Top 100 Quotes About A Novel
#1. Novels aren't pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline. A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it's a good starting place for me.
Alan Lightman
#2. When I imagine changing places with her I get the feeling I do on finishing a novel with a brick-wall happy ending
I mean the kind of ending when you never think any more about the characters.
Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle
#3. My work schedule has changed over the years. The one constant is, when at work on a novel, I try to work seven days a week, so as not to lose touch with that world. Within that, I'm flexible on hours and output.
Donald E. Westlake
#4. My more tenderhearted daughter, Becka, said to me during this time, Mom, when you write a novel you get to rewrite it, but when you live with someone for twenty years, that is the novel, and you can never write that novel with anyone again!
Elizabeth Strout
#5. I took two years away from making films to write a novel.
Neil Jordan
#6. A novel, of course, is a fully self-contained work of art. You pick it up off the shelf, open it, and there it is - a whole universe waiting for you to enter. A screenplay is just a blueprint for making a movie. Until the movie is actually filmed, the script really means nothing.
John Niven
#7. When a colleague of mine had a notable New York Times book, I said, turn one of the chapters in the collection into a pitch for a novel and sell it to your publisher.
Julianna Baggott
#8. Writers need restrictions. If somebody just says, "Hey, do you want to write a novel, or an article, or a movie, or a short story, you get shut down."
Mitchell Hurwitz
#9. But compared to writing a novel, where you can be God, I did the Bay of Pigs invasion in six pages once, and there were 50,000 guys with boots that I didn't have to pay, and all those extras; we didn't have to pay them.
John Sayles
#10. Ever since I was in my teens I had plans at one point in my life to write a novel.
Jo Nesbo
#11. All writing is an act of self-exploration. Even a grocery list says something about you; how much more does a novel say?
Steven Saylor
#12. I never plan. I never know what the next page is going to be ... But that's the fun of writing a novel or a story, because I don't know what's going to happen next.
Haruki Murakami
#13. Whenever you do something that's original, not based on a comic book or a novel or an old movie or a franchise, you definitely learn a lot and for I think it was very gratifying to see the people embrace the world.
Alfred Gough
#14. I really didn't write it with any intention of being published. If I'd known that was going to happen, I would have written something more sensible, because now I have to dress up as a pirate for book signings ... I would have done a novel about a man who hangs around with a gaggle of models.
Gideon Defoe
#15. I'm sorry I don't have brilliant reasons for beginning a novel. As you go along, you make up reasons to do what you want. There's an open space. Enter it.
Natalie Goldberg
#17. Before trying a novel I wrote a couple of plays.
James Merrill
#18. A couple of times he called the second he'd finished reading a novel and just had to tell me about it, and I know it sounds hokey and librarianish to say so, but I just swooned when he did that.
Sarah Vowell
#19. A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there - that of the pulse, the heart beat.
Henry Miller
#20. 'Monday Mornings' is terrific. It's my wife's show. I'm just lucky enough that David Kelley threw me a bone on it as well. It's a wonderful piece based on a novel by Dr. Sanjay Gupta called 'Monday Mornings.'
Jonathan Silverman
#21. My mother had brought me here when I was fifteen, on a Sunday after I'd read Look Homeward, Angel for the first time. She'd loved the novel, memorizing whole paragraphs, and, of course, naming me after the book's main character. It is a novel you have to read as a young person or you don't get it.
Ron Rash
#22. When I asked her what she'd thought of Pride and Prejudice, she only wondered aloud how anyone could have written a novel set in the first part of the nineteenth century without once mentioning Napoleon.
Michelle Cooper
#23. If this were a novel, you'd have to start a new chapter as soon as I appeared.
Jasper Fforde
#24. Writing a novel and living a life are very much the same thing. The secret is finding the balance between going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way.
Ann Patchett
#26. Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. Sometimes you run over a drunk who's lain down and fallen asleep on the warm pavement. I mean, do you keep going, or what?
E.L. Doctorow
#27. I'd never written a novel before, and I wrote a novel, and that turned out OK.
Rainbow Rowell
#28. A novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.
