Quotes About A Novel

#1. I always find the first thing that really bothers me when I start a screenplay is, I have to find a different form. You can't follow the form of the novel. It's a different thing completely. It's impossible. You just somehow have to find a structure for the whole thing. You have to crack that.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

#2. My first novel, 'Leaving Atlanta,' took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African-American children dead.

Tayari Jones

#3. People who shop at Barnes and Noble voted Ulysses the best novel of the last century, and who's to tell them different? There was a point when I would have liked to, but apparently that's just because I'm a bitch.

Dale Peck

#4. 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

#5. I try to write about a woman finding her self-respect, valuing herself, and liking herself again. But what one desperately wants now is to write a proper novel.

Kate O'Mara

#6. Perhaps, more importantly, I think that most human beings realise only a fraction of the true potential of their minds, so the spiritual or mystical, the things which remain mysterious or unexplained have always drawn me to include them in any scheme for a novel.

Rose Tremain

#7. 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

#8. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#9. Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.

Bret Easton Ellis

#10. What could be more boring than a novel that tells you how to think about everything that happens in it?

Jonathan Dee

#11. I'm good with a grill. I like to make cheeseburgers - I once read in a David Goodis crime novel that you're only supposed to flip a burger once.

Noah Baumbach

#12. 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

#13. Rome had freed the Greeks, but on condition that both war and class war should end. Freedom without war was a novel and irksome life for the city-states that made up Hellas; the upper classes yearned to play power politics against neighboring cities, and

Will Durant

#14. Grade A objectivity won't come from those who are closest to us. It will come from outsiders. That's where we'll find divergent thinking, unexpected questions, novel ideas, differences of opinion, and added expertise.

David Sturt

#15. The truth is, you have about three paragraphs in a short story, three pages in a novel, to capture that editor's attention enough for her to finish your story.

Nancy Kress

#16. I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.

Ernest Cline

#17. Last week I was just someone who had had a first novel published.

Jon McGregor

#18. A novel I read when I was about 17 or 18 - 'The World According to Garp,' by John Irving - really made me want to become a writer. The character of Garp is a novelist, and at the time, the whole lifestyle of being a writer was hugely appealing to me.

John Niven

#19. I have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.

Peter Carey

#20. There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.

Paul Auster

#21. Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel.

Carl Clinton Van Doren

#22. You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff.

David Foster Wallace

#23. Edward Bellamy's eugenic utopian novel, "Looking Backward" was the inspiration for American Progressivism.

A.E. Samaan

#24. If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

V.S. Naipaul

#25. Sex was the main component of her thoughts now. But love - and her desperate longing for it - had vanished from her heart like a migraine after a painkiller.

Augustine Sam

#26. When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#27. Maggie Shipstead takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go. Astonish Me is a haunting, powerful novel.

Dani Shapiro

#28. Every novel presents a slice of life. A noir policier for example presents one slice, one that perhaps addresses social dysfunction or some sort of pathology, while mine present a slice that is more upbeat and affirmative.

Alexander McCall Smith

#29. I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.

Robert Hass

#30. the fundamentally paradoxical ways that our very subjectivities are constituted: as cultural scripts, as texts written before us as us. It is confusing being a novel, a piece of fiction that considers itself a simple fact.

Whitley Strieber

#31. Awoke to find three vultures sitting on the fence. Realizing they were a portent of impending death I shot them.

Bridget Allison

#32. Put simply the novel stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. There is no other medium in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character. That is the service a novel renders.

William Golding

#33. When I write a novel, I want it to be completely different from a screenplay. I'm very conscious of the difference, and I want novels to work purely as novels. Otherwise I don't see how they'll survive - why don't we just all go to the movies or watch television.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#34. For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.

Charles Palliser

#35. I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.

Francois Mauriac

#36. Currently she was midway through a bittersweet David Nicholls novel that any other time might well have made her self-indulgently reflective.

Freya North

#37. I tried to write a coming of age novel, but I wasn't deep enough to get past the third chapter.

Rick Robinson

#38. I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.

Guy Gavriel Kay

#39. You'll have more power when you aren't angry. Anger sucks your energy. It makes you weak and distorts your focus.

