Z A Novel Quotes

#1. He believed, as I did, that we are helpless to resist or influence what our hearts are bound to do. - Z - A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

Therese Anne Fowler

#2. 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

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

Vladimir Nabokov

#4. 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

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

Ernest Cline

#6. Every goodbye calls for preparation, but most times, life takes us by surprise.

Elisabetta Gnone

#7. Last week I was just someone who had had a first novel published.

Jon McGregor

#8. 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

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

Ibn Warraq

#10. I have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.

Peter Carey

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

Trevor Dennis

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff.

David Foster Wallace

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

A.E. Samaan

#16. If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

V.S. Naipaul

#17. The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel - one that reads like a mystery to most people. They're not going to learn slash q-z any more than they're going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.

Steve Jobs

#18. The novel 'World War Z' is told from the perspectives of so many people - speaking to the narrator - that there's no way a movie could capture all of them. Still, the idea of turning a zombie pandemic into a war story is fascinating and could have translated easily to film.

Annalee Newitz

#19. It was a dark and stormy night. . .perfect for staying indoors and writing a novel!

Z

#20. I mean, every novel's a historical novel anyway. But calling something a historical novel seems to put mittens on it, right? It puts manners on it. And you don't want your novels to be mannered.

Colum McCann

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

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

Maverick Myth Novel

#27. 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

#28. I try to write about a woman finding her self-respect, valuing herself, and liking herself again. But what one desperately wants now is to write a proper novel.

Kate O'Mara

#29. 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

#30. Grade A objectivity won't come from those who are closest to us. It will come from outsiders. That's where we'll find divergent thinking, unexpected questions, novel ideas, differences of opinion, and added expertise.

David Sturt

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.

Bret Easton Ellis

#35. What could be more boring than a novel that tells you how to think about everything that happens in it?

Jonathan Dee

#36. I'm good with a grill. I like to make cheeseburgers - I once read in a David Goodis crime novel that you're only supposed to flip a burger once.

Noah Baumbach

#37. 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

#38. 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