Top 100 Quotes About Writing A Novel
#1. Writing a novel that crosses genres is a risk, but one well worth taking.
Chet Williamson
#2. At the time I begin writing a novel, the last thing I want to do is follow a plot outline. To know too much at the start takes the pleasure out of discovering what the book is about.
Elmore Leonard
#4. Writing a novel is a lot like directing a movie because you are creating a world and a tone, you are creating a large canvas and all the details.
Stephen Chbosky
#5. I spent four of my five years at Stanford writing a novel I was unable to sell.
Scott Turow
#6. I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go.
Ron Rash
#7. I do write a lot of prose. It's not disciplined enough yet that it's actually become stories, or short stories. The idea of writing a novel seems impossible.
PJ Harvey
#8. The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.
Jane Smiley
#10. When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.
Neil Gaiman
#11. Plot is tremendously important to me: I can't stand books where nothing happens, and I can't imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder.
Ned Beauman
#12. I think I liked writing a novel better. Obviously, it's more rewarding. It's that marathon thing where it sucks when you're doing it, but you're proud of yourself at the end, and you've done it, and at the very least, nobody can take that away from you.
Drew Magary
#13. I had just begun an M.A. in Creative Writing, and I had to write a novel, so I began writing a novel that later became 'A Life Apart.'
Neel Mukherjee
#14. I've never been good with deadlines. My early novels, I wrote by myself. No one knew I was writing a novel; I didn't have a contract.
George R R Martin
#15. Part of the work of writing a novel is to uncover the symmetries or connections that make it whole, which might not reveal itself at first.
Nicole Krauss
#16. Sometimes I say that writing a novel is the same as constructing a chair: a person must be able to sit in it, to be balanced on it. If I can produce a great chair, even better. But above all I have to make sure that it has four stable feet.
Jose Saramago
#17. The best way to keep your house spotless is to begin writing a novel.
Jen Knox
#18. I never conceived of not writing a novel. I believed - oh, God, I believed, it was an article of faith! - I was born to write a novel.
Cynthia Ozick
#19. I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel.
Tom Lehrer
#20. There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.
C.S. Forester
#21. There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters.
Anthony Burgess
#22. Writing a novel takes creativity. Publishing it takes courage
M.L. Kilian
#23. For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. But I don't intend my novels as puzzles. I intend them as invitations to dance.
Mohsin Hamid
#24. I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).
Umberto Eco
#25. Writing a novel, I am making is an object that has a life and identity of its own, apart from me.
Jay Neugeboren
#26. Maybe I would have become an actor. I was a very outgoing kid, but being in the hospital - being outside of social action for so long - turned me into an observer. Actually, right after I got out of the hospital, I did start writing a novel, but the book was so transparently about me that I stopped.
Brent Runyon
#28. If you're gonna use simile, analogy, metaphor, be descriptive and have some flowery adjectives and a few odd nouns and some engaging bits of dialogue or sentiment, then you're sort of writing a novel, really. But rock lyrics are not really known for their sophistication.
Ian Anderson
#29. The disgusting face of things alone was not enough for writing a novel: without imagination it would seem not a true face but a mask.
Elena Ferrante
#30. There comes a point when you're writing a novel when you're in it so deep that the life of the novel becomes more real to you than life itself. You have to write your way out of it; once you're there, it's too late to abandon.
Hanya Yanagihara
#31. Whether I'm in front of the camera, behind the camera, at my computer writing a novel or a screenplay, as long as I get to entertain someone out there, I'm happy.
Chris Colfer
#32. For me, writing a novel goes on for years, and the solitude goes on, too. It tends to swallow me at times. I know it's a problem when my husband sends the dog in to retrieve me.
Sue Monk Kidd
#33. When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.
William Gibson
#34. Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.
J.G. Ballard
#35. It is said that in every Persian carpet there is an error created by the weaver to avoid making a mockery of the belief that only Allah is perfect. Writing a novel is the quest for a perfection every writer knows can never be achieved, but is obliged to Set out to write a masterpiece.
