Novel Quotes
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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.
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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.
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It is one of the many merits of this admirable biography of Proust's mother that it invites one to return to the novel with perhaps a fuller understanding of Proust's heredity, hinterland, and upbringing. . . . This fascinating book is full of interesting social and cultural observation, of information about French Jewish life, the position of Jews in society and, of course, the Dreyfus case. But it is essentially a study of one of the most remarkable and fruitful of mother-son relationships. As such it is a book that every Proustian will want to read.
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The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?
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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.
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What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that.
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The strange thing about writing is that it's so easy to write a novel. It is really easy. But it's getting there to the point where it's easy that's hard. The hard part is to get there.
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Madly, futilely, I wrote novel after novel, eight in all, that failed to find a publisher. I persisted because for me the novel was the supreme literary form: not just one among many, not a relic of the past, but the way we communicate to one another the subtlest truths about this business of living.
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A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play.
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A novel is a way to rethink and rewrite and re-envision the past, and also a way to speak to people who haven't been born yet about what we think about right now.
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Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
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What we know about writing the novel is the novel.
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One must be just a little crazy to write a great novel. One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one’s being to take over the work from time to time.
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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.
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You write a novel by inventing a world and inventing the rules that govern that world. Then you break the rules when you want to.
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All great novels are great fairy tales.
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How are we to write The Russian novel in America As long as life goes so unterribly?
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There are few punishments too severe for a popular novel writer.
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What I think is the most important thing to learn about any instrument is the basics of music. Learn your ABCs before you write a Hemingway novel.
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When I receive a new novel from a hopeful publisher - "hoping that I like the book as much as he does" - I check first of all how much dialog there is, and if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang.
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Many of my works fall into the category of "Zeitgeist novels." Yet I hope that they aren't only reportage, but also attempts to convey the sense of the present to the future.
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I like that we don't have to come out the first 10 minutes and score, you know, with joke, joke, joke. We can open it in a more novel way and keep playing different pranks as we go through the thing.
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When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time.
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Let's try common sense. A novel concept.
