Novel Quotes
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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.
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A novel that features real people is complicated, but in the end, that extra challenge is all for the good.
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Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.
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You need a theme in a picture book just as much or maybe even more than you need it in a novel.
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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.
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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 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.
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Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.
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It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel.
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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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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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It's the pursuit of love and happiness that is the driving force of the romantic novel.
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Of the first seven novels I wrote, numbers four and five were published. Numbers one, two, three, six, and seven, have never seen the light of day... and rightly so.
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Everyone has early fiction fantasies, but it wasn't until my second child Betsy was born that I allowed the urge to write a novel bubble up.
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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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The three hardest parts of writing a novel are writing the beginning, the middle, and the end.
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I don’t want what we’re doing to just end up as notes for a novel.
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People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.
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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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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.
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The rise of the dramas in the thirteenth century, and the rise of the great novels in a later period, together with their frank glorification of love and the joys of life, may be called the Third Renaissance.
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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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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.
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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.
