You Novel Quotes

#1. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really.

Philip Roth

#2. I'll write to you. A super-long letter, like in an old-fashioned novel

Haruki Murakami

#3. The Loon Charm

To A Life Filled with A Love Whose Voice Always Calls You Home

Viola Shipman

#4. In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

Salman Rushdie

#5. Well,if there's nothing else you ladies need in the library, Sophie, would you care to accompany me on a walk about the grounds?
I wondered if there were ever times when Dad didn't sound like he'd just escaped from a Jane Austen novel.

Rachel Hawkins

#6. With a novel, you're the director and the screenwriter and everything else, except that you have to write it knowing it will all be performed inside the head of the reader. So it's a difficult and lonely task.

Jason Henderson

#7. You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career.

Hilary Mantel

#8. The privilege is not writing a novel, it's to have someone read it. When you look at it that way, you realize the responsibility you have to put your very best on the page.

Javier A. Robayo

#9. I have thought of you much, and have shared with you in thought much that has been elevating, stirring, and gay, so much so that it has been like living with my dear friends. If only you know how novel and strange that seems to an old hermit like me? How often it has made me laugh at myself!

Friedrich Nietzsche

#10. Perhaps that is why the novel flourished in England. You had these communities that would stay put and people would see one another all the time and cause one another to change and have the opportunity to observe the changes over time.

Tobias Wolff

#11. If I talk about my father's funeral, as I did when I was promoting the last novel, 'Being Dead,' I'm not going to tell any lies, but there are certain things I'm not going to tell you, and I'm certainly not going to tell my grief.

Jim Crace

#12. You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.

Thomas Harris

#13. Would any of you like to share your career aspirations within the class? Jim?

I dunno, to be honest, I was just hoping to be able to keep the demons away...

Jillian Tamaki

#14. I see the same sky above me, the same stars and moon, but nothing will ever be the same for me, because I love you." Whoever said love was grand evidently had never been in love.

D.F. Jones

#15. A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.

Walker Percy

#16. Mr Saramago, would you like to know my humble opinion of your novel?'

He replied immediately, 'No, no, no. Not at all. Don't bother yourself. I absolutely don't want to know your opinion.

Mohammed Achaari

#17. When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.

Norman Mailer

#18. You can get rid of the column. It's a little like staying at a hotel; you get used to the shape of the room, and then you're gone. With a novel you move into town and stay for a long time. That's both comforting and terrifying.

Anna Quindlen

#19. I went into journalism in a grandiose way. I thought maybe I'd do a little journalism whilst I write the great novel of all time you see
one has to keep oneself afloat.

Neal Ascherson

#20. A weapon is merely a weapon, nothing more. What matters is how you use it.

Kaoru Kurimoto

#21. And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.

Tobias Wolff

#22. 'The Dice Man' is an anti-establishment cult novel, and you don't normally make studio films from such dark comedy material.

Luke Rhinehart

#23. The job of the novel is to be true to the confusion, but not so confusing that you turn the reader off.

Nicholson Baker

#24. The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don't say 'I read a science fiction novel that says it's not a problem.' You take action.

Al Gore

#25. Awake and asleep the novel is with you, dogging your footsteps. Strange formless bits of material float out from the ether about you and attach themselves to the main body of the story as though they had hung suspended in air for years, waiting.

Edna Ferber

#26. What you want to do is talk about ideas, you write a novel, you have a lecture about those ideas. Satire and comedy are really the only film mediums where you can get into ideas and have people leave the theater without being moralized.

Justin Simien

#27. It costs so much to make films. With a novel, you can write the whole thing on a ream of paper from Staples for $4.

Ruth Ozeki

#28. I brought you something. It's my sister's coat. It
gets cold in Nashville in the wintertime.

Nancy B. Brewer

#29. I used to think that: whenever I heard that someone had taken 10 years to write a novel, I'd think it must be a big, serious book. Now I think, 'No - it took you one year to write, and nine years to sit around eating Kit Kats.'

Ian Rankin

#30. You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?

Peter Watts

#31. When you start a novel, it is always like pushing a boulder uphill. Then, after a while, to mangle the metaphor, the boulder fills with helium and becomes a balloon that carries you the rest of the way to the top. You just have to hold your nerve and trust to narrative.

Jim Crace

#32. Reading a great novel gives the same feeling you have when you fall in love.

