Novel Quotes

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

The novel moves like all the arts. It's transforming itself all the time.

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking, 'I really want to write a novel.'

My new novel 'Red Hook Road' began many years ago as a short article in the newspaper.

I think I would explode in flames of irony if I were to option an idea that I was satirizing in a novel.

The first seven years that I wrote fiction, I sent out stories and a novel and made a total of $25.

The way this whole novel thing came together was, I sold them one bill of goods and then didn't communicate very well. I am like Captain Run-on Sentence.

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.

I sold my very first novel when I was 24 or 25 years old.

No novel is a clone of any preceding one, though with a background cast of characters and things that has grown to thousands, there are many familiar aspects.

It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.

I did not know at first that it would be a series; I discovered after the first novel that I had more to say about it, so I did another. And another, and then the readers demanded yet more.

The novel is a penetrating study of morals and ethics.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?

In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.

I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.

The impulse of the journalist is to be novel, yet to relate his curiosities to the urgencies of the moment; the philosopher seeks what he conceives to be true, regardless of the moment.

I wrote the worst novel ever.

I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'

Well, the research into it affected me. And the novel, it very much strengthened my faith.

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas.

There's never a false note in a Berg novel.

If you have to deal with our friends at ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it's like a Kafka novel. Files just disappear.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Comics seldom move me the way I would be moved by a novel or movie.

A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don't want to see how it was made.

Oh you know, I've been writing a novel.

The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.

Some writers can produce marvelous plots without planning it out, but I can't. In particular I need to know the structure of a novel: what's going to happen in each chapter and each scene.

A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.

If I'm going to invest the time in a novel, I want something more than the entertainment you get out of most genre fiction.

I've had a lot of books rejected in my time. My first novel, which didn't get published, was, with hindsight, crashingly dull.

Novel writing wrecks homes.

I invented the historical spy novel.

The Pacific Northwest, and particularly Whidbey Island, is extremely suited to be a location in a novel.

The theory of founder effects does not explain how novel features like plumage traits arise.

A scrupulous man will never produce a great novel.

Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.

The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.

I couldn't resist hiding some historical details and a few clues relevant to the plot and characters of 'A Discovery of Witches' throughout the pages of the novel.

The financial markets tend to be just a backdrop for a novel, for a heist or something that isn't necessarily integral to it. On the whole, I don't think the financial world has been well served by novels.

It was my angry, Dickensian novel, I suppose. It was cathartic - I expended a lot of frustration on that one.

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

'Annapurna' is a sort of novel. It's a novel, but a true novel.

Writing a story is kind of like surfing, as opposed to the novel, where you use a GPS to get somewhere. With surfing, you kind of jump.

I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam.

What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.

When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks.

I don't fret over lost time - I can always use the situations in a novel.

Only in a novel are all things given full play.

I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love.

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

There is no better way of elevating the novel than by making it into a construct which contains ideas.

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

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

When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.

Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.

The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

Publishers send me a lot of first novels because my first novel was the defining novel of my career, and I guess a lot of people want my benediction or something.

My first novel took 12 years to complete because life got in my way.

Before trying a novel I wrote a couple of plays.

A screenplay is not a finished product; a novel is. A screenplay is a blueprint for something - for a building that will most likely never be built.

The first thing that put me on the map was my Sherlock Holmes novel.

In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a character's and let his perceptions take over.

I have nothing revolutionary or even novel to offer.

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

The 'information novel' shouldn't be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream.