Top 100 Quotes About Novel
#1. I don't think Ireland has ever had a genius for the novel. Of course, there were plenty of Irish novels, but I don't think that was ever the natural means of expression for the Irish.
Lady Gregory
#2. I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.
Mary Karr
#3. I have some art, but I am a hobbyist. I would not consider myself an expert but in the course of writing this novel I became very familiar with the various movements in American Modern Art from 1900 onwards.
Nicholas Sparks
#4. Melville locked himself away in his room for months while working on 'Moby Dick.' If I ever decide to write a novel, I hope someone will take pity on me and take me out to dinner instead.
Marge Simon
#5. Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.
Lynn Abbey
#6. Working on an essay versus a novel is like the difference between seeing to that curtain and seeing to New Jersey.
Sloane Crosley
#7. I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking, 'I really want to write a novel.'
Amy Waldman
#8. To make a love story, you need a couple of young people, but to reflect on the nature of love, you're better off with old ones. That is a fact of life and literature - and of the novel ever since it fell in love with love in the 18th century.
James Buchan
#9. I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I've learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself.
Michael Cunningham
#10. If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don't they will feel betrayed.
Mordecai Richler
#11. Make your novel readable. Make it easy to read, pleasant to read. This doesn't mean flowery passages, ambitious flights of pyrotechnic verbiage; it means strong, simple, natural sentences.
Laurence D'Orsay
#12. The Eleventh Plague hits disturbingly close to home An excellent, taut debut novel.
Suzanne Collins
#13. The two most common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased wickedly and that it taught nothing, had broken down before the discovery, except in illiberal sects, that the novel is fitted both for honest use and for pleasure.
Carl Clinton Van Doren
#14. Don't try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.
Ray Bradbury
#15. Every journalist has a novel inside him, which is an excellent place for it.
Russell Lynes
#16. To write a novel is to dream a story and write it down on the page. That's why the power of a really good story is one of true magic. Good stories engage the reader utterly in the writer's dream so the dream becomes theirs, too.
Wendy J. Dunn
#17. I, alas, must present myself somewhat ignominiously as a chef in a busy kitchen. Somewhere a novel is bubbling on a back burner, an old attempt at history may come out of the freezer.
Theodore White
#18. John Irving once told me he doesn't start a novel until he knows the last sentence. I said, 'My God, Irving, isn't that like working in a factory?'
Tom Robbins
#19. The reader is always looking for two things in the novel: themselves and transcendence.
Walter Mosley
#20. I start with theory rather than people. I don't like novels which have no theoretical or philosophical underpinning. I hate the contemporary novel where people just sit and talk to each other about their relationships.
Neel Mukherjee
#21. But if you needed to HAVE AN IDEA, boredom could be to a roadblocked novel what chemotherapy was to a cancer patient.
Stephen King
#22. ...in search of my creative muse while writing a novel.
Atlas Brown
#23. A novel is a collision of ideas. Three or four threads may be floating around in the writer's consciousness, and at a single moment in time, these ideas collide and produce a novel.
Anita Shreve
#25. A good novel is the biography of an imaginary person--and when the biography is completed, the person is no longer imaginary; he is as real as his creator
William Edmund Barrett
#26. Ideas come from all over, but as I write more and more, I find I'm always hunting for mood: I want to write a novel with a pervasive mood that sticks with you after you close the cover.
Maggie Stiefvater
#27. Writing a novel is so hard, and there are so many problems that the last thing you're thinking about is adapting this mess you have on your hands as a movie. You just want to get it to work as a novel. That's your main focus.
Maria Semple
#28. I think that it's important to try to keep reality. I think that Gabriel Garcia Marquez speaks a lot about reality in his magical realism. So I don't think we have to be hyper-realistic. But we have to understand the pressures that undergird the lives of the characters within that novel.
Walter Mosley
#29. By far my most popular novel, and one that allows me to join the small company of "respectable" writers whose fiction deals with the American West: Cormac McCarthy, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Tom Lee and a handful of others,
Larry McMurtry
#30. I certainly incorporate facts into my fiction. I take the basic facts from the life of my subject and I pick and choose what to use to construct a really interesting novel. I don't let facts get in the way of my imagination and my exploration of the subject's emotions and relationships.
