Novel Quotes
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I'm very secretive. I'll write a whole novel and revise it, which might take me two years or more, and the people I know best don't know what I'm writing about.
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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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I always try to create conflict and drama in my books; it's the engine of the novel.
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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.
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You have the older generation like Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson who are not as old as Graham Greene, but still are coming on. I dare say anyone who knew the scene better than I know it could fill it in with a very satisfactory supply of novels.
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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.
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It's true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.
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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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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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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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Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.
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On an island, anything can happen. In a crime novel, it usually does.
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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?
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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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Novels are completed when they are finished, but the memoir changes its own conclusion by virtue of being written... I was not at all the same person, when I handed the manuscript to the publisher, as I had been when I began. A memoir may always be retrospective, but the past is not where its action takes place.
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Usually, ordinary histories don't get the emotional feel of a period. That's what a novel can do.
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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.
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I didn't know anything about Opus Die except from pop culture, like Dan Brown novels, which I knew wasn't really knowing anything about Opus Die.
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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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There are jobs that can be done equally well by men or by women and that finally you can't see a difference. But from the moment that you involve yourself fully in writing a novel, for example, or an essay, then you are involved as a woman, in the same way that you can't deny your nationality - you are French, you are a man, you are a woman... all this passes into the writing.
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The battle with the bottle is nothing so novel.
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To be able to analyze plays and novels is so relevant to acting.
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A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.
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Romance novels satisfy a very specific fantasy of romantic love that seems to be a powerful part of the female psyche.