Elizabeth Bowen
#29. Bet on technical insights that help solve a big problem in a novel way, optimize for scale, not for revenue, and let great products grow the market for everyone.
Eric Schmidt
#30. And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.
Sandra Cisneros
#31. A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life: that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression" - from "The Art of Fiction
Henry James
#32. I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.
Joyce Carol Oates
#33. A novel can do something that films and TV usually can't - a glimpse inside the characters' heads. I write very tight third person point of view, so the reader is right behind the eyes of each character, seeing what they see and feeling what they feel.
Karen Traviss
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. The monotony of staying in one place is the best thing for writing a novel. Having regular habits, a kind of security, but especially no big surprises, no shocks.
Paul Theroux
#37. I haven't published a novel in six years; instead, I fill my departmental hours casting words of praise into the bureaucratic abyss. On multiple occasions, serving on awards committees, I was actually required to write LORs to myself.
Julie Schumacher
#39. I even feel guilty if I'm reading a novel, because I think I should be reading Homer again. I don't really know what free time is, because I don't have something to measure it against.
Simon Armitage
#40. Celebrity is absolutely preposterous. Entertainment seems to be inflating. It used to be the punctuation to your life, a film or a novel or a play, a way of celebrating a good week or month. Now it feels as if it's all punctuation.
Hugh Laurie
#41. We are material creatures who spend much of our lives on material pursuits (even building a cathedral or writing a novel requires stone and mortar or paper and ink).
Virginia Postrel
#42. Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.
Jane Smiley
#43. 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
#45. We managed to prepare a cell-free system which was active when suitably supplemented, and this was a novel result since the process of oxidation was believed to require the integrity of the cells.
Luis Federico Leloir
#46. Let me back up a little and tell you why I prefer writing to real life: You can rewrite. A novel, for example, can be cleaned up, altered, trimmed, improved. Life, on the other hand, is one big messy rough draft.
Harlan Coben
#47. I wrote a novel for my degree, and I'm very happy I didn't submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with my professors who had to read it.
David Eddings
#48. In a democracy, you have to find a market niche, make sure a novel is 'interesting' and 'spectacular.' That may be the toughest censorship of all.
Imre Kertesz
#49. Some authors, when starting a novel, imagine a place first. Others, a character starts taking shape in their head. I start with a hook, a situation, a 'what if.'
Linwood Barclay
#50. London opens to you like a novel itself. [ ... ] It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passsage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand.
Anna Quindlen
#51. I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.
Joyce Carol Oates
#52. It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.
Norman Mailer
#53. The business of writing a novel is a long, meandering road into the self, into the imagination. And it's a road the writer travels alone.
Lisa Unger
#54. Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel
Joan Didion
#55. You know, the point of a novel - or to me, the point of a novel, the gift of a novel is to go really deeply inside people's lives and inside their personal experiences.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#56. 'The Lake of Dreams' grew gradually, over many years, elements and ideas accruing until they gained enough critical mass to become a novel.
Kim Edwards
#57. I judge a novel by whether or not it turns my blood into starlight.
Bryan Jones
#58. I am thus led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative ... A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.
E.L. Doctorow
#59. I don't think comics necessarily think in literary terms. There is an element of developing your stage persona and your comedic voice, but I don't think comics see it like a character in a novel.
Ted Alexandro
#60. I have written millions of words about contemporary England - in journalism. Why don't I take it as the background for a novel? I may do one day. But the simple answer is that it does not excite the novelistic part of my brain; it does not fire it up.
Sebastian Faulks
#61. The few times I've tried to write original screenplays, it's a difficult process because I just don't feel like I know the characters the way I know them after the year or two it takes to write a novel.
Tom Perrotta
#63. In a weird way it was just too good to put down. It was like a novel so disgusting you just have to finish it.
Stephen King
#64. I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel.
M.J. Rose
#65. Writing a novel about World War II and the French Resistance was a challenge both sobering and thrilling.
Bobbie Ann Mason
#66. That's the difference between a real journal and one that's invented for a novel - a novel journal has to be manipulated so someone reading it can have enough comprehension, which means the person writing it would've had to have a sense of a someday-audience.
