Books Quote by Kingsley Amis

After the first shock of recognition - a sudden sense of "this is what I'm going to write" - the novel starts to breed…

— Vladimir Nabokov

“What's remarkable about fiction is that it places you in the unusual position of having no trajectory. You stand aside, motives abandoned for the…

— Tom Rachman

Ideas can come while reading a good novel.

— Ben van Berkel

When I write, I get glimpses into future novels.

— Patricia Briggs

In a lot of cases, writers discover that the novel needs to begin later in the action than they'd first thought.

— Will Hobbs

“Forget all those prescriptive ideas about "the novel" and "literature" and set down your feelings and thoughts as they come to you, freely, in…

— Haruki Murakami

The ideas for my books come about in two ways. There can be an intellectual idea that seems to be the reason for writing…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

A passion for any novel, and any character, can crystallise your ideas when you really need to be as open as possible as a…

— Romola Garai

In the novels I most admire, there is this sense that, within the confines of the world, the possibilities are always opening in new…

— Laura van den Berg

“A novel must show how the world truly is, how characters genuinely think, how events actually occur. A novel should somehow reveal the true…

— Anonymous

The reason I start a novel is because there's something that excites me and I want to explore it.

— Ned Beauman

“Thus the fundamental form-determining intention of the novel is objectivised as the psychology of the novel's heroes: they are seekers.”

— Georg Lukacs