Top 100 Quotes About Novel Writing
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. I'm trying to get every man involved in art, into experimental music, or painting, or novel-writing.
Harvey Pekar
#4. I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs.
Jess Row
#5. Because - and don't let anybody tell you different - novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy.
Richard Russo
#6. Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.
Richard Powers
#7. I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.
William Faulkner
#8. The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.
Wilkie Collins
#9. Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.
C.S. Forester
#12. Novel writing is World Building & Word Weaving (Neil Postman's terms).
J.M. Varner
#13. It was failing part of my Ph.D. that led me into novel-writing. By then I was 29, had remarried and had a second baby. It struck me that I'd lost my path in life and I felt frustrated. That's when I started to write.
Kate Atkinson
#14. The recent extraordinary discovery in Photography, as applied in the operations of the mind, has reduced the art of novel-writing to the merest mechanical labour.
Lewis Carroll
#15. There were no absolutes in fiction, no certain way to deliver what was needed. So it was no surprise most technical writers considered novel-writing a gateway to madness.
S.A. Reid
#16. I binge write. I think it's because I started seriously writing by participating in National Novel Writing Month, an online-based challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days.
Erin Morgenstern
#17. NaNo[ National Novel Writing Month] is an awesome opportunity to stretch your writing muscles and gives you permission to write in a way you probably wouldn't do in a normal circumstance.
Michelle J. Howard
#18. There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.
Khaled Hosseini
#19. Anybody can do research. The plotting of the novel, writing the ending before you write anything else, which I always do - I don't know that everybody can do that. That's the hard part.
John Irving
#20. Novel writing is like heroin addiction; it takes everything you've got.
James N. Frey
#21. I naively thought I would quit television writing, move up to Seattle, my novel would come out, and then I'd have a novel writing career, and so I found myself really stuck in this very poisonous self-pitying state and felt like I'd never write again. And I blamed Seattle for that.
Maria Semple
#22. The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.
Winifred Holtby
#23. 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
#24. Novel writing, to me, is all about language: choosing your words, finding the characters within the words and just really agonizing over every word. It's really crafting this whole piece from nothing.
Jonathan Tropper
#25. I don't think I knew that you could be a novelist. I think a lot of my students are in the same condition. I thought it was unreachable, that it was sort of dead people. It took me a long time - I think I was well into novel writing before I really thought, 'Actually, this is a valid pastime.'
Rachel Cusk
#26. Novel-writing is a settling, lovely space. I call it self-indulgent - I feel mildly guilty about it.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
#27. Novel writing is the slowest art form in the world. It is not a sprint. It is not even a marathon. It is a series of marathons that stretch over and over across a continent.
Mohsin Hamid
#28. Laura thought Bell would have a few things to say to Pynchon. And Laura had a few things to say to Bell, like, How the hell was a writer supposed to know when she was one-fifth through her novel-writing, so she could cut a door into the wall and shove her character out into the forest?
L.L. Barkat
#29. Novel writing is a kind of private pleasure, even if nothing comes of it in worldly terms.
Barbara Pym
#30. Not getting bored of my own story and/or character is one of the main struggles I have had with novel writing, and I have put to bed big chunks of work that just didn't sustain my interest.
Aimee Bender
#31. Drawing and painting is like a quickie in bed. Were as novel writing is a long term relationship, much more fulling.
Tara Dobbs
#32. Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.
Tom Perrotta
#33. Writing is wretched, discouraging, physically unhealthy, infinitely frustrating work. And when it all comes together it's utterly glorious.
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) Pep Talk
Ralph Peters
#34. Novel writing is World Building & Word Weaving (Neil Postman's terms).
J.M. Varner
#35. Novel writing seems an altogether less intimidating occupation when one considers that one only need produce a small tale.
Charlie Lovett
#36. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, film has been a shadow thrown over the minds of all novelists. Ever since, novelists have strained to make themselves more relevant and, whether consciously or not, novel-writing has been influenced by cinematic doctrines - by turns, embracing and defying it.
Matthew Pearl
#37. Novel writing should never be confused with journalism. Unfortunately, in the case of Primary Colors, a fair number of journalists confused.
Joe Klein
#38. Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.
Rick Moody
#39. I wish every American explored the importance of novel writing, identity, honesty, character and place in fresh-ass ways.
Kiese Laymon
#40. Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That's the way I do it, anyway.
Joseph O'Neill
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.
Ernest Cline
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.
Francois Mauriac
#48. 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
#49. Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.
Bret Easton Ellis
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Life is like a friendship, eventually it will end, by conflict or God's hand"
-Sons In The Clouds
Randy Mitchell
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. She could not see what good it would do anyone to read a novel of this kind. Yet she was writing it.
Doris Lessing
#62. Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.
Sarah Dessen
#63. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. I want to write a novel so profound that it would suffocate a fly.
Gao Xingjian
#71. Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
Oscar Wilde
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W. Somerset Maugham
#77. The whole process of writing a novel is having this great, beautiful idea and then spoiling it.
Diane Johnson
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. Want to know what it feels like when your soul bleeds? Write a novel.
Carl Henegan
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.
John Le Carre
#90. Two characters and sexy banter do not a book make, damn it.
Sherry Thomas
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.
Alain De Botton
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. There is no better way to learn how to write than by writing a novel.
Lawrence Block
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