Melanie Benjamin
#31. It was only after five years in the army, when I was having to do a very boring job in a very boring place, that I thought: 'Why not try writing a novel?' partly out of youthful arrogance and partly because there had been a long line of writers in my mother's family.
Antony Beevor
#32. If this were a novel, I'd stop reading right now. I'd throw it across the room.
Gabrielle Zevin
#33. I can't imagine how American readers will react to a novel, but if the story is appealing it doesn't matter much if you don't catch all the detail. I'm not too familiar with the geography of nineteenth century London, for instance, but I still enjoy reading Dickens.
Haruki Murakami
#34. Writing doesn't get easier. Every novel is a first novel.
John Le Carre
#35. I was a little bit wary of playing Nicholas. In the script, which I think is true of the novel and the film, he's the only character not singing and dancing in a musical style. Playing someone who is the personification of good is a little difficult.
Charlie Hunnam
#36. I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.
Winston Churchill
#37. I couldn't ever write a straight crime novel: there'd be an intrusion of weirdness at some point.
Alastair Reynolds
#38. his look was both self-congratulatory and full of cynical cruelty. I came home, conscious of a feeling of disgust so much more powerful than usual that I sat down and made myself read the novel for the first time since it was published.
Doris Lessing
#39. The storyline of a fantasy novel is filled with such a sense of enchantment, beauty and strangeness; it allows the writer to explore the big ontological questions of life that would sound like a sermon in a social realist novel.
Kate Forsyth
#40. It is much easier for me to define what makes a novel French or Russian, but defining the characteristics of an Australian novel are difficult for me as it is all too close - I can't see the woods for the trees.
Robert Dessaix
#41. I don't know how it is with other writers, but most of the time when I finish [reading] a story or novel, I may be pleased, I may even be impressed, but somewhere in the back of my mind I'm thinking, I can do that.
F. Paul Wilson
#42. The facts of life are to the biographer what the text of a novel is to the critic.
Victoria Glendinning
#43. After writing each novel, I would spend days poring over suggestions from my editor.
Ashwin Sanghi
#44. Daytime Bartender Moonlights as a madman. Now there's a novel,
Kimberly Bettes
#45. I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.
John Irving
#46. You say fate is almost indispensable to literature - I think it's completely indispensable, at least in a novel, because a novel always has a plot. Even if nothing happens, even if someone just spends a day walking around Dublin, or whatever, there's still something going on.
Daniel Kehlmann
#47. Most of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do - really felt like I had to do if I was going to write another novel - was move towards something like sincerity.
Ben Lerner
#48. I think reading a novel is almost next best to having something to do.
Margaret Oliphant
#49. Unfortunately, this is so obviously a convention of bad fiction that it might as well read, 'Looking in the mirror, Joe saw a tall, brown-haired man, trapped in a poorly written novel.
Howard Mittelmark
#50. The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.
Norman Mailer
#51. The new novel is sought more eagerly, and devoured more greedily, the New Testament.
Thomas Guthrie
#52. I think with 'Chunky Rice,' it felt novel to me to give this emo twist on these funny animals.
Craig Thompson
#53. My poems tend to have rhetorical structures; what I mean by that is they tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There tends to be an opening, as if you were reading the opening chapter of a novel. They sound like I'm initiating something, or I'm making a move.
Billy Collins
#54. When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel ... you have to listen to it.
Jim Crace
#55. It doesn't matter how a novel was printed. What matters are the words in between the pages.
Giuseppe Bianco
#56. I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.
Natalie Goldberg
#57. The High Divide, a novel about a family in peril, is haunting and tense but leavened by considerable warmth and humanity. Lin Enger writes with durable grace about a man's quest for redemption and the human capacity for forgiveness.
Benjamin Percy
#58. If I'm hanging around too much, my wife and kids say, 'Hey, why don't you go downstairs and start a new novel?'
Nick Cave
#59. My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool.
Junot Diaz
#61. I want to be an art-hero - I want to change the form of the novel.
Jeanette Winterson
#62. I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.
Aleksandar Hemon
#63. Steve Yarbrough is a masterful storyteller-one of our finest-and Safe from the Neighbors is a masterpiece ... This is a spellbinding, powerful novel.
