I'm not working on the Great American Novel. All I am…

I hope to keep entertaining in some way until I can't physically entertain any longer. It's what I was born to do, and I…

— Bette Midler

I have a library room with four desks in it. On one of them is a spec, on one of them is a present…

— William Monahan

I didn't have the great American novel burning inside me, but I felt I could try my hand at popular fiction.

— Clive Cussler

Reading a good poem can give me a far bigger kick than a novel. But it's not something I can keep doing. It would…

— Stephen Dobyns

Show me a novel that's not comic, and I'll show you a novel that's not doing its job.

— Howard Jacobson

And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I…

— Tobias Wolff

“I have never written a novel yet...without doing 40,000 words or more and finding they were all wrong and going back and starting again,…

— P.G. Wodehouse

People think that they will sit down and produce the great American novel in one sitting. It doesn't work that way. This is a…

— Isabel Allende

My father was a frustrated writer. I think he wanted to write the great American novel.

— Anne Waldman

“I try to keep up with what’s being done in every field, and most children’s books are ten times more enjoyable than the average…

— Ray Bradbury

“There is a novella inside every anus; there is a broken heart inside every mind; there is a bisected hug inside every arm; there…

— Jimmy Chen

I was saving the name of 'Geisel' for the Great American Novel.

— Dr. Seuss

“Great American Novel” = ”doorstop of a book, usually pretentious, written by a man.”

— Lionel Shriver

With iron and blood, it seems, and from the rich depths of the earth, John Griswold has fashioned a classic American novel, its dignified…

— Bob Shacochis

“[upon hearing that the school received funding for the football field, but not for any of the arts] Well, we might never have another…

— Chris O'Guinn