Quotes About Writing Novels

#1. Writing novels is the most exciting.

Sidney Sheldon

#2. I'd probably still be a financial journalist now if it weren't for writing novels. Mmm. Fun! I'm much happier writing novels!

Sophie Kinsella

#3. I'm writing novels because I found something I love because I tried it. Don't be afraid to shake it up.

Adriana Trigiani

#4. How do I happen to believe in God? . . . Writing novels, I got into the habit of looking for plots. After awhile, I began to suspect that my own life had a plot. And after awhile more, I began to suspect that life itself has a plot. - FREDERICK BUECHNER

Sarah Arthur

#5. I obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world.

Mordecai Richler

#6. I wanted to be a writer, but the idea of writing novels or movies seemed really intimidating. I never got more than a few pages into one.

Kurt Busiek

#7. As a kid I wanted to write science fiction, and I was never without a book. Later I really got into being a scientist and never thought I'd be writing novels.

Daniel H. Wilson

#8. I'm never going to be a Tom Clancy. And I wouldn't really want to be - not that I have anything against him, and I wish him continued success - because that's not why I'm writing novels. I'm doing it because I have to. I feel like I have to, anyway.

Michael Chabon

#9. As for writing novels - it's what I've done for 30 some-odd years. I can't suddenly say I'm going to take up golf. I need something in my life. As long as I can write a coherent sentence, I'll keep at it.

Susan Isaacs

#10. The movies are fun, but I'm a novelist. In many ways, screenwriting is much easier than writing novels. I find screenplays twenty times easier to write than a novel.

Nicholas Sparks

#11. I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.

Haruki Murakami

#12. It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.

Zadie Smith

#13. I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.

Robert Harris

#14. I feel quite at home writing short stories but nervous and anxious when writing novels, as if the bad time of consecutive failures might arise again.

Charles Baxter

#15. Gavin said that writing novels with a PC was supposed to be easier than writing with a typewriter and bond paper, or with a pen and foolscap, or with a chisel and a granite obelisk imported from Greece. I shook my head with pity as he related this canard to me.

Gary Reilly

#16. My husband saw me go through the 2008 campaign cycle. We did it together for Sarah Palin and John McCain. It ended disastrously, and afterward I really wanted to do something different, so I started writing novels, and I imagined a fictional female president in my head.

Nicolle Wallace

#17. He has a frightening aversion to text messaging in general.
"It's a phone. It's for making calls, not for writing novels".

Patrick Carman

#18. My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

John Irving

#19. Writing novels is really all about making people think, and even more, making them feel things.

Mark Rubinstein

#20. I love writing novels, even if only a few thousand people read them. Here's my soul; I hope it appeals to your soul.

Mark O'Donnell

#21. Writing is writing. It's an abiding, wonderful talent, craft, gift that stays with you your whole life. And you can go in different forms, and you can try them. Look at me: I'm writing novels because I found something I love because I tried it.

Adriana Trigiani

#22. Writing novels allows you to create your own world.

Norman Shabel

#23. Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.

Thomas Harris

#24. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life.

David Mitchell

#25. In 25 years of writing novels, I've never had anything that felt like writer's block.

Richard Powers

#26. My purpose in writing novels is to expose man's inhumanity to man.

Carly Compass

#27. I've never taken any classes or had formal training in writing novels. At its most basic, I learned how to structure a novel.

Dennis Green

#28. I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.

Denis Johnson

#29. All my writing-life people kept telling me that I should stop writing short stories and start writing novels: my agent, my Israeli publisher, my foreign ones, my bank manager - they all felt and keep feeling that I'm doing something wrong here.

Etgar Keret

#30. I'm boggled by the idea of being an only child. I know nothing at all (I'm happy to say) about having had a cold and withholding mother, about being divorced. The more I've been writing novels, each novel I've written has become successively less grounded in anything approaching autobiography.

Anna Quindlen

#31. One of the things that made me try writing novels was I could take time off to be with the kids. That's the practical side of what I love about the writing life.

Simon Toyne

#32. I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

Alice Walker

#33. After these three novels I gave up writing novels for a time; I was dissatisfied with romantic doom, yet didn't see much way around it.

Nicholas Mosley

#34. I love reading and writing novels that don't fit nicely into a specific genre. But they also have to move. I want to be excited about each chapter, because otherwise why is it there?

