and exits. I think about dialogue. But most of all I think about voice - all character development in theatre is done through voice. And as I wrote my debut novel "The Big Fear", I thought about narrative voice with every line.
Andrew Case
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