Novel Quotes
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There is no 'right' way to begin a novel, but for me, plot has to wait. The character comes first.
Susan Isaacs
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The job of the novel is to be true to the confusion, but not so confusing that you turn the reader off.
Nicholson Baker
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I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.
William Gibson
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It was a great place to write a novel about book burning, in the library basement.
Ray Bradbury
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I don't talk about my books while I'm writing them: not even my husband knows what a novel's about until it's done.
Sarah Dessen
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I'm grateful for the likes of Kundera, Murnane, Markson, Berger, and, in his recent work, Coetzee. But no matter how celebrated they are, critics still consider them askance. Elizabeth Costello, for example, is a great novel, but it got quite a critical panning when it was published. The complaint was that it was simply a book of speeches, without the machinery of conventional fiction. Markson's books are compilations of facts and alleged facts, very artfully.
Teju Cole
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It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.
Haruki Murakami
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Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history.
Sébastien-Roch Nicolas
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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.
Rick Yancey
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The historical background is one of the easier aspects of writing a novel. Far more difficult is dreaming up the smaller, character-based scenes, scenes that rise entirely from one's own imagination.
Ethan Canin
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When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.
Richard Russo
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I can't imagine how American readers will react to a novel, but if the story is appealing it doesn't matter much if you don't catch all the detail. I'm not too familiar with the geography of nineteenth century London, for instance, but I still enjoy reading Dickens.
Haruki Murakami
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In all my stories and novels, no one ever escapes Louisiana. Maybe that is because my soul never left Louisiana, although my body did go to California.
Ernest Gaines
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You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year
Ray Bradbury
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We could live like counts. ... If all that money is out there, I might as well hack a little on the side and put the novel off.
William Faulkner
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You can't do science in a novel, but you can do philosophy. Or, if you're really lucky, you can manage to pose a question in such a way that other people will take it on.
Scarlett Thomas
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Writing a first novel takes so much effort, with such little promise of result or reward, that it must necessarily be a labour of love bordering on madness.
Steven Saylor
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If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
Terry Eagleton
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Information, defined intuitively and informally, might be something like 'uncertainty's antidote.' This turns out also to be the formal definition- the amount of information comes from the amount by which something reduces uncertainty...The higher the [information] entropy, the more information there is. It turns out to be a value capable of measuring a startling array of things- from the flip of a coin to a telephone call, to a Joyce novel, to a first date, to last words, to a Turing test...Entropy suggests that we gain the most insight on a question when we take it to the friend, colleague, or mentor of whose reaction and response we're least certain. And it suggests, perhaps, reversing the equation, that if we want to gain the most insight into a person, we should ask the question of qhose answer we're least certain... Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of course, and I don't quibble with them in the slightest. But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish.
Brian Christian
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Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.
Chad Harbach
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If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.
Ray Bradbury
