Novel Quotes
-
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
-
Usually, ordinary histories don't get the emotional feel of a period. That's what a novel can do.
-
I always try to create conflict and drama in my books; it's the engine of the novel.
-
Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.
-
I think predictability is built into any good novel in some way - you begin reading Anna Karenina and you know pretty much what's going to happen at the end. But that doesn't mean you know what's going to happen in the middle. For me, it's that sense of what happens in the middle that's important.
-
I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.
-
I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.
-
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.
-
Hollywood called just as I crested thirty. My novels did not and still do not interest them, but my writing ability did.
-
I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'
-
You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year
-
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.
-
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.
-
Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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."
-
It's been a while since I've written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, 'Okay, now I'm going to write something for us old folks.' I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.
-
On an island, anything can happen. In a crime novel, it usually does.
-
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.