Patrick Keithahn

#35. I wasn't one of those kids who dreamed of writing novels when I was 8 or 12. I wanted to be a film director. I wanted to make big action movies. I loved movies like 'Die Hard,' 'Predator,' 'Aliens,' 'Raiders of the Lost Ark.'

Matthew Reilly

#36. Writing novels is not an illness that need be recovered from. It is my work; it is what I do.

Shannon Winslow

#37. One of the things that I love about writing novels is that it really doesn't matter what next step you take as long as you're pursuing some intuition or instinct. Of course, then, intuitions or instincts don't make for great novels, but they often make for good first drafts.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#38. As well as writing novels and doing short-order journalism, I am also the full-time carer of my husband, who has Alzheimer's. Each day feels like a race that must be run.

Laurie Graham

#39. Mostly it's lies, writing novels. You set out to tell an untrue story and you try to make it believable, even to yourself. Which calls for details; any good lie does.

Anne Tyler

#40. The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them.

Robert Galbraith

#41. There's no lack of writers writing novels in America, about America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that huge number of people writing here when there are so few people writing about somewhere else.

Chinua Achebe

#42. When I'm writing novels, even screenplays, it's never an actor I have in mind; it's always the version in my head of who the character is. Once somebody gets cast, I have to adjust a little bit to who they are.

Jonathan Tropper

#43. If writing novels - and reading them - have any redeeming social value, it's probably that they force you to imagine what it's like to be somebody else. Which increasingly is something we all need to know.

Margaret Atwood

#44. I think it's harder than ever to be an artist. I think that you end up, especially as a middle-aged person, you pay such big consequences for saying, 'I'm just going to devote my life to making art,' or 'I'm going to devote my life to writing novels.' You end up with no resources.

Dana Spiotta

#45. I've found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience - both physical and mental - and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm, to keep myself focused on what I'm doing.

Paul Auster

#46. I love research. Sometimes I think writing novels is just an excuse to allow myself this leisurely time of getting to know a period and reading its books and watching its films. I see it as a real treat.

Sarah Waters

#47. Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.

Elizabeth McCracken

#48. Writing novels allows the novelist to spend much of his time in a fictional world, which is really the only or at least the most bearable place to be.

Javier Marias

#49. The most dangerous lie we tell ourselves is that writing novels shouldn't feel like a job.

Kameron Hurley

#50. Although I now spend most of my time writing novels for teenagers and adults, 'readaloudability' is still a criterion I try to adhere to.

Mal Peet

#51. I don't write poetry or short stories. I don't like to write articles usually. I tend to really only want to be focused on writing novels. It's one of the real advantages I've had over the years. I've only been good at one thing. It helps to be limited.

Markus Zusak

#52. Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable.

Lorrie Moore

#53. Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

Anita Brookner

#54. Writing novels is largely about endurance and patience. I take a lot of breaks, hit walls, and go do something else while I think things through. But I do it every day, and I try to treat it as a job, something that is not dictated by whimsy or muses.

Adam Mansbach

#55. In writing novels, you have to believe in yourself or there would be no way to sustain it. But you also have to give good evidence regularly for having that faith in self-either with quality goods or with, at least, "good efforts." Working hard will do when inspiration is not forthcoming.

Rachel Kushner

#56. Writing novels reminds me of being an awkward 15-year-old typing on a Commodore 64 in his bedroom, trying to be the next Stephen King.

Duane Swierczynski

#57. When I began making art, I just thought I liked it. As a woman who was placed in spaces with various conditions, conventions, and restrictions on self-expression, turning to art - whether visual art, writing novels, or writing articles - was to gain freedom from the space around me.

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook

#58. Writing novels takes up about 100% of my available working time.

Charles Stross

#59. The easy answer is that writing novels is a lot more fun than practicing law.

Jeffery Deaver

#60. I love writing picture books and story books because of the exciting, visual life that artists and illustrators give to them. And most of all, I love writing novels because of the inner, emotional journeys that they take me on. Hopefully, the reader comes with me!

Berlie Doherty

#61. There is ... a big aspect of play in writing novels, and making the story more and more elaborate is just more and more fun.

Gish Jen

#62. I never thought I would become amazing. I never thought I would be as great as my father. I would like to continue writing novels, and hopefully, at some point, I would like to make the switch from being 'Stephen Hawking's daughter' to 'novelist Lucy Hawking,' and that will be a fabulous day.

Lucy Hawking

#63. Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.

Jane Smiley

#64. Writing novels is a way of living alternative lives.