Chloe Thurlow
#36. Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.
Steve Bisley
#37. The task of writing a novel is to imagine a world
a world that first exists as a picture before it eventually takes the form of words. Only later do we express through words the picture we imagine, so that readers can share this product of the imagination.
Orhan Pamuk
#38. While writing a novel I almost completely stop reading books in the same sub-genre for the duration.
Charles Stross
#39. I started writing prose before I started writing television. Then 'Breaking Bad' came around, and to me, writing 'Breaking Bad' is like writing a novel each season. So it's been very creatively satisfying writing for the show.
George Mastras
#40. I'm going to write a novel and get it published. I'm going to do it because writing a novel is worthwhile and because I have the talent to do it.
I'm going to do it because I have something important to say to the world.
I refuse to let anything get in my way.
Randy Ingermanson
#41. Sometime early in life, I developed the notion - one which I have never relinquished - that writing a novel is the very finest thing a person can do.
Irvin D. Yalom
#42. Writing a novel is the closest thing a male writer will ever get to the experience of childbirth.
Norman Mailer
#43. For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life.
Haruki Murakami
#44. Late night is no different than making a film, really, except that it's faster, and if you do a crap one, you can do a better one tomorrow. Writing a novel and doing stand-up - that stuff is very similar.
Craig Ferguson
#45. I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don't. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It's a hard way to learn to write. I don't recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.
Andrea Barrett
#46. Writing a novel is like running a marathon. Selling one is like building a castle. You gotta do it one brick at a time.
Charles R. Hall
#47. There's a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog - and that was Eric also, what a little monster he was! - in a novel, even if I took it directly from life, it would be fiction.
Paul Auster
#48. I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel. I showed her four or five chapters of what would become 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' and to my surprise she auctioned them off.
Kate Atkinson
#49. Having written for film and television, I had little interest in turning 'The Good Father' into a Hollywood thriller. I was writing a novel, and novels demand that the writer goes deeper, both emotionally and thematically.
Noah Hawley
#50. You come out of your MFA program with a cogent clutch of stories, trying to get an agent interested, and she or he admits these are quality, sure, but this agent actually needs something the publisher can make money on. So you get kind of bullied by the market into writing a novel.
Stephen Graham Jones
#51. I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.
James Salter
#52. What I found interesting writing a screenplay as opposed to writing a novel is not the obvious thing, which is having to pare everything down and find the kind of essence, the skeleton if you like, which can then be fleshed out by performance and cinematography.
Salman Rushdie
#53. Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.
Salman Rushdie
#54. It was a dark and stormy night. . .perfect for staying indoors and writing a novel!
Z
#55. Writing a novel proved to be the hardest, most self-analyzing task I had ever attempted, far worse than an autobiography: and its rewards were greater than I expected.
Dick Francis
#56. I never plan. I never know what the next page is going to be ... But that's the fun of writing a novel or a story, because I don't know what's going to happen next.
Haruki Murakami
#57. I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.
Teju Cole
#58. Writing a novel is like knocking on a door that will never open. You are so desperate to get in, you will say or do anything. You feel: please take my novel.
Samantha Shannon
#59. Anyone who works in the arts knows, if you're writing a novel or a play or anything, you have to be ready for someone to say, 'Your time is up.'
Colm Toibin
#60. I enjoy the research element. There are so many stories from the past that interest me, that I want to learn more about, just as an interested person. And if I'm going to learn, if I'm going to research, it's probably going to lead me to writing a novel.
John Boyne
#61. When I'm writing a novel, I'm usually just trying to write about things that are interesting to me.
Ruth Ozeki
#62. In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.
Raymond Chandler
#63. ...in search of my creative muse while writing a novel.
Atlas Brown
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it's been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you're letting the novel make its own shape, and you're putting into it the pleasure of creation, which is intoxicating.
Martin Amis
#67. 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
#68. Ironically, writing a novel is not a way to sort out your confusion.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#69. Don't be offended if you encounter some good-natured ribbing; the idea of
writing a novel in a month deserves to be laughed at.
