Novel Quotes
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.
Stephanie Perkins
There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.
Michael Stipe
R.E.M.
Every novel is an attempt to capture time, to weave something solid out of air. The author knows it is an impossible task - that is why he keeps on trying.
Arthur David Beaty
My first novel, 'Sacrifice,' was set on the Shetland Islands.
Sharon Bolton
I didn't know anything about Opus Die except from pop culture, like Dan Brown novels, which I knew wasn't really knowing anything about Opus Die.
Wes Bentley
At the interface of the say-able and the unsay-able is the novel, the new, the never before seen, said or done. And that's what I think it's important to try and bring out, ideas. Because I think we are the animals that bring back ideas.
Terence McKenna
It's true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.
Haruki Murakami
Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
Vladimir Nabokov
Of the first seven novels I wrote, numbers four and five were published. Numbers one, two, three, six, and seven, have never seen the light of day... and rightly so.
Sue Grafton
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.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Motion pictures are of course a different medium of expression than the public speech, the radio, the stage, the novel, or the magazine. But the First Amendment draws no distinction between the various methods of communicating ideas.
William O. Douglas
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.
Ishmael Reed
Sons of the Dawn is a page-turner, and author Hank Nuwer is to be thanked for enriching our sense of the West with this memorable novel.
Gerald Haslam
I can't do a linear novel. I'm just going to write what I need to write.
Sandra Cisneros
Even the crudest, most derivative novel is an expression of the author's hopes and fears and ideas about good and evil.
Steven Saylor
Within my own life, I read all the beloved novels by lamps of vegetable oil; I saw the Standard Oil invading my own village, I saw gas lamps in the Chinese shops in Shanghai; and I saw their elimination by electric lights.
Hu Shih
The Brightwood Stillness is a novel I could not put down. On the surface, it is the lives of normal people in trying circumstances. Deeper, it is an uncannily perceptive exploration of male psychology… Pomeroy is a brave new voice capable of taking us beyond the clichés of war and its aftermath and into the secret heart of every man. This is simply the best novel I’ve read in a long time.
Andrew X. Pham
Inspiration is everywhere - film, television, newspapers, novels, overheard conversations, whatever you can tap into. It's out there, and I've been at this long enough to know that it won't always just come to me; sometimes I have to go get it.
Kasey Anderson
