Novel Quotes
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I've seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn't occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me, so I don't feel like going back and dredging them up.
Jhumpa Lahiri -
I tried once in my life to write a novel. I had written something like 80 pages of it when my laptop got stolen. When I told people this, they acted as if something tragic had happened, but I kind of felt relieved, grateful to the thief who saved me from another year of something that felt more like homework than fun.
Etgar Keret
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It’s a rare reader who doesn’t go to the novel looking for a kind of encouragement to live.
Norman Rush -
Writing the middle of a novel is a lot like driving through Texas. You think it's never going to end, and the scenery looks the same.
Carolyn Wheat -
Ive always got a novel under way, but if I try to work on it every day, exclusively, I falter. So I always keep more than one thing going.
Thomas Mallon -
Reading a good poem can give me a far bigger kick than a novel. But it's not something I can keep doing. It would be like shooting up 10 times a day.
Stephen Dobyns -
I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.
William Gibson -
A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
Saul Bellow
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Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history.
Sébastien-Roch Nicolas -
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.
Carmen Boullosa -
I've found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience - both physical and mental - and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm, to keep myself focused on what I'm doing.
Paul Auster -
I'm grateful for the likes of Kundera, Murnane, Markson, Berger, and, in his recent work, Coetzee. But no matter how celebrated they are, critics still consider them askance. Elizabeth Costello, for example, is a great novel, but it got quite a critical panning when it was published. The complaint was that it was simply a book of speeches, without the machinery of conventional fiction. Markson's books are compilations of facts and alleged facts, very artfully.
Teju Cole -
Dare to ask, "Where is my novel too simple?"
Scott Westerfeld -
Novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written.
William Gibson
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As long as the reader is enjoying a story and the writing, it doesn't concern me if people don't understand why it's running backward or if it's running backward. I think disorientating a reader a bit can be really nice. Making them work and bringing their own past to play in a novel.
Evie Wyld -
I . . . am always half afraid of finding a clever novel too clever--& of finding my own story & my own people all forestalled.
Jane Austen -
I went into journalism in a grandiose way. I thought maybe I'd do a little journalism whilst I write the great novel of all time you see - one has to keep oneself afloat.
Neal Ascherson -
...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.
William James -
Everything that I write comes when it wants to, out of its own need and it dictates its form. I don't say, "I am going to write a novel."
Sandra Cisneros -
It is however, difficult to make your narratives relative by yourself. A novelists' work is to provide models to make your narratives relative. If you read my novels then you may feel, "I have the same experience as this narrative", or "I have the same idea as this novel". It means that your narrative and mine sympathize, concord and resonate together.
Haruki Murakami
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Often it's the latest novel that I've written that is my favourite. I'd been dreaming it for so long, living and breathing its story so that when it finally arrives as a newly published book, smelling wonderful and fresh out of the box, there is nothing like it.
Michael Morpurgo -
Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.
Eudora Welty -
Joaquin Jackson's frank and colorful account of his long career as a modern-day Texas Ranger thrills like an action novel, yet the stories are true, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, but always gripping. I could hardly put the book down. . . .The writing is superb.
Elmer Kelton -
I started out in life as a poet, I was only writing poetry all through my 20s, it wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them.
Paul Auster