Novel Quotes · Page 30

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

I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.

— Robert Harris

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

— Nicholas Sparks

You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist…

— Michael Ondaatje

You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it.

— Jonathan Coe

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

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but…

— Rose Tremain

I wish my life was a John Grisham novel. His heroes always seem to be one step away from death but come…

— Simone Elkeles

I think I'm succinct to the point of trying to write the two-word novel. Editing my work almost never means taking anything…

— Kate DiCamillo

No one reads novels anymore. And I don't see the situation improving. People prefer video games, reality TV, and films. There are…

— Gore Vidal

The reason I shift gears constantly, why I'm doing an opera, why I've done essays, why I've written poetry for years that…

— Ray Bradbury

We all have a lot of people inside us, yet we get to live only one life. Fiction lets us slip into…

— Steven Saylor

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring…

— Ralph Ellison

My first novel, 'You Lost Me There,' has been described as a beach read. Tough bracket, beach reads. There's not much room…

— Rosecrans Baldwin

The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally…

— Milan Kundera

The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging…

— Arthur Schopenhauer

I was always an album guy, not a greatest hits kind of guy, not so much a radio guy. I'm not saying…

— Mark Stoermer

Doing crime films...maybe it's to some extent a matter of taste. Certainly my first novel had a criminal element and was about…

— William Monahan

The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire…

— Billy Collins

When I first went to Pittsburgh, I had never been there before, and we hadn't even decided to shoot there yet. I…

— Curtis Hanson

The Green Shore is an engrossing novel about political oppression, played out on an intimate family scale. Bakopoulos charts the subtle, gnawing…

— Peter Ho Davies

After finishing a draft, no matter how rough, I almost always put it aside for a while. It doesn't matter if it's…

— Leslie Jamison

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

— Iain Banks

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

— Caroline Leavitt

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

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

— Jim Rash

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

— Stanley Kubrick

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

— Peter R. Grant

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

— Lynn Abbey

'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'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

It seems to me that the basic plot of all historical novels is a romance swept aside by history.

— Ned Beauman

“I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me,will you. Stop defending yourself.”

— Michael Ondaatje

I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.

— Richard Flanagan

“Think of the very words “novel,” “romance” — what do they mean but exaggeration of one bit of life?”

— George Gissing

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

— Helen Dunmore

When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time.

— Kingsley Amis