Novel Quotes · Page 37

I've always wanted to write a novel. It's overwhelming and daunting, and it's one of those things that every writer fantasizes about…

— Howard Gordon

Novel writing is a kind of private pleasure, even if nothing comes of it in worldly terms.

— Barbara Pym

Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn't…

— Anna Godbersen

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

— Sylvia Plath

“(A novel is) a paper where your thesis is that these people are real, and you have to prove it.”

— Maggie Stiefvater

I've decided to take advantage of outsourcing. My next novel will be written by a couple of guys in Bangalore, India.

— Tom Robbins

love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.

— Mary McCarthy

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

— Anthony Burgess

The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is…

— Ruth Park

When I'm writing novels, even screenplays, it's never an actor I have in mind; it's always the version in my head of…

— Jonathan Tropper

But you will be hard-pressed to find more than a few novels, films, news stories, and TV shows that dare to depict…

— Rob Brezsny

Great wealth could make an enormous difference over the next decade if they sensibly support the scientific elite. Just the elite. Because…

— James D. Watson

Film is a medium of clear lines and broad strikes - which can be fantastic - but compared to the subtleties and…

— William Boyd

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

— Haruki Murakami

“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

I feel really strongly about not wanting to overly guide the reader about what he or she should think. I really trust…

— Nicole Krauss

Within months after reading the novel 'The Hunger Games,' I went from telling my mom that I could see myself as this…

— Amandla Stenberg

The best of Donald Westlake's pseudonymous thrillers about Parker, the toughest burglar who ever lived. . . .Out of print for years…

— Terry Teachout

I see everything visually. It's very visual for me. And so I think, from a plotting standpoint or what have you, there's…

— Michael Landon, Jr

I was aware that I had to pay off things in a convincing emotional fashion, that I had to address the lingering…

— Tod Goldberg

But when I say it isn't meant for anyone's eyes, I don't mean it in the sense of one of those novel…

— Katharine Weber

Philip Galanes has fashioned a novel both bleak and funny about a young man's struggle to sort out his troubled love: the…

— Andrew Solomon

And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working…

— Dorothy Allison

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

— James A. Michener

The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.

— Winifred Holtby

For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.

— Zadie Smith

In order to write novels for a living - it's not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget…

— Richard Ford

Not merely one of the finest fantasy novels of recent years, but one of the finest ever. Should not be missed

— Brian Stableford

“A novel is born several times and dies several times, before it takes its final life form.”

— Manjiri Prabhu

I think I would explode in flames of irony if I were to option an idea that I was satirizing in a…

— Jess Walter

Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with…

— E. Lockhart

“A person is like a novel: Up to the very last page you don't know how it's going to end. Otherwise, there'd…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

“Clearly she knew that between book lovers, a novel is not a novel is not a novel. It's a symbol, an offering…

— Sara Nelson

A novel, basically, is writing one sentence — then, without violating the scope of the first one, writing the next sentence.

— Anonymous

I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs.

— Jess Row

If you get discouraged about a section of a novel, that can be more catastrophic than getting discouraged about an individual story.

— Maggie Shipstead

Every housemaid expects at least once a week as much excitement as would have lasted a Jane Austen heroine throughout a whole…

— Bertrand Russell

I get very weird and defensive about what I'm working on - I wouldn't even tell my secretary what the next page…

— Joan Juliet Buck

Axiom : Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.

— E. M. Forster