Novel Quotes · Page 31

I wouldn't mind my book being called an African novel if it didn't invite lazy readings.

— Taiye Selasi

Working on the plot/story idea for my next novel ... It always takes time.

— Nicholas Sparks

Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.

— Annie Dillard

I've often thought I would like to try to write a conventional novel, but I just don't know enough about the real…

— Jim Woodring

I just don't care about popular culture. It looks to me pointless and superficial. If I had free time I'd rather read…

— Noam Chomsky

Novels are written, not wished into existence. You have to sit your ass in the chair or nothing gets done.

— John Dufresne

In 25 years of writing novels, I've never had anything that felt like writer's block.

— Richard Powers

Neither transitions nor transformations will be manageable without novel forms of global governance and markets

— Hans Joachim Schellnhuber

There are these boutique writers out there who think if they are not writing their novels sitting at a bistro with their…

— Rick Bragg

When you get ready to write your novel, outline it first. There's nothing worse than getting halfway through and realizing you've painted…

— Janet Evanovich

It is as true for the writer as for the reader that any novel worth its ink should be an experience first…

— David Wroblewski

[The movies] make the sort of comment only a novel can make, an allusion to the world in which people live, the…

— Orson Welles

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character…

— Paul Auster

Once, I thought I had a novel, and it turned out it was only a short story. I wrote about 800 pages,…

— Richard Bausch

I think that too often we, film directors, think that a big epic novel and feature film are the same. It's a…

— Pirjo Honkasalo

I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel,…

— Martin Amis

“I likened her to the slender PSYCHÉ and judged that the perfection of her face ennobled everything unclean around her: The dusty…

— Roman Payne

I would have to say the novel 'War and Peace' influenced me more than any other book. This greatest of novels demonstrated…

— Douglas Preston

Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a…

— William Faulkner

...until that moment I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that…

— Carlos Ruiz Zafon

In the course of writing a book I'll produce loads of pieces of paper to help the novel itself. Diagrams, charts, family…

— Maggie O'Farrell

I wrote the first draft of the New People quickly but it had been percolating a lot longer. It's a hard question…

— Danzy Senna

Life for women in ancient Greece was hard - you had to fight for every inch of ground you got. Both Thetis…

— Madeline Miller

Thank you, Dain," she said. "I should like that very much. I've never seen a proper wrestling match before." "I daresay it…

— Loretta Chase

I'm not embarrassed about the novels I wrote when I was younger, but I couldn't write them today because of my religion.

— Louise Mensch

Bonsai won the Chilean Critics Award for best novel of the year in 2006and it's easy to understand why.

— Jonathan Messinger

I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away…

— John Keats

Every movie is a road movie. Every novel is a mystery. Every tortilla chip is sacred.

— Sherman Alexie

Reading a novel in which all characters illustrate patience, hard work, chastity, and delayed gratification could be a pretty dull experience.

— Thomas Perry

The only justification for writing a novel is that it should be wonderful. Adequate is inadequate.

— Janet Burroway

Readers of novels are a strange folk, upon whose probable or even possible tastes no wise book-maker would ever venture to bet.

— E. V. Lucas

'Constructed Worlds' comes from a novel draft that I wrote in my early twenties and reread/revised only in my late thirties.

— Elif Batuman

You write your first novel with the desperation of the damned. You're afraid that you'll never write anything else, ever again.

— Patricia Duncker

In addition to psychopaths, 'Quantum Night' is also a novel about literally thoughtless people, without inner voices, thoughts in their heads.

— Robert J. Sawyer

Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.

— Virginia Woolf

I don't yet know what style will be required for my next novel, but my sense is that each book will involve…

— Vivek Shraya

More often than not, real life is so rich, complex and unpredictable that it would seem completely implausible in the pages of…

— Candice Millard

In a novel, the biggest symbiosis exists between plot and character. In a song, it would be the lyrics and the melody.

— Jesse Michaels

There are two ways to approach the writing of a mystery novel: adhere to the rules, or break them with glee.

— Sarah Weinman

An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original.

— Umberto Eco