Alive Quote by David Foster Wallace

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

Writing a novel is like an amusement park or a museum or a city. You go into that place and you have certain experiences…

— Mohsin Hamid

To me, novels are a trip of discovery, and you discover things that you don't know and you assume that many of your readers…

— Tom Wolfe

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who…

— Flannery O'Connor

But once an idea for a novel seizes a writer...well, it’s like an inner fire that at first warms you and makes you feel…

— Dean Koontz

Novels give you the opportunity to create a whole world. Because you create people, you make them talk... You decide who they are, whether…

— Gioconda Belli

I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life…

— P. G. Wodehouse

Writing fiction is ... an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.

— Rose Wilder Lane

I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality.

— Manuel Puig

The good thing about writing a novel is that you're creating an imaginary world and can take a break when you need to.

— Liane Moriarty

Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel…

— Ann Patchett

To make it interesting and worth doing, writing a novel has to be a leap into the unknown. I have to be unsure if…

— Charles Palliser