Novel Quotes
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Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.
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The Apple Pie Hubbub was a significant novel for me, because that's when I first started using verbs.
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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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Novels, like human beings, usually have their beginnings in the dark.
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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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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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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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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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When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
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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'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'
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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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Don’t try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.
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Yes, there's a relaying of internal states that only a novel can achieve. In my view, the novel is one of Europe's greatest gifts to the world. America and Africa collaborated to give the world jazz. We'll call it even.
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Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.
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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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A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.
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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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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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A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
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The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.
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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.
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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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There is no 'right' way to begin a novel, but for me, plot has to wait. The character comes first.
