Quotes About The 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. Do you know what it's like, to hide in the shadows until your soul starts to blend into the darkness?

Maverick Myth Novel

#6. I'm in that very preliminary stage of wondering how exactly to "pressurize" the novel in some way I've never considered before.

Mark Leyner

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. My first novel, 'The Lions of Lucerne,' just poured out of me. It was an amazing feeling of accomplishment. My biggest fear and therefore my biggest obstacle to becoming an author had been, 'What if I spend all that time and the book is no good?'

Brad Thor

#10. There were no stars, only the darkness and an arctic chill that had intensified since the first thin, blood-red stripes of sunrise shimmered on the ocean's horizon.

P.J. Parker

#11. 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

#12. I really feel the novel has certain conveniences about it and has something so fundamental about it you could almost say that as long as there is paper, there is going to be the novel.

William Golding

#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. Celebrating love, wherever it is found" (Trevor Dennis). I'm using this sermon title as the essence of my novel

Trevor Dennis

#15. The problem lies not with the characters within the novel, but with the reader itself.

Vladimir Nabokov

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. The West has given the world the symphony, and the novel.

Ibn Warraq

#19. Ever since the '70s, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were the godfathers of Scandinavian crime. They broke the crime novel in Scandinavia from the kiosks and into the serious bookstores.

Jo Nesbo

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

A.E. Samaan

#23. 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

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

Dani Shapiro

#25. My favorite novel in the world is Frankenstein. I'm going to misquote it horribly, but the monster says, "I have such love in me, more than you can imagine. But, if I cannot provoke it, I will provoke fear."

Guillermo Del Toro

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. No matter how many miles I move away, my love will always remain within the boundary of your heart
Lines from Love Vs Destiny ...

Atul Purohit

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

Bridget Allison

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. The great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.

Ellen Glasgow

#33. Intricately plotted, beautifully paced, The Music of the Spheres is an elegant historical novel rich in detail, at times Dickensian in its description of London. Elizabeth Redfern has made an exciting debut.

Martha Grimes

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

Rick Robinson

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.

D.H. Lawrence

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. Have the courage to analyze great emotions to create characters who shall be lofty and true. The whole art of the analytical novel lies there.

Paul Bourget

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. His kisses fed the slow burn of an ever-growing flame.

Carlyle Labuschagne

#59. 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

#60. I spent the period reading the first novel assigned for English. And wow. If I hadn't realized I was in France yet, I do now. Because Like Water for Chocolate has sex in it. LOTS of sex.

Stephanie Perkins

#61. 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

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

Margaret Atwood

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

Randy Mitchell

#64. 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

#65. I was twenty-seven when I came up with the idea for my first novel.

Jane Green

#66. When my cousin Anil-da started telling us what he'd heard at the market about the groom's family, at my aunt Moina-pehi's wedding in January 2002, his eyes shone like inky marbles reflecting sunlight.

Aruni Kashyap

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. '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

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. I may have one more 'Star Trek' novel in me, but it would be in the old universe, not the new one.

Diane Duane

#77. 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

#78. Wisdom tolerates blustered opinions, the better to dismiss them later with discovery.

John Pipkin

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

Michael Kroft

#80. The manager swiftly overtook him, sliding effortlessly past the skinny Englishman, with the practiced ease of someone used to slinking around ailing, despotic monarchs.

Tom Vater

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

Paul Morris Segal

#82. Our souls need music, Robert, as our bodies need touch.

Gaelen Foley

#83. 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

#84. Suffering is tossed by handfuls over the multitudes, with most of it falling on some people and little or none of it on others.

Jose Luis Peixoto

#85. 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

#86. 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

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

Rick DeStefanis

#88. The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.

W. H. Auden

#89. People have asked me why I made the first chapter of my first novel so long, and in an invented English. The only answer I can come up with that satisfies me is, 'To keep out the scum.'

Alan Moore

#90. The novel is always pop art, and the novel is always dying. That's the only way it stays alive. It does really die. I've been thinking about that a lot.

Leslie Fiedler

#91. A novel is a great act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess. From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.

Pat Conroy

#92. He wrote a novel, The Moon Is Down, for a precursor to the CIA,

John Steinbeck

#93. A love story is not the same as a romance novel. A romance novel is the story of two people falling in love against their will. This is a story of two people who leave each other against their will. It starts to end the minute they meet.

Tiffany Reisz

#94. For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know.

Anthony Marra

#95. Love is the connection between souls synchronized through heart beats.
Quote from my upcoming book 'Always Be MINE

Neha Daraad

#96. A spectacular novel of colonial China that should put this first-time author on the map." - Kirkus Reviews

Milena Banks

#97. It was 1981. I was working on a novel. And I put that novel aside one day after I read a newspaper article. The story said there were 19 women still on the pension payroll who were Confederate war widows. They were women who very early in their lives had married very old men.

Allan Gurganus

#98. If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.

Don DeLillo

#99. That's the exciting part about capitalism. It's like surfing, you have to catch the wave. - Martin Peter (aka Vermin Gobsmack)

Jamie Delano

#100. The kiss wove between gentle and frenzied, liquid and greedy, silken and primal, and he sucked every second of bliss he could from the forbidden pleasure.

Jami Gold