Novel Quotes

• There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however na?ve that may have been, it was a good deal less na?ve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.

  

  Flannery O'Connor
  • Life
  • Time
  • Good

• That was a very sophisticated attack; the nature of it was novel.

  

  F. Thomson Leighton
  • Nature
  • Attack
  • Sophisticated

• What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

  

  Eudora Welty
  • Writing
  • Knows
  • Novel

• I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.

  

  William Gibson
  • Writing
  • Shopping
  • Lists

• For me, when I start a novel, I only have a general sense of what I am going to do - usually three or four big scenes or something to which I can really respond emotionally.

  

  Patrick Ness
  • Sense
  • Scenes
  • Emotionally

• The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.

  

  Joshua Foer
  • Art
  • Memories
  • Creativity

• Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.

  

  Rachel Kushner
  • Things
  • Write
  • Course

• A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

  

  Hilary Mantel
  • Book
  • Should
  • Answers

• I fantasised about becoming an author and wrote my first book at 18 - an introspective novel set in the 1920s.

  

  Talulah Riley
  • Book
  • First
  • Author

• Before I studied story, I was trying to write a novel, and it was terrible. It wasn't going anywhere, and I couldn't figure out what I was trying to do. It was really hard; much harder than I thought it was going to be. Now that I've studied story, I think I'd have a different approach and maybe I could actually get it done.

  

  Donald Miller
  • Different
  • Trying
  • Done

• A couple of times he called the second he'd finished reading a novel and just had to tell me about it, and I know it sounds hokey and librarianish to say so, but I just swooned when he did that.

  

  Sarah Vowell
  • Reading
  • Couple
  • Sound

• We become comfortable saying that there's nothing new, and then something like Malarky comes along, which is new and old and different and familiar, but ultimately itself, comfortable in its own skin, wise and smart and crazy-sexy or maybe sexy-crazy-well, you just have to read it to understand. It's a novel that sets its own course, sure and steady, even when it seems like it might be about to go over the edge of the world.

  

  Laura Lippman
  • World
  • Novel
  • Edge

• The best of Donald Westlake's pseudonymous thrillers about Parker, the toughest burglar who ever lived. . . .Out of print for years and years, Butcher's Moon is the ultimate Parker novel, best read as an installment in the series as a whole but comprehensible and wholly satisfying on its own.

  

  Terry Teachout
  • Moon
  • Ultimate
  • Print

• Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel

  

  Sara Paretsky
  • Wanted
  • Novel
  • Publish

• I didn't have a list of things I should do this year, next year, find a good novel, sign two stars and make a deal - because I think cinema should come from cinema. I never adapted anything. Beautiful books are beautiful books, that's it. I don't know why we should transform them.

  

  Agnes Varda
  • Good
  • Thinking
  • Why

• The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?

  

  Nicholson Baker
  • Life
  • Question
  • Novel

• I was born January 6, 1937, eight years after Wall Street crashed and two years before John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the plight of a family during the Great Depression.

  

  Lou Holtz
  • Great
  • Family
  • Winning

• The greater the novel, the more it is apt to embody the special, non-replicable properties of the written medium.

  

  Joseph O'Neill
  • Novel
  • Properties
  • Embody

• Even when there's not a joke or a hook, the first line has to be good and snapem to attention. Songs ain't novels. You don't have 30 pages to slowly wrap somebody in. They're more like short stories or poems. If the first line hasn't grabbed them, you won't get to the second line. Once you've developed an audience, you may have some luxury and trust, so you don't have to knock 'em over the head with line one.

  

  Dan Bern
  • Writing
  • Song
  • Attention

• I'd like to ghost-write Liz Phair's novel. But I don't really know about that. It seems like a dignified thing to segue into as I approach the other side of 45. My hands are just full right now. There's the potential to try to write some kind of biography of Pavement - sort of a cryptic, nonfiction/fiction blowout. The story's never been told well. But that's a lot of inward-gazing that I'm not sure I want to do. I like to look out.

  

  Stephen Malkmus Pavement
  • Hands
  • Ghost
  • Biography

• With James Reese’s vivid and chilling novel, readers will gain a whole new appreciation of two gothic landmarks, Dracula and Jack the Ripper. Not only does The Dracula Dossier grip us with its fast paced hunt for history’s most notorious killer, it also enchants us with sophisticated and lyrical recreations of its unique period and strong characters. A daring achievement.

  

  Matthew Pearl
  • Readers
  • Gothic
  • Landmarks

• Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.

  

  Virginia Woolf
  • Burning
  • Brands
  • Antidote

• My science teachers always encouraged their classes to 'go out and discover something' because all scientific endeavors depend on observation and experimentation. Through such pursuits, anyone can find something new to science, and if it's truly novel, the entire edifice of science might have to be restructured.

  

  Gregory Walter Graffin Bad Religion
  • Teacher
  • Observation
  • Experimentation

• Chevy Stevens is in top form. ALWAYS WATCHING is a tense and twisty exploration of dark memories, hidden pasts, and a place that seems like heaven but might be hell. This is a deep and exciting novel, as unsettling as it is gripping.

  

  Lisa Unger
  • Dark
  • Heaven
  • Deep

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