Luigina Sgarro

#33. Like I've told you before, Beverly, I don't care where we live as long as we're together." Vance ... "The Elder Effect

D.L. Given

#34. If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn't concern the central issues, it wouldn't be worth publishing.

Alan Paton

#35. 'War and Peace' goes down a lot smoother than a Dan Brown novel, let me tell you.

Dave Morris

#36. Horror and supernatural novels give you a lot of what you look for in a crime novel, just with a twist that was very fresh for me as a reader.

Michael Koryta

#37. The only wand you'll ever need is a better-feeling thought.

C.G. Rousing

#38. You can't sort of write the novel as if you're taking dictation from heaven.

Martin Amis

#39. Great wealth could make an enormous difference over the next decade if they sensibly support the scientific elite. Just the elite. Because the elite makes most of the progress. You should worry about people who produce really novel inventions, not pedantic hacks.

James D. Watson

#40. What are you reading?"
She replied without once taking her eyes off the page. "I am reading the sort of sentimental novel men dismiss as rubbish but could actually stand to learn a thing or two from."
"That's an awfully long title," he remarked dryly.

Maya Rodale

#41. post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven asks that question, then it asks another: What would you then try

Anonymous

#42. Can you imagine how many people got laid in here? Abby said, walking to the other side of the Jacuzzi.

J.C. Joranco

#43. I thought you'd be interested in these things as a government man. Ain't you mixed up in the prices of things we eat or something? Ain't that it? Making them more costly or something. Making the grits cost more and the grunts less?

Ernest Hemingway,

#44. My first novel was called 'Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald,' about the difficulties of graduating from college, the longing and mourning you feel when all your promise seems to float away.

Ron Carlson

#45. You have to wait for your mind to catch up with whatever it is it's working on; then you can write a novel.

James M. Cain

#46. [Mark] Twain is pointing at you. You, the reader of the book one hundred and thirty years ago and today. That is what has made it a great American novel and the most widely read book in American Literature around the world today.

Hal Holbrook

#47. I am obsessed with story. I had a late awakening in life. In college was the first time that I understood what you could do with a story and what a good novel is - literary value and subtext and irony and everything.

Shane Carruth

#48. Have you come to terms with what's going to happen between us?

N.D. Jones

#49. Out in the field, any connection with home just makes you weaker. It reminds you that you were once civilized, soft; and that can get you killed faster than a bullet through the head.

Henry Mosquera

#50. - Why would the man who never takes vacations suddenly have a desire for one?

- Because I have a desire for you.

Barbara White Daille

#51. 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

#52. A novel has to entertain
that's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page.

Barbara Kingsolver

#53. In a novel, even if you put a country in the wrong hemisphere, which I've done, I can always claim it was part of the additional weirdness of the story.

Nick Harkaway

#54. Writing a successful novel is a great challenge, and you have to be a bit of a poet, a bit of a critic, a bit of a dramatist, a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a social scientist, to pull it off.

Anis Shivani

#55. Can you write 200 words a day? 100? 50? In six months, 50 words a day is 9,000 words. That's 2-3 short stories. If you did 200 words every day, in three months that's 36,000 words. That's half a short novel.

Holly Black

#56. I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

Hilary Mantel

#57. A lot of times, the inspiration for a novel is a messy bird's nest of shiny things. Little things that don't make a whole lot of sense or that, no matter how hard you look, cannot be found directly in the finished book.

Molly O'Keefe

#58. Katherine Heiny's work does something magical: elevates the mundane so that it has the stakes of a mystery novel, gives women's interior lives the gravity they so richly deserve
and makes you laugh along the way.

Lena Dunham

#59. If you write a novel where war is nothing but hell and no one experiences excitement or cracks a dark joke, then you're not actually admitting the full experience.

Phil Klay

#60. You do not win a war by dying for your country. You win a war by making sure that some poor bastard dies for his.

Mal Peet

#61. I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life.

Iris Chang

#62. You are accidentally leaving your DNA all over everything in a novel because it's all coming from you.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#63. If it takes you seven years to write each novel, you need a patron. And I would rather have my corporate self as my patron than any arts council or bestower of grants.

Mohsin Hamid

#64. We're taking it a hundred miles north.
That's a hundred miles closer to where you are.
I've decided units and measurements of distance are bullshit.
With you there are only two distances that matter:
Here.
Not here.
You are not here.

