Novel Quotes
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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 . . . 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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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 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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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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I don't think the 'what' distinguishes a good novel from a bad one but rather the 'how.'
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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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For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life.
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Facebook is the novel we are all writing
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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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You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year
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Baltimore was never intended to be anything other than this original novel that Chris Golden and I did together. There was never any thought of this thing going on and becoming a series. If there's any common thing between these characters, it's that they weren't anything I was seeing in comics. Almost everything I've done is something I wish somebody else was doing, because it's what I'd like to read.
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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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I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.
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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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I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn't novel.
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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'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'
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On an island, anything can happen. In a crime novel, it usually does.
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The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt. Precisely because we keep questioning everything, especially our own premises, we are always ready to improve our knowledge. Therefore a good scientist is never ‘certain’. Lack of certainty is precisely what makes conclusions more reliable than the conclusions of those who are certain: because the good scientist will be ready to shift to a different point of view if better elements of evidence, or novel arguments emerge. Therefore certainty is not only something of no use, but is in fact damaging, if we value reliability.
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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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Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history.
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Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.
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I've seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn't occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me, so I don't feel like going back and dredging them up.
