Novel Quotes · Page 27

There are very few films that work like a novel.

— Robert Schwentke

The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.

— Mason Cooley

“Writing is the only way to run away from home, without ever leaving.”

— Shannon L. Alder

Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.

— Jane Smiley

“He lived like a devil and died like a saint”

— Haidji

“Every book has to wait for the right time to be read and understood.”

— Kamand Kojouri

A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.

— Richard Flanagan

“Tine-ma aici cat vrei,si cand nu ma mai vrei,spune-mi sa ma duc”

— Radu Tudoran

“There’s nothing worse than delivering bad news to women. I hoped I wouldn’t get good at it.”

— Steven Ramirez

A novel that features real people is complicated, but in the end, that extra challenge is all for the good.

— Rick Bass

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.

— Joyce Carol Oates

I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the novel is a…

— Zadie Smith

I think the main thing to remember when writing a novel is to stay true to the characters.

— Cassandra Clare

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time…

— Rose Tremain

It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three…

— Don DeLillo

I've never been good with deadlines. My early novels, I wrote by myself. No one knew I was writing a novel; I…

— George R. R. Martin

What you want to do is talk about ideas, you write a novel, you have a lecture about those ideas. Satire and…

— Justin Simien

I got into my usual obsessive writing frenzy, using all the material I'd worked on for so long and crafting it into…

— Helen Fielding

“But humankind doesn't give a damn ! The proof of it is that in twenty-four years this novel has been collecting dust…

— Amélie Nothomb

I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write…

— Gore Vidal

“The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river…

— Haruki Murakami

I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which…

— Rebecca Solnit

You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason…

— John Irving

The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many…

— Alexander Payne

I often ask myself: "What would Theodore Roosevelt do?" One can never know, of course. The ultimate contribution of consequential leaders is…

— James M Strock

“He had a book to finish. Ten-thousand words. The other ninety thousand had been difficult. This last tenth seemed impossible. His plot…

— Garry Kilworth

This thought-provoking novel portrays the absurdity of our overbearing government bureaucracy with a story that is entertaining and fast-paced. The Taxman Cometh…

— Grover Norquist

No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no…

— Henry James

With a historical novel you know that liberties are being taken. Since Walter Scott, we know that poetic license, dramatic license, that…

— Nicholas Meyer

“Was he shiny and bright and something sucked it out of him? Cecilia thought. But stars are a load of fire, maybe…

— Basma Salem

I have long admired the visceral storytelling and moral complexity of John Vaillant’s brilliant non-fiction about humankind’s tragically ambivalent relationship with the…

— John Burnham Schwartz

I tend to see my characters from inside and outside at once; this is a technique I use to retain a slight…

— Karan Mahajan

My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life.

— Tom Perrotta

If you haven't written a novel by the time you're forty you never will!

— Richard Yates

When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.

— Philipp Meyer

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.

— Virginia Woolf

I took two years away from making films to write a novel.

— Neil Jordan

I am my mother's daughter,... I am her only novel.

— Marge Piercy

Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.

— Ian Mcewan

A Marxist has never written a good novel.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer