Novel Quotes
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My first book was a historical novel. I started writing in 1974. In those days, historical novels meant ladies with swelling bosoms on the cover. Basically, it meant historical romance. It was not respectable as a genre.
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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.
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Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
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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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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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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.
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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 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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A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.
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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.
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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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When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
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Don’t try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.
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I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'
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Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.
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I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.
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I love to tell stories. I love to tell stories the way I tell them, not the way anybody else tells them. I am all the time writing a novel.
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Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.
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I'd like to emphasize that when a reader finishes a great novel, he will immediately begin looking for another. If someone loves your book, it increases the chance that he or she will look at mine. So there is no competition between writers. Another writer's success helps build a larger readership for all of us.
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Put simply the novel stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. There is no other medium in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character. That is the service a novel renders.
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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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I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'
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Hollywood called just as I crested thirty. My novels did not and still do not interest them, but my writing ability did.
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I always try to create conflict and drama in my books; it's the engine of the novel.
