Top 100 Quotes About Novel Writing
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.
Ernest Cline
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.
Francois Mauriac
#8. 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
#9. Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.
Bret Easton Ellis
#10. One of the notebooks was for musings and pep talks. ... The other notebooks were for writing out the novel the way authors had done for centuries.
Gail Godwin
#11. Writing one's first novel, getting it sold, and shepherding it through the labyrinths of editing, production, marketing, journalism, and social media is an arduous and nerve-wracking process.
Paul Di Filippo
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Life is like a friendship, eventually it will end, by conflict or God's hand"
-Sons In The Clouds
Randy Mitchell
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. The best novels capture the times in which the writer lives, which accounts for the current, if contrasting taste for lost utopias and dystopian nightmares peopled by vampires and wolves.
Chloe Thurlow
#21. She could not see what good it would do anyone to read a novel of this kind. Yet she was writing it.
Doris Lessing
#22. Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.
Sarah Dessen
#23. Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.
Elizabeth Bowen
#25. People should know better than to be an ass in front of writers. We immortalize things. Lots of things. And we take liberties with character descriptions.
Michelle M. Pillow
#26. One of the things about writing a novel is you can do it any way you want. It's your voice that's important and I see absolutely no reason why a screenplay can't be the same. It makes it a hell of a lot easier when you're the writer and the director.
Quentin Tarantino
#27. A logic proof is: you get a starting point and an ending point, and you have to get there through all these different steps and tautologies. I approach novel writing that way. When I get to the end I have to go back and connect everything.
Heidi Julavits
#28. While passing through an obscure nook of Notre Dame cathedral, Victor Hugo noticed the Greek work for fate carved in the stone. He imagined a tormented soul driven to engrave this word. From this seed sprang his monumental novel "The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Alexander Steele
#29. 10% of authors earn 75% of the royalties. If you're writing a Romance novel, your odds will be slightly higher at making back your investment. Throw in a few vampires, even better.
J.R. Young
#30. The writing in Mission to Paris, sentence after sentence, page after page, is dazzling. If you are a John le Carr fan, this is definitely a novel for you.
James Patterson
#31. I want to write a novel so profound that it would suffocate a fly.
Gao Xingjian
#32. Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
Oscar Wilde
#33. Well, when I was a young writer the people we read were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And to begin with, I was a bit of a copycat writer and very derivative and tried to write a novel using their voices, really ... I keep it out of print.
Mordecai Richler
#34. Writing the middle of a novel is a lot like driving through Texas. You think it's never going to end, and the scenery looks the same.
Carolyn Wheat
#35. Martin: Yes, I'd like to go home and do some work. I'm writing a novel about women from the women's point of view.
Caryl Churchill
#36. I've been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.
Andrew O'Hagan
#37. This is all you have to do. Sit down once a day to the novel and start working without internal criticism, without debilitating expectations, without the need to look at your words as if they were already printed and bound. The beginning is only a draft. Drafts are imperfect by definition.
Walter Mosley
#38. There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W. Somerset Maugham
#39. The whole process of writing a novel is having this great, beautiful idea and then spoiling it.
Diane Johnson
#41. Sometimes I write less than I'd like but do research. Other times, editor's notes or a copy-edited manuscript or page proofs for a forthcoming novel mean that I need to put my attentions elsewhere for a day or two, but I always come back to writing.
Jane Lindskold
#42. 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
#43. Writing a novel, in an unplanned and unpredictable way, makes you engaged; it takes you into yourself, and it becomes something between you and the character for a moment, and then you move back into the structure of the book. I love those moments, because they are completely unbidden.
David Bezmozgis
#44. Want to know what it feels like when your soul bleeds? Write a novel.
Carl Henegan
#45. My writing process hasn't changed - it's is the same whether I'm working on a Y.A. novel or, as now, a new novel for adults. A lot of reading, a lot of research if the subject warrants it, a lot of sticky notes and scraps of paper - and get to work.
Kathe Koja
#46. 131/ Writing a novel is like having a baby. I know because I've had both, and the experiences were hellish. By comparison, the torture of the damned - plunged into excrement, boiled in blood, beheaded, set upon by harpies - are like love nips from your yippy little dog.
Kim Addonizio
#47. 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
#48. Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.
Martin Amis
#49. The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law.
(Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel, 1949)
Raymond Chandler
#50. However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.
Helen Dunmore
#51. There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.
John Le Carre
#52. Two characters and sexy banter do not a book make, damn it.
Sherry Thomas
#53. Writing a novel mimics what we bring to our journey of life. God is the great editor who purges the faulty, the awkward, and all the bits that are just plain wrong, so the optimal story can finally emerge.
Denise M. Baran-Unland
#54. The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself.
Robert Walser
#55. One of the things he liked about playwriting as to any other kind of writing is that a playwright is a w-r-i-g-h-t, not a w-r-i-t-e; in other words, that a playwright is more of a craftsman than an artist of the big novel.
