Novel Quotes · Page 8

For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination.

— Ellen Glasgow

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

— Haruki Murakami

I am writing my second novel for children for Simon and Schuster.

— Marlee Matlin

There are very few films that work like a novel.

— Robert Schwentke

The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.

— Mason Cooley

You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.

— Vikram Seth

“I thought if I loved you enough I could change you. I was so stupid.”

— Steven Ramirez

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

— Richard Yates

It takes me two to three years to write a novel. A screenplay is 100 pages and takes five years.

— Nick Hornby

“When I lifted up the skin, a fat kidney worm dripping with gore raised its bald, blind head and glared at me.”

— Steven Ramirez

“He’d used the amulet to read my thoughts again. I pictured smacking him in the face.”

— Priya Ardis

I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by…

— Ernest Gaines

I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.

— Steve Erickson

Writing novels is where I'm most comfortable. It's a very intimate experience.

— Matthew Nable

I think, above all, the characters in my novels feel universal to the readers.

— Nicholas Sparks

I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.

— Anonymous

As a writer I have persisted in my uncertainty, alternating between novels which could charitably be considered literature and world reporting which…

— James A. Michener

A good novel is an indivisible sum; every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and…

— Ayn Rand

It's very important to set your place in a concrete environment. I think Chekhov said that the important thing when you have…

— Roman Polanski

I hadn't ever felt any particular calling to be a novelist, and I clearly remember telling a friend of mine about six…

— Gabrielle Zevin

... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Make your novel readable. Make it easy to read, pleasant to read. This doesn't mean flowery passages, ambitious flights of pyrotechnic verbiage;…

— Laurence D'Orsay

The Weird Sisters is a chronicle of real women, because it tells the truths of sisters. Eleanor Brown has written a compelling…

— Min Jin Lee

I'm interested in the Gothic novel because it's very much a woman's form. Why is there such a wide readership for books…

— Margaret Atwood

Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there - that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable…

— Willa Cather

I write both, as you know, dozens of ecological and social scientific and historical works, dozens of novels. It's hard to describe…

— Michael Tobias

Sometime during the 1990s, when I was teaching philosophy at UCSD, my friend, colleague, and music teacher, Carol Plantamura, discussed the possibility…

— Philip Kitcher

Most really good fiction is compelled into being. It comes from a kind of uncalculated innocence. You need not have your ending…

— Tom Robbins

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising,…

— J. G. Ballard

Certainly, light fiction exists and encompasses mysteries or second-class romance novels, books that are read on the beach, whose only aim is…

— Umberto Eco

“The things that will go I to my handbag are laid out on my dressing table. Two packets of pocket tissue, one…

— Oyinkan Braithwaite

“...a novel for me is a pretext, a way of starting up and sustaining a complicated and many layered inner exchange, a…

— Sven Birkerts

My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life.

— Tom Perrotta

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

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

— Kamand Kojouri

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Philipp Meyer

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

— Jane Smiley

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

— Shannon L. Alder