Penny Reid

#65. 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

#66. Do you know what a journalist is? Someone who hasn't written a novel yet.

Lavie Tidhar

#67. 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

#68. When you have a novel set in a fictional history, you still should get your history right.

Kurt Busiek

#69. Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.

Sarah Dessen

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. You'll have more power when you aren't angry. Anger sucks your energy. It makes you weak and distorts your focus.

A. Valentine Joseph

#74. I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.

Ernest Cline

#75. 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

#76. My next novel will be the third volume in the John Dies at the End series, and in fact may already exist, again depending on when you're reading this.

David Wong

#77. To be shockingly original with your first novel, you don't have to discover a new technique: Simply write about people as they are and not as the predominantly liberal and humanist literary establishment believes that they ought to be.

John Braine

#78. You never learn how to write a novel," he told me. "You only learn to write the novel you're on." He

Neil Gaiman

#79. Don't start writing your novel until you know your characters very, very well. What they'd do if they saw somebody shoplifting. What they were like at school. What shoes they wear. Spend days - weeks, months - being them until they thicken up and start to breathe.

Deborah Moggach

#80. In order to make the novel into a polyhistorical illumination of existence, you need to master the technique of ellipsis, the art of condensation. Otherwise, you fall into the trap of endless length.

Milan Kundera

#81. She meant you have to live a story for a time.'
'And?'
'And then you can write it, in time. What have you lived?'
'Kind of a personal question for Twitterland.'
'Kind of the perfect question to answer in fiction.

L.L. Barkat

#82. I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.

Richard Flanagan

#83. When you're writing a novel - at least the way I write is I work from what I would call 'emotional atmosphere,' ambiance to ambiance.

Oscar Hijuelos

#84. You can catch a scent in the wind - an idea, or a concept - and follow it. You can delve into your subconscious and see what happens, in a way you just can't when you're writing a novel.

Lynn Coady

#85. Eventually, I decided that if I was going to really write a novel, I couldn't do it in New York City while holding down a job. You need a constant money source to live in New York City unless you're independently wealthy, which I'm not.

Rachel Kushner

#86. You write your first novel with the desperation of the damned. You're afraid that you'll never write anything else, ever again.

Patricia Duncker

#87. With any novel that you begin, you can't foresee how difficult or easy it's going to be, and you can't really prepare yourself. You just have a take it one step at a time and know that it's all right to keep going - you can always fix it.

Jane Smiley

#88. The first teacher, the first kiss, and the first crime. I've always been hindered by my dislike for repetition. The first time you do anything, it's creative, but from then on it's just work.

Elizaveta Mikhailichenko

#89. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#90. Probably writers should forget what it was like to write the last novel, and the one before that, and the one before that, or we should all be plumbers. It must be good to be a plumber. Everyone is happy to see you, and no one reviews your work.

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

#91. Could you people stop trying to come up with novel ways to kill me for just ONE HOUR? Or maybe the rest of the night? I would SO like that. Just the rest of the night. Just sit down. Just stop doing anything. Sit down and wait sensibly. Earth, water, air, fire - you're running out of elements here!

Lois McMaster Bujold

#92. Kinda ' makes it hard to be a super hero when you ain't got nothin' to work wit', ain't it?

Randolph Randy Camp

#93. I think predictability is built into any good novel in some way - you begin reading Anna Karenina and you know pretty much what's going to happen at the end. But that doesn't mean you know what's going to happen in the middle. For me, it's that sense of what happens in the middle that's important.

Scarlett Thomas

#94. Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

Penelope Lively

#95. You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it.

Donna Tartt

#96. You do not have to dramatize everything. In fact, you usually can't, not without ending up with a half-million-word novel.

Nancy Kress

#97. You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of your audience. You write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen the things that intrigue you

Bret Easton Ellis

#98. Andi Teran's first novel is vivid and fully realized, an entire universe expertly condensed into the pages you hold in your hands. Ana herself is a complicated delight, and by the end of the book I wanted to scoop her up into my arms.

Emma Straub

#99. Do we really mean it when we say 'in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, until death do us part or do we add a silent clause, 'unless you shame me or disappoint me?' What is the cost of unconditional love and how capable are we of giving that?

Deirdre-Elizabeth Parker

#100. You know, nice guys finish last, don't you?"
"I guess I'll finish last.

Jalpa Williby