Simon McBurney
#56. I'm trying to get every man involved in art, into experimental music, or painting, or novel-writing.
Harvey Pekar
#57. I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.
Alain De Botton
#58. I was not exploiting any real individual's story in writing ROOM, of course I was aware that my novel, by commenting on such situations, would run the risk of falling into those traps of voyeurism, sensationalism and sentimentality.
Emma Donoghue
#59. I would be perfectly willing if a publisher came up to me and said, "I need a novel about underwater Nazi cheerleaders and it has to be 309 pages long and I need fourteen chapters and a prologue.
Michael McDowell
#60. I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs.
Jess Row
#61. Many different substances, as distinct to the practiced eye as stone and wood, go to the making of a novel, and it is necessary to see them for what they are.
Percy Lubbock
#62. A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.
John Irving
#63. Writing a novel in general is like trying to reach a mountain top you'll never quite reach - so you try again and maybe get a little closer.
Harlan Coben
#64. There is no better way to learn how to write than by writing a novel.
Lawrence Block
#65. The good thing about writing a novel is that you're creating an imaginary world and can take a break when you need to.
Liane Moriarty
#66. Just keep writing, and try to finish that novel. Remember, all authors started exactly where you are right now; the only difference between a published author and a non-published one is that the published author never stopped writing.
Julie Kagawa
#67. I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business.
The day you die.
Yasunari Kawabata
#68. You don't market-research a novel; you really are writing it for yourself. It's a hobby, in many ways. The problem becomes what you do when you're confronted by criticism. You just don't listen to it.
Bret Easton Ellis
#69. I never think about a movie when I'm writing a book, because I think only two things could happen and both of them are bad. You write a lousy novel and a lousy film.
Don Winslow
#70. I've written short stories in first person, but you have so much more control writing in third person. Third person, you know what everybody's thinking. First person is very limiting, and I could never sustain a first person novel before.
Tamora Pierce
#71. I think authors are just realizing there's no real reason to feel limited to a narrow set of genre rules in their writing. There's no reason a mystery novel can't have fantastic elements in it. Similarly, there's no reason why your epic fantasy series can't have elements of a mystery.
Patrick Rothfuss
#72. Your understanding and interpretation of [a novel] is undoubtedly unique ... and that is the real beauty of the relationship that joins readers, books and writers together in a literary trinity - a bookish triumvirate.
Briar Kit Esme
#73. The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she - the author - should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#74. There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. ( ... )
A good novel editor is invisible.
Terri Windling
#75. I can get really obsessive. I like writing many drafts, and I try not to because it is very time-consuming, especially when you're working on a novel. But I do like to take a story and reorder it, put things in different places. This allows me to see things in a new and sometimes surprising way.
Carol Windley
#76. I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.
Alice Hoffman
#77. When I'm writing a novel, which is what I like to write, I get up early, sit zazen, make a pot of green tea. I wear wrist cuffs to keep my wrists warm and minimize irritation from extended contact with the surface of my desk. I sit down and write.
Ruth Ozeki
#78. To write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.
Virginia Woolf
#80. Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom.
David Mamet
#81. My first novel is loaded with food references largely because my cupboards were bare, and I was writing hungry.
Jan Karon
#82. As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.
Avijeet Das
#83. My boyfriend suggested I write two pages a day. He wouldn't take me out if I hadn't done my two pages. That's how I wrote my second novel.
S.E. Hinton
#84. Many of us would not make terribly interesting characters in a novel.
Claire Wingfield
#85. 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
#86. Writing a successful novel is a great challenge, and you have to be a bit of a poet, a bit of a critic, a bit of a dramatist, a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a social scientist, to pull it off.
Anis Shivani
#87. The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life.
Angus Wilson
#88. You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more."
("The Castle")
Michael Connelly
#90. 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
#91. For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel,
Alice Munro
#92. To make it interesting and worth doing, writing a novel has to be a leap into the unknown. I have to be unsure if I can write it; otherwise, I won't want to.
Charles Palliser
#93. You talk books away," he said; "why don't you write one?" "I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal.
Oscar Wilde
#94. You must write as if Dostoyevsky himself will be reading your novel, and Shakespeare will be acting it out.
Christina Westover
#95. Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.
Flannery O'Connor
#96. I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was constantly by my side while I was writing it, who was the good fairy of my equilibrium, who banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of certainties ...
Salvador Dali
#97. A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.
Lorrie Moore
#98. If possible, I'd like to avoid that kind of literary burnout. My idea of literature is something more spontaneous, more cohesive, something with a kind of natural, positive vitality. For me, writing a novel is like climbing a steep mountain, struggling up the face of the cliff,
Haruki Murakami
#99. Because - and don't let anybody tell you different - novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy.
Richard Russo
#100. When well executed, description is unobtrusive and lends substance to a novel. It is the body fat of prose: too much is unhealthy, but without any, you no longer have the thing - you have its skeleton.
Howard Mittelmark
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