Chris Baty
#70. When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.
Howard Gordon
#71. In weeks when I was writing a novel, I followed a five-day schedule, doing about thirty pages a day, so a typical Ace novel would take me six or seven days to write.
Robert Silverberg
#72. Writing a novel is a huge adventure; when it's going well it's more fun than fun. When it stutters to a halt put it aside. Go for a swim, go for a walk, take a week off. Don't panic or be afraid; you and your characters are in it together. Trust them to come to your rescue.
Deborah Moggach
#73. Writing a novel is always complicated, it's not like you snap your fingers and go, 'Ah, I know what I'll write'. For me, a lot of the time, I have to write and as I write, I learn about the story.
Reif Larsen
#74. I can't be reading novels when I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in. The hardest thing to do is keep the tone and your attitude over the course of a year or however long it takes.But when I'm writing short stories, which I will be doing shortly, I can read anything I like.
T.C. Boyle
#75. I sometimes start keeping a journal about the writing process itself. Particularly when I get the ideas, and I am trying to brood over the chaos phase. In writing a novel, you really have to brood over a lot of chaos of ideas and possibilities.
Sue Monk Kidd
#76. Writing a novel about World War II and the French Resistance was a challenge both sobering and thrilling.
Bobbie Ann Mason
#77. I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel.
M.J. Rose
#78. The business of writing a novel is a long, meandering road into the self, into the imagination. And it's a road the writer travels alone.
Lisa Unger
#79. We are material creatures who spend much of our lives on material pursuits (even building a cathedral or writing a novel requires stone and mortar or paper and ink).
Virginia Postrel
#80. The monotony of staying in one place is the best thing for writing a novel. Having regular habits, a kind of security, but especially no big surprises, no shocks.
Paul Theroux
#81. And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.
Sandra Cisneros
#82. Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. Sometimes you run over a drunk who's lain down and fallen asleep on the warm pavement. I mean, do you keep going, or what?
E.L. Doctorow
#83. Writing a novel and living a life are very much the same thing. The secret is finding the balance between going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way.
Ann Patchett
#84. To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you ... a truth ... that used to elude you.
Norman Mailer
#85. Writing a novel is like going a great distance to take a small shit.
Harlan Ellison
#86. You can only look forward to a South Dakota winter if, as with childbirth, remodeling a house, or writing a novel, you're able to forget how bad it was the last time.
Dan O'Brien
#87. Writing a novel was completely awesome because parts of it could suck and I could throw them away. I didn't have to know the ending until I got there.
Austin Grossman
#88. You want the greatest trick for writing a novel? Here it is: imagine urgently whispering your story into one person's ear - and only one. This one visualization will clarify every word choice you make.
Julianna Baggott
#89. I quickly realised that it is difficult to get started when writing a novel. You have this dream of what you want to create, but it is like walking around a swimming pool and hesitating to jump in because the water is too cold.
Patrick Modiano
#91. I've always been ambidextrous, writing short stories and novels, and I pretty much have been writing a novel and a handful of short stories every year since '91.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#92. Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel.
That would fix a lot of people.
Sylvia Plath
#93. The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.
Ernest Hemingway,
#94. Writing, and especially writing a novel, where you get to sit in a room by yourself with either a pen and a paper or a computer for a couple of years, is a very solitary occupation. You can read sales figures - a hundred thousand books sold, half a million books sold - but they are just numbers.
Neil Gaiman
#95. I wanted to find something I could do at home. I sat down with a friend and made a list of all the things I could try, and one of them was writing a novel.
Sara Sheridan
#97. Writing a novel is like heading out over the open sea in a small boat. It helps, if you have a plan and a course laid out.
John Gardner
#98. I've discovered as an author that the process of writing a novel becomes harder over time, not easier. I used to think the reverse must be true, that it would be like any task, and the more I practiced, the more adept I'd become.
Tawni O'Dell
#99. What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that.
Nicholas Sparks
#100. When I was 23 and about to go to law school, I thought I'd spend the summer writing a novel.
John Casey
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