Novels And Stories Quotes

#1. In America they have to know just what you are
novelist, poet, playwright ... Well, I've been all of them ... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.

Robert Penn Warren

#2. If novels and stories are bulletins from the progressive states of ignorance a writer passes through over the years, observations and opinions about horses are all the more so, since horses are more mysterious than life and harder to understand.

Jane Smiley

#3. In two novels written forty years apart, a man and a woman tell stories of their love ... Taken together they provide an unusually touching story of young love unable to prevail against an opposition whose strength was tragically buttressed by the uncertainties of a cultural divide.

Isabel Colegate

#4. One thing I've found that I can do that I really enjoy is rereading my own writing, earlier stories and novels especially. It induces mental time travel, the same way certain songs you hear on the radio do ... the whole thing returns, an eerie feeling that I'm sure you've experienced.

Philip K. Dick

#5. People who actually tell stories, meaning people who write novels and make feature films, don't see themselves as storytellers.

Stefan Sagmeister

#6. There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called "powerful" novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog.

Vladimir Nabokov

#7. Lost Cactus is a cornucopia of sights, sounds and inhabitants completely foreign to a little squirrel like Sammy, but attempting to set him straight will only complicate matters.

John Hopkins

#8. 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

#9. Are my characters copies of people in real life? ... Don't ever believe the stories about authors putting people into novels. That idea is a kind of joke on both authors and readers. All the readers believe that authors do it. All the authors know that it can't be done.

Ayn Rand

#10. Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.

Eric Brown

#11. A story conducted by the time of a clock and calendars alone would be a story not of human beings but of mechanical toys.

Mary Lascelles

#12. One of the less vaunted joys of Austen is that she is one of the greatest writers in the English language who also happened to write witty romance novels. Women enjoy the love stories in Austen the same way men read Hemingway for the hunting and fishing: it provides guiltless pleasure.

Alessandra Stanley

#13. The reason I shift gears constantly, why I'm doing an opera, why I've done essays, why I've written poetry for years that nobody wanted, why I do short stories and novels and screenplays ... is so I will have new ways of failing. This means becoming a student again.

Ray Bradbury

#14. Research is always the best part. As we dug deeper into the history and mythology behind each of the hallows, we discovered more and more stories - some of them deserving of novels in themselves.

Michael Scott

#15. The whole 'starting with stories, ending with novels' thing, it's probably too ingrained in the industry and the psyche to change it.

Stephen Graham Jones

#16. In my contemporary stories, I write about today's quilters, inventive techniques they use, and how technology has influenced their art. Novels set in the past let me have fun researching patterns that were popular and fabrics and tools available to quilters through history.

Jennifer Chiaverini

#17. I am extremely interested in how people negotiate catastrophe, not because I'm morbidly interested in it but because I'm interested in the secret of resilience; that's what I'm always exploring in the stories and the novels.

Janette Turner Hospital

#18. Language can still be an adventure if we remember that words can make a kind of melody. In novels, news stories, memoirs and even to-the-point memos, music is as important as meaning. In fact, music can drive home the meaning of words.

Constance Hale

#19. I had a story-telling mother; she's written novels and short stories. So I feel like maybe I'm staying alive by telling tales.

Ayshay

#20. You'll notice that my books offer great variety. Some are for adults, some for children and some for teens. There are mysteries, historical novels, picture books, love stories and stories of crisis and courage.

Sonia Levitin

#21. Others, amounting to four novels and a mess of short stories which I did not think worth preserving, I have done my best to eliminate from the record by refusing all requests for permission to reprint them, and I hope I have done a good job of making them hard to unearth.

Leslie Charteris

#22. To me, comedians are the last great storytellers because they depict their stories and create their effect with so few words. In the span of a couple minutes, stand-up comics can communicate more emotion than most novels do in hours worth of reading.

Chuck Palahniuk

#23. I started trying to be a writer and failed for years. I tried novels, short stories, sitcoms, movies, plays, anything. And then, to support myself, I had millions of jobs on the fringes of show business.

Bruce Eric Kaplan

#24. Jim Harrison's novels, John McPhee's nonfiction, Flannery O'Connor's short stories, and the crime novels of John Sandford, Ken Bruen, and T. Jefferson Parker. His books

C.J. Box

#25. I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.

Aleksandar Hemon

#26. Not everyone can experience what other people can... That's why movies come out... films and books... and short stories and novels...

Deyth Banger

#27. Though my short stories are the more readable, my novels do have more to say; and they will, if anyone has the patience for it, repay a rereading.

R.A. Lafferty

#28. You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels.

Tobias Wolff

#29. Short stories and some short novels are close to poetry
with the fewest words they capture the essence of a situation, of a human being. It's like trying to pin down the eternal moment.

Gina Berriault

#30. Even when she was alive, Esther Kreitman's novels, short stories and translations received far less attention than the work of her famous brothers, I. J. and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Clive Sinclair

#31. I've always been ambidextrous, writing short stories and novels, and I pretty much have been writing a novel and a handful of short stories every year since '91.

Catherine Ryan Hyde

#32. Writing is my number one passion. I've written two novels. I've written a screenplay. I also write short stories and poetry.