Cris Mazza
#67. I sometimes start keeping a journal about the writing process itself. Particularly when I get the ideas, and I am trying to brood over the chaos phase. In writing a novel, you really have to brood over a lot of chaos of ideas and possibilities.
Sue Monk Kidd
#68. You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.
Gore Vidal
#69. Whenever I start a novel, I'm always looking for two things: a bit of science that makes me go 'what if?' and a piece of history that ends in a question mark.
James Rollins
#70. 'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both.
Junot Diaz
#71. I can't be reading novels when I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in. The hardest thing to do is keep the tone and your attitude over the course of a year or however long it takes.But when I'm writing short stories, which I will be doing shortly, I can read anything I like.
T.C. Boyle
#72. 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
#73. A novel must be a rich forest known at the start only by instinct.
Dawn Powell
#74. 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
#75. Writing a novel is a huge adventure; when it's going well it's more fun than fun. When it stutters to a halt put it aside. Go for a swim, go for a walk, take a week off. Don't panic or be afraid; you and your characters are in it together. Trust them to come to your rescue.
Deborah Moggach
#76. You need a theme in a picture book just as much or maybe even more than you need it in a novel.
Eve Bunting
#77. In weeks when I was writing a novel, I followed a five-day schedule, doing about thirty pages a day, so a typical Ace novel would take me six or seven days to write.
Robert Silverberg
#78. If you were a novel, you'd be an adventure of sadness and happiness and love lost in between.
Courtney Peppernell
#79. She could possibly hit the best-seller list if she sold it as a novel, though.
Shanna Swendson
#80. After you've been working fairly intensively on a novel for six months you never want to see the damn thing again.
Terry Pratchett
#81. When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.
Howard Gordon
#82. Don't be offended if you encounter some good-natured ribbing; the idea of
writing a novel in a month deserves to be laughed at.
Chris Baty
#83. A novel is an interminable effort. You think until you are weary. You write until you are ready to scream. You stop. You rest. But you have to get back to it. You have to pick up the threads, revive your enthusiasm, recapture the mood.
Frank Gruber
#84. My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#85. When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
John Irving
#86. Ironically, writing a novel is not a way to sort out your confusion.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#87. Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about.
Kurt Vonnegut
#88. Two people at a cocktail party. One turns to the other and says: "I'm writing a novel." The other replies, "Neither am I.
Private Eye
#89. I love reading novels, and I love going to movies, but I kind of hate going to an adaptation of a novel, and it starts off with a voiceover.
David Benioff
#90. While the music played a whole eternity went by like life in a novel
Boris Pasternak
#91. The flashbacks to Scout's childhood, persuaded me to write a novel from the point of view of the young Scout.
Anonymous
#92. When you write a novel, you make other people see your imaginary friends.
Tayari Jones
#93. When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.
John Irving
#94. For children: I'm writing a picture book about the Big Dipper and a novel about a cricket, a firefly and a vole. For grownups: I'm writing poems.
Kate DiCamillo
#95. Continuous present is all we have, and stream of consciousness - which in a novel is arguably just as artificial as the stilted dialogue that you get in most conventional novels. They're all stratagems to try to get closer to the texture of lived life.
Will Self
#96. Working on a novel is very solitary and I get to be the boss. I'm the dictator, so I win every battle. So, in that sense, novels are easier because you don't have to answer to anyone. And then, you go into something like film and there are more cooks in the kitchen, so to speak.
Nicholas Sparks
#97. A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.
Emma Donoghue
#98. I wrote a great deal of a novel, 'Winter's Tale,' on the roof of a Brooklyn Heights tenement on Henry Street. I was a technical climber, and now and then I would put down my manuscript and get up to walk along parapets and climb walls and chimneys.
Mark Helprin
#99. That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
#100. I thought it was a novel."
"It is."
"What's it about??"
"You'll have to buy it to find out, but it's got everything: love, death and an amusing dog."
"This one's got a recipe for apple crumble," I said.
"Don't you love that about the novel? The capaciousness?" he said.
Marcel Theroux
