Novel Quotes · Page 47

Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but…

— Jane Smiley

Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them-almost all women; a vast number of clever, hardheaded men.

— William Makepeace Thackeray

A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market - it knows nothing about target markets.

— Julianna Baggott

Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites.

— Piers Paul Read

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm…

— Alice Hoffman

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

— Sue Grafton

A good novel tells us the truth about it's hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

— GKChesterton

I'm a professional. So before I published any novels, I'd always been writing stories.

— Jess Walter

Certainly some guy eating cardboard in Cincinnati has lost any ordinary impetus to review your novel decently if he's just read you…

— William Monahan

Writing a novel is a huge adventure; when it's going well it's more fun than fun. When it stutters to a halt…

— Deborah Moggach

40 Words for Sorrow is brilliant-one of the finest crime novels I've ever read. Giles Blunt writes with uncommon grace, style and…

— Jonathan Kellerman

Very few teachers or leaders in my small Michigan community ever discussed the issue of 'The Catcher in the Rye,' and certainly…

— Richard Grenell

For me Oliver Twist is a political novel. It is a furious critique of the treatment of orphans and poor children who…

— Henning Mankell

I try to hurt myself, to sprain something, writing every novel and story, because I'm stretching for something new and difficult that…

— Catherynne M. Valente

You can't write a novel all at once, any more than you can swallow a whale in one gulp. You do have…

— Orson Scott Card

Writing is a particular kind of frustration, which is why when I was making the structure for the novel I visualized it…

— Rebecca Miller

A criminal trial is like a Russian novel: it starts with exasperating slowness as the characters are introduced to a jury, then…

— Clifford Irving

A visionary company is like a great work of art. Think of Michelangelo's scenes from Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine…

— John C. Maxwell

But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in…

— John Green

I don't know if you hear this often but I would say The Razor's Edge (loosely based on a great W. Somerset…

— Lewis Schiff

One can feel the immense joy of Amy Hill Hearth's engagement in her first novel. It radiates through every scene and through…

— Philip K. Jason

Radio is the medium that most closely approximates the experience of reading. As a novelist, I find it very exciting to be…

— Daniel Alarcon

It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or…

— Willa Cather

...when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out…

— Pat Conroy

In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.

— Alexis de Tocqueville

I don't like to make strong statements. I want to write strong novels... I keep my deep, radical things for my novels.

— Orhan Pamuk

“I love you more than depth of the ocean, but I can't let you feel the pain of it... lines from Love…

— Atul Purohit

I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories - I love the short story.

— George R. R. Martin

I only published my first novel at the age of 40. Till then, I wrote short stories.

— A. B. Yehoshua

“The sound of him drinking was indescribable—like dirty runoff down a storm drain.”

— Steven Ramirez

I began visiting Lima's prisons back in 2007, when my first novel, 'Lost City Radio,' was published in Peru.

— Daniel Alarcon

A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.

— Edmund White

When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.

— Umberto Eco

The business of writing a novel is a long, meandering road into the self, into the imagination. And it's a road the…

— Lisa Unger

I don't think you can write novels on the road. You need a certain stability.

— Leonard Cohen

I had just begun an M.A. in Creative Writing, and I had to write a novel, so I began writing a novel…

— Neel Mukherjee

I've always said that 'Twin Peaks,' to me, was like a novel we filmed every page of.

— Mark Frost

Well, I think in my first two novels, both the characters are pretty neurotic, which I would say that I am.

— Curtis Sittenfeld

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

— David Mitchell

As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.

— Gillian Flynn