Evangeline Lilly

#33. Let me in, Emily, and I swear to you that you'll never regret it.
Ethan Sterling in Private Emotions

Elize Amornette

#34. My crime books are actually novels and are written as such. One might even say that each one is really two novels, one of which is the story I tell the reader, and the other the buried story I know and let slip now and then into a clue to whet the reader's interest.

Mary Roberts Rinehart

#35. When I was one day old, I learned how to read. When I was two days old, I started to write. By the time I was three, I had finished 212 short stories, 38 novels, 730 poems, and one very funny limerick, all before breakfast.

Jon Scieszka

#36. Novels are very different than films and I love to see someone else's imagining of my story.

Nicholas Sparks

#37. I could read at a very early age and I loved stories, losing myself in stories, novels.

Heather Donahue

#38. I imagine I should have told it to you before? I love you, Sejal.I wish for you to become my wife.Recently I've also opened a shop in North Dakota and thinking that, just maybe, you love me too.

Chayada Welljaipet

#39. I usually do at least a dozen drafts and progressively make more-conscious decisions. Because I've always believed stories are closer to poems than novels, I spend a lot of time on the story's larger rhythms, such as sentence and paragraph length, placement of flashbacks and dialogue.

Ron Rash

#40. God is going to send you someone that will rescue you. Then one day you will rescue them in return and together your story will rescue others. He has always been a God of rescues and a maker of warriors for his grace. You only need to believe that you are part of something greater than you know.

Shannon L. Alder

#41. It may be old hat, but I see no reason to close off what is for me a fruitful subject of inquiry, especially so for one, like me, who is very much interested in creating stories and novels of ideas.

Norman Lock

#42. You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.

Larry Niven

#43. 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

#44. The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#45. That's how I work, whether with stories or novels - they start with an image that comes to me in a daydream, and a lot of times I'm walking around with these pictures in my head for awhile before I start writing.

Dan Chaon

#46. If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?

Jennifer Weiner

#47. I'm going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children.

Jack Kerouac

#48. I have lost stories and many starts of novels before. Not always as punishment for 'telling,' but more often as a result of something having gone cold and dead because of a hiatus. Telling, you see, is the same as a hiatus. It means you're not doing it.

Cynthia Ozick

#49. I've published several virtually invisible novels and several dozen even more invisible short stories over the years, all of which give me joy - unlike the cumulative experience of seeking publishers for them!

Scott Bradfield

#50. New thing is made in writting books, (novels, short stories... stories...)... It's to be build a character which you will love you will like him.... and one moment he dies... isn't it awesome?

Deyth Banger

#51. Will Cato's alien buddies come en masse and invade Earth? He's not sure but he'll try to keep humanity in the loop.

John Hopkins

#52. Like so many aspiring writers who still have boxes of things they've written in their parents' houses, I filled notebooks with half-finished poems and stories and first paragraphs of novels that never got written.

Ally Carter

#53. I enjoy writing plays most. I haven't written a radio play in a while and I don't write short stories anymore because the process of submitting them depressed me. I really enjoy revising novels, but drafting them can be a pain.

Sefi Atta

#54. Each of my novels has come from a different place, and the processes are not always entirely conscious. I have lived off and on in America for a number of years and so have accumulated observations, found things interesting, been moved to tell stories about them.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#55. I feel quite at home writing short stories but nervous and anxious when writing novels, as if the bad time of consecutive failures might arise again.

Charles Baxter

#56. I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.

Lynn Abbey

#57. I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.

Bruce Coville

#58. I have to say that movies have as much impact on me as music. And that I learned as much about narrative from movies as I did from reading novels, how to arrange stories, how to juxtapose things.

Dana Spiotta

#59. I guess I would say that most of what I've learned about storytelling derives from novels and short stories. I cannot think of a novel or story, or a novelist or story writer, who thinks in terms of three-act structure.

Tom Bissell

#60. Romance novels feature nuanced portrayals of female characters having adventures, making choices, and accepting themselves just as they are. When we say these stories are silly and unrealistic, we are telling young girls not to expect to be the heroines in their own real lives.

Maya Rodale

#61. I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.

Pat Conroy

#62. I had no idea Savage Season was the beginning of a series. I wrote the second one about three years later. The character of Hap wouldn't stop talking to me, and then there was a third, and over the years nine novels and a collection of stories and some uncollected stories.

Joe R. Lansdale

#63. Many people have said to me, "What a pity you had such a big family to raise." "Think of the novels and the short stories and the poems you never had time to write because of that." And I looked at my children and I said, "These are my poems, these are my stories."

Olga Masters

#64. I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.

Stephen Graham Jones

#65. I read more than I had in years-novels, short stories, three long nonfiction books about how we had stumbled into the Iraq mess (the short answer appeared to have W for a middle initial and a dick for a Vice President).

Stephen King

#66. I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels ... a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.

Seth Grahame-Smith

#67. Juliet is one of those rare novels that has it all: lush prose, tightly intertwined parallel narratives, intrigue, and historical detail all set against a backdrop of looming danger. Anne Fortier casts a new light on one of history's greatest stories of passion. I was swept away.

Sara Gruen

#68. I think people who share my dreams can enjoy reading my novels. And that's a wonderful thing. I said that myths are like a reservoir of stories, and if I can act as a similar kind of "reservoir," albeit a modest one, that would make me very happy.

Haruki Murakami

#69. Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark ... your words come out, and then nothing ... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.

Alice McDermott

#70. Seth: I write of love in my novels, write of it well, if my critics and fans are to be believed, but in all of my years at that typewriter, I never found the combination of words that would convey how I felt about you. You were my everything.

Lissa Bryan

#71. Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.

Louis L'Amour

#72. 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

#73. Stories and novels consist of three parts: narration, which moves the story from point A to point B and finally to point Z; description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech.

Stephen King

#74. With almost every book I've written, my secret target audience is the young therapist. In this way, I am staying in my professorial role; I'm writing teaching stories and teaching novels.

Irvin D. Yalom

#75. I have always loved to read, and now that I have penned 10 novels and a few magazine articles, I have fallen seriously in love with writing stories and seeing them go out into the world. It's magical, you know?

Dorothea Benton Frank

#76. And I used to write novels and little stories and compositions and I - but I put them away because I started acting when I was 17. So there wasn't much time.

Joan Collins

#77. Even the two novels I've written were based on true stories. It's how I'm wired - real life is fascinating and fantastical enough. The kind of journalism I did unpeeled lids from cans otherwise sealed.

Peter Landesman

#78. When I first encountered the 'Sigma Force' novels - long before I became friends with Jim Rollins - a bookseller told me that these stories were about 'geeks with guns.' While not entirely accurate, that's pretty close to the mark, and that really speaks to me.

Jonathan Maberry

#79. I was intentionally curbing the impulse to be funny and hiding the ability. I wrote any number of very serious attempts at poems, short stories, novels - horrible. At a certain point, I recognized that it was fun to write dialogue that had a degree of lightness and humor.

Patrick DeWitt

#80. I love to write. I write everything across the board - kids' stories and novels and scripts. I actually would like to give that a go; I'd like to try to be a writer.

Evangeline Lilly

#81. Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

Colm Toibin

#82. 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

#83. I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read . The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy , and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.

James A. Baldwin

#84. Reed wanted to believe, and he had to place faith in her, to have a life with her. "Ruby, the one thing I know for certain is I love you. I have faith in you. I believe in you.

D.F. Jones

#85. I'm extremely surprised to learn that a story, which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding novels and adventure stories, should have had such an immediate and profound effect upon radio listeners.

Orson Welles

#86. I can't change the past, and I don't think I would. I don't expect to be understood. I like what I've written, the stories and two novels. If I had to give up what I've written in order to be clear of this disease, I wouldn't do it.

Harold Brodkey

#87. Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.

Joyce Carol Oates

#88. READING, n. The general body of what one reads. In our country it consists, as a rule, of Indiana novels, short stories in "dialect" and humor in slang.

Ambrose Bierce

#89. When I write my novels I don't really have a huge plan beforehand; I don't have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it.

Michael Ondaatje

#90. All my writing-life people kept telling me that I should stop writing short stories and start writing novels: my agent, my Israeli publisher, my foreign ones, my bank manager - they all felt and keep feeling that I'm doing something wrong here.

Etgar Keret

#91. Shades of Grey. I haven't read it yet, but what you have to read carefully, is "Story of O" by the French writer Dominique Aury. This is actually the forerunner of all the whole SM novels and it's really good. You have to read it.

Theo Hutchcraft

#92. I hadn't thought specifically about doing graphic novels until a couple of my friends got contracts for them. Then I started picturing how various of my stories or poems would work in an illustrated format and thinking how cool that would be.

Sharon Shinn

#93. My dream was to eventually make movies. To be part of the fairy tales, stories and novels I loved reading so much growing up.

Irena A. Hoffman

#94. If every book was judged by its cover, very few would be read; education would be limited, and fewer movies would be made.

Ellen J. Barrier

#95. In all my stories and novels, no one ever escapes Louisiana. Maybe that is because my soul never left Louisiana, although my body did go to California.

Ernest Gaines

#96. I try to widen the horizons of every child I meet, and part of that is promoting diverse forms, be it graphic novels, stories told in a narrative voice, or more translated books, as well as more diverse writers and more diverse characters.

Malorie Blackman

#97. I am drawn to writing books about magic and the supernatural because those are the types of books I like to read. I've written many short stories with realistic settings, and I certainly wouldn't rule out realistic novels in the future!

Cassandra Clare

#98. For the past few years my fans have made it very clear that they would like to read my novels and revisit my family of characters faster than I can write them. For them, I am willing to make a change to my working methods so the stories in my head can reach the page more frequently.

Wilbur Smith

#99. Novels seem to exist because of this need to know and connect, and so story becomes charged with necessity.

Michael Helm

#100. Movies, novels, TV shows - these are the water fountains of today. We thirst for stories which speak to us by representing us, but we go to the water fountains in the centre of town looking for that, and we're turned away, sent to the ghetto.

Hal Duncan