Novel Quotes
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All writing is an act of self-exploration. Even a grocery list says something about you; how much more does a novel say?
Steven Saylor
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I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.
William Lewis Safir
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I feel quite at home writing short stories but nervous and anxious when writing novels, as if the bad time of consecutive failures might arise again.
Charles Baxter
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The reason I shift gears constantly, why I'm doing an opera, why I've done essays, why I've written poetry for years that nobody wanted, why I do short stories and novels and screenplays... is so I will have new ways of failing. This means becoming a student again.
Ray Bradbury
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One of the things that's exciting for me about this novel is that, to me, Brookland and The Testament of Yves Gundron were both, in certain regards, crypto-steampunk. They're both books that are interested in an alternate technological past that in fact didn't historically come to pass. If you were to ask me what my novels were about, I would say, well, these are novels about technology and how we relate to technology and what technology means.
Emily Barton
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When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
Ernest Hemingway
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When I started writing short stories, I thought I was writing a novel. I had like 60 or 70 pages. And what I realized was that I don't write inner monologue. I don't want to talk about what somebody is thinking or feeling. I wanted to try to show it in an interesting way. And so what I realized was that I was really writing a screenplay.
Shane Carruth
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A lot of people have come up after Brookland and asked, "What happens to her at the end of the novel?" and I will very politely say, well, here are the two possibilities.
Emily Barton
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When I decided to write a novel about Istanbul, I thought I should put the different faces of Istanbul into one book. I also put the characters in a cell, and it's three stories underground, rather than on the surface. The characters have one Istanbul, the other one is above ground. One is in dark, one is in light. That kind of contradiction - those opposite sides - creates a great energy in Istanbul.
Burhan Sonmez
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Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.
William Golding
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Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.
Northrop Frye
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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
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I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel. Everything I did is on the record and, if you want to hear it, just listen to the record.
Tom Lehrer
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I knew I'd have to go to work in real estate or something else or I could never finish my novel.
Judith Rossner
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A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.
Ethan Canin
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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
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I always try to create conflict and drama in my books; it's the engine of the novel.
Monica Ali
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I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.
Alice Mattison
