Novel Quotes · Page 60

“Not writing is never an option. This is not words of advice. It just literally never an option!”

— Lillian R. Melendez

If you have to deal with our friends at ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it's like a Kafka novel. Files just disappear.

— Jeb Bush

After you've been working fairly intensively on a novel for six months you never want to see the damn thing again.

— Terry Pratchett

I've never taken any classes or had formal training in writing novels. At its most basic, I learned how to structure a…

— Dennis Green

I read novels but I also read the Bible. And study it, you know? And the more I learn, the more excited…

— Johnny Cash

My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.

— Edward Abbey

I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose.

— Jeffery Deaver

That seems to be the definition of 'novel' for me: a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.

— George Saunders

He brought his great hand to rest on an early edition of Bram Stoker's novel and smiled, but said nothing. Then he…

— Elizabeth Kostova

The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all - in the end the vast majority of them simply aren't that great,…

— Lev Grossman

Absolutely breathtaking, nail-biting, and edge-of-your-seat. Michael Koryta is a master at maintaining suspense and a hell of a good writer. THOSE WHO…

— Nelson DeMille

Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published. I wrote four novels that nobody wanted, sent them…

— Jerry Spinelli

Dominion is a spy novel, a love story, and also I hope gives some sense of the difficulties faced by dissidents under…

— C.J. Sansom

HBO and I have a deal to at least try to make a television series from the Leonid McGill stories. We're going…

— Walter Mosley

Every new medium has, within a short time of its introduction, been condemned as a threat to young people. Pulp novels would…

— Hanna Rosin

Every one who has seriously investigated a novel question, who has really interrogated Nature with a view to a distinct answer, will…

— George Henry Lewes

I never really understood that massive collaboration involving hundreds of people is what makes movies possible, and it's also why I would…

— John Green

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for…

— Milan Kundera

“. ."Isn't Chief worried about the Dan Rather-James Brady syndrome? Getting the news first -- if it's incorrect? And if that wasn't…

— Diane Moore

I always thought that I could write a novel. In my case, it was misguided. I do believe that the best nonfiction…

— Ron Rosenbaum

But strangely, [in] the original Matt Helm books, he's just this super hardass assassin. They sort of made it into a sexy…

— Adam Reed

I would not describe myself as a political writer except in the sense that the personal is political, which is something that…

— Neil Gaiman

Either the Earth System would undergo major phase transitions as a result of unchecked human pressure on nature's capacities and resources or…

— Hans Joachim Schellnhuber

My first three novels were all the subjects of intensely exciting flurries of calls from producers and even stars' production companies, and…

— Jean Hanff Korelitz

“You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up.”

— Thomas Harris

The novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements.

— Don DeLillo

The novel [The Kite Runner] came about as an expansion of that original, unpublished short story.

— Khaled Hosseini

We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.

— John Steinbeck

A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They’re all parts of yourself.

— Janet Fitch

Writing is my number one passion. I've written two novels. I've written a screenplay. I also write short stories and poetry.

— Evangeline Lilly

There're no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels, and then I read them again, and it's…

— Willow Smith

It is my huge pleasure that my novels are translated into languages that are read among small numbers of people.

— Haruki Murakami

I wanted to be a writer, but the idea of writing novels or movies seemed really intimidating. I never got more than…

— Kurt Busiek

A novel usually begins, in my experience, with a thought or image that won't leave me alone.

— John Lanchester

I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.

— Jay McInerney

If I'm hanging around too much, my wife and kids say, 'Hey, why don't you go downstairs and start a new novel?'

— Nick Cave

Romance novels satisfy a very specific fantasy of romantic love that seems to be a powerful part of the female psyche.

— Melissa Pritchard

Writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

— Jonathan Carroll

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

— Milan Kundera

When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.

— William Gibson