Novel Quotes
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I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.
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Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list.
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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.
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Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
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When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
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Each and every novel is a world outside the world - for a reader to visit, for comfort, consolation, escape, or challenge.
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Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.
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Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.
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I think that physics is about escaping the prison of the received thoughts and searching for novel ways of thinking the world, about trying to clear a bit the misty lake of insubstantial dreams, which reflect reality like the lake reflects the mountains.
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The battle with the bottle is nothing so novel.
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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.
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I know you sometimes think that people are like books. But our lives don’t have neat logical plots, and we don’t always say beautiful, intelligent things like the characters in a novel. That’s not the way life is.
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There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.
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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."
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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.
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It's a complex thing when you're writing a novel, because so much of it is conscious and planned and deliberate, and so much of it is not, and it has to be a dance between the conscious and the unconscious. I bring my best instincts to my work. For instance - and I come by this naturally, or I think I do - I am a very good judge of character.
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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.
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Most of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do - really felt like I had to do if I was going to write another novel - was move towards something like sincerity.
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I . . . am always half afraid of finding a clever novel too clever--& of finding my own story & my own people all forestalled.
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Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.
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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.
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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.
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Not all coincidence has to be loaded with meaning. Sometimes, things simply recur because that's how it is in life, that's how the mood gets in. It's good to subtly overdo it too, as Nabokov does, as Sebald does. It's a good way to intensify that region of localized weather that we call a novel.
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Very quietly, I heard a voice in my ear.It said, in a weird, cheesy, right-out-of-one-of-my-mother's-novels way, "Ah. Wemeet again." I turned my head, just slightly, and right there, practically on top of me, was theguy from the car dealership. He was wearing a red Mountain Fresh Detergent T-shirt - not just fresh: mountain fresh! - it proclaimed, and was smiling at me. "Oh,God," I said. "No, it's Dexter.
