Novel Quotes
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I use things, I steal things from my life when I want to, when I need to, or when it seems appropriate. But most of the stuff in my novels is entirely invented, ninety-five percent. And even when I do borrow something, it becomes fictionalized.
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They take the circuits out of people’s brains that make it possible for them to think for themselves. Their world is like the one that George Orwell depicted in his novel. I’m sure you realize that there are plenty of people who are looking for exactly that kind of brain death. It makes life a lot easier. You don’t have to think about difficult things, just shut up and do what your superiors tell you to do.
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Any man's life, told truly, is a novel.
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Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.
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Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry.
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In Catholicism, you learn to worship a superior god that creates, who organizes and creates. And when you do novels, you have this illusion that you are following the model of the creator, that you are playing the creator who has to organize that. It is a vice and a sin, and I like to sin. I'm a vicious person.
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I don't think it's possible to write a good novel around a negative personality.
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We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality . . . the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cats may be black at night, but not to other cats.
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No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.
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Arabs don't do crime fiction. I read crime fiction and I read Arabic literature, and I wish this was a novel I could have read in Arabic.
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Once I had started, I discovered the secret pleasure of writing a novel. It's such an immersive, deep commitment. With short stories, you're continually having to start again from scratch, but with a novel you only need one good idea every few years.
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I am my mother's daughter,... I am her only novel.
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Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
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I think that setting a novel in a small town taps into a sense of nostalgia among readers. People tend to believe life is different in small towns, and frankly, it is different.
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'The Slap' is not like anything else. It's an incredibly well-written novel that has been turned into a great and intriguing series that reveals both less and more about each character than you learn in the book. It's a novel that has been given a second chance to live.
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When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I'm finished with a theme, I'm generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises.
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Sir Walter, with his 61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career than most of his brethren.
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The rule for finding plots for character-centered novels, which is to ask: 'So what's the worst possible thing I can do to *this* guy?' And then do it.
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It’s a rare reader who doesn’t go to the novel looking for a kind of encouragement to live.
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Foreign novels are less action-oriented. They have a different pace; they’re more reflective. They challenge us to look for the story, find the story within the story.
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It's an eclectic film and I think we served the novel really well. And we had a great cast who worked for free. Everyone read it and said, I'm in, from Nick Nolte to Albert Finney to Omar Epps to Barbara Hershey. We really had fun and shot it in a very short time. I think the subject matter is more topical today, more to the point, than it was 30 years ago, when it concerned the Vietnam War.
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If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.
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A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.
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We have to diversify, we have to find work we can do that helps other people while helping ourselves, work that has to do with writing that isn't necessarily just writing saleable novels or getting huge advances.