A. Valentine Joseph

#40. I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.

Anthony Trollope

#41. Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.

Bret Easton Ellis

#42. Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina is a coming-of-age novel about Ruth Ann (Bone) Boatwright and a difficult childhood made even harder by her violent and predatory stepfather.

Nancy Pearl

#43. In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.

Jane Smiley

#44. When I give myself over to a good novel, I surrender to the truths fashioned from one writer's heart, mind and soul. I do not waste a nanosecond wondering whether what I'm reading 'really happened.'

Julia Glass

#45. Many people have a novel inside them, but most don't bother to get it out.

Jodi Picoult

#46. I don't have a lot of time. I can give a poem a couple of lines, a short story a paragraph, and a novel a few pages, then if I can stop reading without a sense of loss, I do, and I go on to something else.

Flannery O'Connor

#47. As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know.

Nancy Kress

#48. If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.

John Irving

#49. Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word.

Charles Stross

#50. If we think of the novel and the epic ... The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero
a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character.

Jorge Luis Borges

#51. Hardly anything is as exciting or as diverse, as strong a confirmation of life and hope and the universe's urge towards creativity, as a lively compost heap or the first draft of a novel.

Margaret Simons

#52. Life is like a Ferris wheel, going 'round and 'round in one direction. Some of us are lucky enough to remember each trip around." From: Yesterday - A Novel of Reincarnation

Samyann

#53. When readers close the covers on 'Running the Rift,' I want them to understand that it is not a genocide novel but rather a story of hope and rebirth.

Naomi Benaron

#54. I started a novel in the back of a notebook, and it was great because it looked like I was taking notes. And I just, I kept it up, it was sort of fantasy, it was part soap opera. It was utterly dreadful, but that's how I got hooked.

Jacqueline Carey

#55. One has to be just a little crazy to write a great novel

John Gardner

#56. Eucalyptus. Murray Bail. Someone told me that this was a great novel so I bought it, but then I discovered that it was great Australian novel so I put it away. I find it difficult to get to grips with Australian novels. Difficult, but not impossible.

Susan Hill

#57. A novel is not a rant.

Rachel Kushner

#58. We the Living is not a novel 'about Soviet Russia.' It is a novel about Man against the State. Its basic theme is the sanctity of human life - using the word 'sanctity' not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of 'supreme value.'

Ayn Rand

#59. In the second grade, I would just get bored and a joke would pop into my head and I would have to say it. It was almost like I had some brilliant novel in my head that I had to get down, and I would interrupt class all the time and get in trouble.

Anthony Jeselnik

#60. Only another writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It's an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself.

Norman Mailer

#61. The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

Rose Tremain

#62. I think that the joy of writing a novel is the self-exploratio n that emerges and also that wonderful feeling of playing God with the characters. When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish ... I think the most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.

Erica Jong

#63. If John somehow turns into a different man and we do not witness that transformation, the editor considering your novel will somehow turn into an editor considering a different novel.

Howard Mittelmark

#64. Mum was thinking 'bout going back to study creative twatting writing. She had a novel in her, whatever the fuck that meant. She was going to do all the stuff that having me when she was twenty had stopped her from doing. She said I'd made her tits little and taken away her identity.

Caroline Smailes

#65. 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

#66. If I use the word 'khichdi' in my novel, I don't have to get into the trouble of explaining that it is a dish of rice and lentils. My Indian readers know it.

Ashwin Sanghi

#67. Reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.

Ann Patchett

#68. I think each time you start a story or novel or whatever, you are absolutely at the bottom of the ladder all over again. It doesn't matter what you've done before.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#69. One can't found a novel theology on Nothing, and nothing is so secure a foundation as a contradiction.

Gene Wolfe

#70. I think the novel is the American form because people read it in private, and the only valuable things that happen in America happen in private life, because public life is a dead loss.

David Hare

#71. It's not as if I knew answers which I am going to set down in the form of a novel or a memoir or a sermon. It's, rather, I'm going to search myself for what I might have to say in this area.