Jill McCorkle
#64. He also offered a novel and, to my mind, worthy suggestion, that the league could benefit from replacing some of the tired heavy metal that is pumped into arenas with a little old-school Michael Jackson. "That would get me fired up," he said.
Anonymous
#65. It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.
Don DeLillo
#66. No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?
Milan Kundera
#67. I only did about one novel a year while I was working full time, but since 1993, I've averaged two and a half books a year.
L.E. Modesitt Jr.
#68. My first novel, 'You Lost Me There,' has been described as a beach read. Tough bracket, beach reads. There's not much room for mistakes when you're competing against the sun for a person's attention.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#69. (which has inspired at least one novel, Apostolos Doxiadis's Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture29).
John Derbyshire
#70. I've always felt that the traditional novel doesn't give you enough information about the narrator, and I think it's important to know the point of view from which these tales are told: the moral makeup of the teller.
W.G. Sebald
#71. when it comes to the novel you have to work long and hard even to produce a bad one.
Anonymous
#72. I try to keep up with what's being done in every field, and most children's books are ten times more enjoyable than the average American novel right now.
Ray Bradbury
#73. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (whose mother died ten days after she was born) wrote a novel that anticipates Semmelweis's discovery and serves as a parable for the destructive power of decaying matter.
Laura Mullen
#74. The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change.
"A Clockwork Orange Resucked" intro to first full American version 1986
Anthony Burgess
#75. What, then, shall a Catholic Christian do ... if some novel contagion attempt to infect no longer a small part of the Church alone but the whole Church alike? He shall then see to it that he cleave unto antiquity, which is now utterly incapable of being seduced by any craft or novelty.
Vincent Of Lerins
#76. I wrote a novel in my early twenties; I won a high school prize - my short story got published, and I got 50 dollars, which was a huge deal.
Sue Miller
#77. Many years from now when your children ask what New York City was like just after 9/11, this will be the book you give them in response. It's an exquisite novel full of heart, soul, passion and intelligence, and it's the one this great New York author was born to write.
Lee Child
#78. Few people in one's life ever go quite away. They turn up again like characters in a Simon Raven novel. It is as if Fate is a movie producer who cannot afford to keep introducing new characters into the script but must get as many scenes out of every actor as possible.
Stephen Fry
#79. Photography intervenes in a very strange way. It makes the streets, gates, squares of the city into illustrations of a trashy novel, draws off the banal obviousness of this ancient architecture to inject it with the most pristine intensity ...
Louis Aragon
#80. When life gives you lemons, turn them into a bestselling novel!
Breathless
#81. I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam.
Tracy Kidder
#82. Get thee to the novel! - the novel, that word-woven submarine, piloted by intimation and intuition, that will dive you to the deeps of the heart's maelstrom.
Cynthia Ozick
#84. The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.
Sylvia Plath
#85. Sometimes I imagine life itself as merely a long preparation and waiting, a long darkness of growth toward these adventures of the spirit, a picaresque novel, so to speak, in which the episodes are all inward.
May Sarton
#86. 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! How
Elizabeth Strout
#87. It may sound surprising, but a joke and a crime novel work in very much the same way. The comedian/writer leads their audience along the garden path. The audience know what's coming, or at least they think they do until they get hit from a direction they were not expecting.
Mark Billingham
#88. Even though the method of 'Harvest' was a historical novel, its intentions were that of a modern novel. I'm asking you to think about land being seized in Brazil by soya barons. It's also a novel about immigration.
Jim Crace
#89. A good novel is an out-of-self experience. It lifts you off the ground so that you have the sensation of flying. It says, 'Look at the world around you; learn from the people in these pages, neither quite me nor quite you, how life is lived in so many different ways.'
Julia Glass
#90. 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
#91. When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
John Irving
#92. Ironically, writing a novel is not a way to sort out your confusion.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#93. The sign of a good novel is what it can cause its reader to see, even if this lies beyond the author's own vision.
John Gaddis
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. Mad cow disease is caused by a prion, a weirdly folded protein molecule that triggers weird folding in other molecules, like Kurt Vonnegut's infectious form of water, ice-nine, in his great early novel Cat's Cradle.
David Quammen
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. It almost feels like a movie or a- I know it's been said many times - that cable television is the new novel kind of thing - but it does feel like that.
Christian Cooke
#100. When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.
John Irving
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