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.
Stephen Malkmus Pavement -
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.
Karl Ove Knausgard
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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.
Will Self -
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 -
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
Virginia Woolf -
A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play.
Charlotte Bronte -
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.
Nicholas Sparks -
All great novels are great fairy tales.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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.
Vladimir Nabokov -
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.
Yngwie Johan Malmsteen Alcatrazz -
There are few punishments too severe for a popular novel writer.
S. S. Van Dine -
I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was constantly by my side while I was writing it, who was the good fairy of my equilibrium, who banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of certainties.
Salvador Dali -
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 -
Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don't know what the hell is going on.
Lily King
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Wrote my first "novel" when I was six. Studied a bit in college, but then pursued history... But when I started writing professionally, it was mostly learn as you go.
David B. Coe -
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.
John Gardner -
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.
Emily Barton -
When I write a novel, every word is mine. I welcome suggestions from my editor, but in the end, I make all the final decisions.
Louis Sachar -
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.
William Nicholson -
A short story is confined to one mood, to which everything in the story pertains. Characters, setting, time, events, are all subject to the mood. And you can try more ephemeral, more fleeting things in a story - you can work more by suggestion - than in a novel. Less is resolved, more is suggested, perhaps.
Eudora Welty
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However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
William Golding -
Let's try common sense. A novel concept.
Barack Obama -
We Rodriguez and Frank Miller wanted to take the movies and turn them into a graphic novel, so that people wouldn't even know what they were looking at. It's still visual storytelling, but it's approached completely different. The two mediums don't have to be separate mediums. They can be one and the same.
Robert Rodriguez Chingon -
History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.
Paul Auster