Frederick Buechner

#72. I had written a novel that was more of a classic linear novel, and I worked on it and worked on it for years, and it always seemed like it wouldn't catch fire. At a certain point I just scrapped it all, and I kept maybe 15 percent of it, and I wrote those parts out on note cards.

Jenny Offill

#73. Every novel is-at the beginning-the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space.

Margaret Atwood

#74. I wrote a graphic novel called 'Soul Stealer' with big, beautiful, epic artwork by Chris Shy. It grew into a trilogy.

Michael Easton

#75. Life is like a friendship, eventually it will end, by conflict or God's hand"
-Sons In The Clouds

Randy Mitchell

#76. It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.

Lawrence Durrell

#77. I would never condone the burning of a Dan Brown novel, much though I loathe and detest his work. Well, I say work, you know, words, randomly arranged to form millions of dollars ... I'm not bitter at all ...

Bill Bailey

#78. I don't talk about my books while I'm writing them: not even my husband knows what a novel's about until it's done.

Sarah Dessen

#79. A magical blending of mystery, romance, and deep and dangerous secrets. Kelly Parra's Invisible Touch is an action-packed coming-of-age novel, sure to keep readers turning pages and begging for a sequel.

Laurie Faria Stolarz

#80. Every once in awhile you find a novel so magical that there is no escaping its spell. The Night Circus is one of these rarities - engrossing, beautifully written and utterly enchanting. If you choose to read just one novel this year, this is it

Danielle Trussoni

#81. To be a classic, a novel should be original.

Ruth Rendell

#82. I spent three and a half years writing the novel 'Chang & Eng,' about the conjoined brothers for whom the term 'Siamese twins' was contrived, and when I think of these afflicted people, my only emotion is one of profound sympathy.

Darin Strauss

#83. I've come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.

William Golding

#84. Liminality may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but as in some sense the source of them all, and, more than that, as a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise

Victor Turner

#85. I knew that we'd have a big following because the graphic novel [ The Walking Dead] is so popular, and I knew that with Frank Darabont and Gale Ann Hurd at the helm that we were doing something very special.

Laurie Holden

#86. 'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.

Sue Monk Kidd

#87. Having the urge to write a novel, especially if you've yet to be published, is like having a medical condition impossible to mention in polite company - it's a relief simply to know there are fellow-sufferers out there.

Robert Harris

#88. Mankind is focused on earth; he is mostly interested in stupid things like wars or ideological absurdities. What he has to do is to concentrate on the universe, because the universe is a cosmic novel that he must read fully, that he must understand fully and that in the end he must rewrite it!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#89. She could not see what good it would do anyone to read a novel of this kind. Yet she was writing it.

Doris Lessing

#90. What I love is how pissed off Jane Eyre is. She's in a rage for the whole novel and the payoff is she gets to marry this blind guy who's toasted his wife in the attic." -Angela Argo "Blue Angel

Francine Prose

#91. If I was to write a novel about the paranormal, I think I would want to use a ghostwriter for greater impact.

Michael Kroft

#92. Perhaps the whole of life is a continuous
interconnecting of miracle,
but we don't always realise it.

Paul Morris Segal

#93. It is a novel constructed like a poem, where each character is only exceptional because if the hyperbolic manner in which he represents generality.

Victor Hugo

#94. Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.

Sarah Dessen

#95. When you have a novel set in a fictional history, you still should get your history right.

Kurt Busiek

#96. Today's world needs a workforce of creative, curious, and self-directed lifelong learners who are capable of conceiving and implementing novel ideas. Unfortunately, this is the type of student that the Prussian model actively suppresses.

Salman Khan

#97. 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

#98. For better or worse, whether it is a sign of aesthetic complexity or of intellectual indecision, this novel [Frankenstein] offers equally fertile ground to those readers who like their meanings ambiguous and indeterminate and to those who prefer to discern a deeply important doctrine.

Richard T. Nash

#99. Truth has a resonance to it that fills the cracks where falsehoods lie.

Rick DeStefanis

#100. Are you sorry? Do you wish you could do it all again and go off and write novels instead of being a teacher?
No. You can't trade what is for what might have been.

Lurlene McDaniel