Novel Quotes · Page 33

“should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal. But”

— Oscar Wilde

Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.

— Richard Russo

You need a theme in a picture book just as much or maybe even more than you need it in a novel.

— Eve Bunting

I've never really understood that whole thing of writers avoiding other writers' novels while they're working on their own.

— Ned Beauman

And that which yesterday was the novel opinion of one man, to-day becomes the general opinion of the majority.

— Leo Tolstoy

I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.

— John Irving

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its…

— Paul Auster

I couldn't be happier to have found a home at Dialogue Books for my debut novel 'The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius…

— Paterson Joseph

Coca-Cola can get really fresh output because it is getting people who are outside the traditional model and they are combining ideas…

— John Kao

The question I hate the most is "How did you DO it - write novels and raise your children simultaneously!" I mean,…

— Jodi Picoult

A novel, especially a first novel, is... really an emotional autobiography. All these emotions I'm embarrassed at having had, I've written about.

— Min Jin Lee

Crafted with care and with love, this beautifully constructed novel reveals hard truths and difficult secrets. Diana Davidson is a writer of…

— Pauline Holdstock

All my writing-life people kept telling me that I should stop writing short stories and start writing novels: my agent, my Israeli…

— Etgar Keret

In some ways, the best novel about terrorism, though it's not a novel, is 'The Looming Tower' by Lawrence Wright or 'Perfect…

— Karan Mahajan

It did not take long after the rise of the commercial printing press before someone figured out that erotic novels were a…

— Clay Shirky

When people read a novel 600 pages long, six months pass, and all they will remember are five pages. They don't remember…

— Orhan Pamuk

You are suffering from an ailment that affects ladies of romantic imaginations. Symptoms include fainting, weariness, loss of appetite, low spirits. While…

— Diane Setterfield

'To Kill a Mockingbird' appeared to highly favorable reviews and quickly climbed to the top of bestseller lists, where it remained for…

— Charles J. Shields

Despite the war, and bombings, and all the big things that happen to us, the stuff of our lives is small and…

— Robert Dessaix

Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point in the universe. This idea is…

— Nikola Tesla

She feels so contented in giving birth to a child, in helping the child to grow; and that's why she does not…

— Rajneesh

I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very…

— Jane Austen

Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books…

— Lev Grossman

“The sense of modernism is often seen in the determination of each of the arts to come as close as possible to…

— Milan Kundera

I think The Nightingale is my best, most mature, most moving novel, but maybe that's just because I love these characters. I…

— Megan Chance

All those words of praise they use for novels - spare, economical. Why should I shell out £17 for economical?

— Howard Jacobson

Any novel of importance has a purpose. If only the "purpose" be large enough, and not at outs with the passional inspiration.

— D. H. Lawrence

make no mistake about it, the detective-story is part of the literature of escape, and not of expression.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

“Writing a novel creates a window to a new way of looking at the world. Reading one means looking through that window.”

— Mark Rubinstein

I try to write about things, places, events, and phenomena I know about personally. That helps make the novels more genuine.

— Lincoln Child

Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if "X" happened? That's how you start.

— Tom Clancy

Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

— Richard Wright

Since I cant write the greatest American novel, Im going to write the longest American novel.

— Thomas Steinbeck

The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.

— David Shields

Even in traditional filmmaking, you're always trying to find novel ways of telling stories, and this is different.

— Rick Heinrichs

Jekyll and Hyde, in particular, is such an important novel in terms of suspense and setting a perfect scene for crime

— Alanna Knight

If I had to rank my skills, I have a long way to go before I can write a good graphic novel.

— Ted Rall

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

— Joyce Carol Oates

I had a story-telling mother; she's written novels and short stories. So I feel like maybe I'm staying alive by telling tales.

— Ayshay

“Without needing told, without Jacob's lead, Akando dropped to his knees and lunged into the throne room of Christ.”

— Willowy Whisper