Novel Quotes · Page 36

Novels are very different than films and I love to see someone else's imagining of my story.

— Nicholas Sparks

The new novel is sought more eagerly, and devoured more greedily, the New Testament.

— Thomas Guthrie

I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses; and sentences keep itching without coming…

— Gustave Flaubert

My first novel, 'You Must be Sisters,' was started in Pakistan. I've wrote several novels and a TV drama set or partly-set…

— Deborah Moggach

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

Since I can't write the greatest American novel, I'm going to write the longest American novel.

— Thomas Steinbeck

In many cases, the line between a thriller and a crime novel has become too blurred to be useful.

— Susie Dent

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

— Lynn Abbey

Position yourself to succeed by doing the other things in your life that rejuvenate you. You can create little islands of time…

— Jeff VanderMeer

It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from…

— Noam Chomsky

You can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster…

— Neil Gaiman

What I want is to respond to the challenge posed by the mass media - to permit the novel to say what…

— Carlos Fuentes

“He now realized that right and wrong were intertwined notions. His arms could not differentiate between just and unjust causes. They only…

— Roy L. Pickering Jr

Nothing can hide from me the conviction that an immortal soul needs for its sustenance something more than visiting, and gardening, and…

— Thomas Wentworth Higginson

At present, the novels which we owe to English ladies form no small part of the literary glory of our country. No…

— Thomas B. Macaulay

It is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the…

— Raymond Chandler

It used to be that you would go into a writing program and what you would learn was how to write a…

— Lorin Stein

I do like the idea of the novel of repressed college students being a contemporary novel of courtship! I guess what I…

— Elif Batuman

There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but…

— J. B. Priestley

A fiction which is designed to inculcate an object wholly alien to the imagination sins against the first law of art; and…

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

I hope for so much from every book I read. And time and again, I find myself disappointed. I look across my…

— John Boyne

I think everything you are, everything that engages you, eventually comes to bear on the novel you write. I think the creative…

— Francisco Goldman

In the years since The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, Voinovich has sharpened his satire, and Monumental Propaganda is…

— Ken Kalfus

Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of…

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Peter R. Grant

One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.

— Stanley Kubrick

I'm working on a new novel, in its 3rd draft, but it's hard to write while doing 7th Heaven.

— Stephen Collins

I have only one bit of advice to beginning writers: be sure your novel is read by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

— James A. Michener

'The Dice Man' is an anti-establishment cult novel, and you don't normally make studio films from such dark comedy material.

— Luke Rhinehart

I had a writing professor at Brandeis who told me I'd never make it - and when I sold my first novel…

— Caroline Leavitt

Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.

— Iain Banks

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

— V. S. Naipaul

I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to…

— Umberto Eco

Honestly, it's terrible, but I don't know if I've ever really read a Stephen King novel.

— Jim Rash

We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to…

— Georges Simenon

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

— Ray Bradbury

I am almost six-novels-old. It took me until the third novel to call myself a writer.

— Manju Kapur

Other genres are plot-driven, but the entire focus of a romance novel is on the characters and their arcs.

— Sylvia Day

I think I've finally learned to stop worrying about how big the gaps are between my novels' publication.

— Justine Larbalestier

The place for truth is not in the facts of a novel; it is in the feelings.

— Mary Stewart