Around Quote by Anita Shreve

a novel is not born of a single idea. The stories I've tried to write from one idea, no matter how terrific an idea,…

— Katherine Paterson

Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.

— Joyce Carol Oates

We live in a sea of general ideas, so that's not a novel, since there are so many general ideas. But the moment a…

— Chinua Achebe

A novel is a conversation between a reader and a writer.

— John Green

In my experience, a novel is the culmination of various thoughts and impressions collected over time, until something comes along to give them a…

— J. Courtney Sullivan

If you have one strong idea, you can't help repeating it and embroidering it. Sometimes I think that authors should write one novel and…

— John P. Marquand

Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them,…

— Andrew O'Hagan

“A novel is the final common pathway of a writer's experiences, fears, wishes, thoughts, feelings & fantasies. All is distilled in a novel.”

— Mark Rubinstein

The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life.

— Angus Wilson

It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same time

— Matthew Specktor

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Anonymous