Melvyn Bragg

#65. I'm not writing novels, the screenplays are my novels, so I'm gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it'd almost be okay because I did it. It's there on the page.

Quentin Tarantino

#66. I love writing journalism because it's all over in two hours and comes straight off the top of the head. Writing novels is soooooo much harder. It's the hardest thing I've ever done.

Rachel Johnson

#67. All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.

Siri Hustvedt

#68. Structure is, for me, the most fun challenge about writing novels.

Heidi Julavits

#69. I must say, it was a lot easier writing novels than I thought it would be. I think it's because I'm a novelist at heart, and it took me a while to figure that out.

Maria Semple

#70. One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you've forgotten what happened.

Nina Bawden

#71. Journalism is a team sport. Writing novels is golf: it's you and the ball.

Pete Hamill

#72. The question one asks of the young writer who wants to
know if he's got what it takes is this: "Is writing novels what
you want to do? Really want to do?"
If the young writer answers, "Yes," then all one can say is:
Do it. In fact, he will anyway.

John Gardner

#73. I started writing novels by not thinking about actually writing a whole novel - that felt altogether too daunting. I thought out a rough idea, then wrote chapter by chapter, and then by the time I'd hit 40,000 words, it was a challenge just to see if I could get to the end.

Jojo Moyes

#74. I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going deep down into life and not caring a damn ...

P.G. Wodehouse

#75. There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress.

Elizabeth McCracken

#76. People assume that science is a very cold sort of profession, whereas writing novels is a warm and fuzzy intuitive thing. But in fact, they are not at all different.

Diana Gabaldon

#77. One of the unfortunate things about creative writing courses is that they make people impatient. People feel that they have prepared themselves and that they must now do it. In fact there are positive incentives for doing so - universities are offering degrees for writing novels.

Robert Dessaix

#78. It got to the point where most of my time went toward writing novels. I would still occasionally write short stories, but only when I was commissioned by an editor to write for a themed anthology or special issue.

Tim Pratt

#79. I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door, or at my uncle's, on the dining table.

Patrick White

#80. Writing screenplays is incredibly hard. I can't call it joy. Writing Novels? Joy. Directing? Joy. Writing Screenplays? That's where you pay all your dues.

Stephen Chbosky

#81. Character is character and voice is voice, which translates nicely from writing novels to writing TV. But the process is different. You have a writer's room, people pitch you jokes and you collaborate.

Jennifer Weiner

#82. I think there's a real connection between acting and writing novels because the way I write characters has a little bit to do with the method acting that I was taught in high school and college.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#83. I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

Joyce Carol Oates

#84. I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.

Alan Furst

#85. Writing novels is where I'm most comfortable. It's a very intimate experience.

Matthew Nable

#86. Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.

Neil Gaiman

#87. If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels.

Quentin Tarantino

#88. I started to write a series of fantasy novels when I was eleven. I have never taken anything artistic as seriously; since then, writing has felt like an attempt to get back there, to my bedroom, my maps, those races and languages and runes.

Ken Baumann

#89. In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.

Peter Temple

#90. Having read several prize-winning novels, Fancy was confident that she now knew the recipe:
1. Write a simple narrative.
2. Make a long list.
3. Scatter the contents of your list throughout your narrative.

Jaclyn Moriarty

#91. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.

Criss Jami

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

Randy Mitchell

#93. 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

#94. Architecture is a discipline that takes time and patience. If one spends enough years writing complex novels one might be able, someday, to construct a respectable haiku.

Thom Mayne

#95. You mean you don't fit characters into a plot? excatly ...

John Geddes

#96. When I write a book I'm always questioning the project as a whole. I always feel I might have to just throw it away and forget about it, and I've done that with novels I've started and worked on for a long time. It's an option I need in order to write freely.

Daniel Kehlmann

#97. For me, writing post-apocalyptic novels isn't so much about exploding helicopters and fifty-megaton doomsday bombs as it is about the pleasure of dealing with the best of everything that makes us human: cleverness, grit, loyalty, and self-sacrifice.

Jeff Carlson

#98. 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

#99. I have always loved to read, and now that I have penned 10 novels and a few magazine articles, I have fallen seriously in love with writing stories and seeing them go out into the world. It's magical, you know?

Dorothea Benton Frank

#100. I love how easy it is to run my business, Writing Workshops Los Angeles, with the help of email and my website. I love that I don't have to use cuneiform, a quill, or a typewriter to write my novels - I love to write on my laptop!

Edan Lepucki