Novel Quotes
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I find coming up with a title the hardest part of writing a novel.
Sara Shepard
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I really think people are greatly stimulated and enriched by experiencing in film just as we can from novels and other art, experiencing things that resonate with what our lives are about. I think people really want to know... want to share, want to have the stimulus to think and care about the way they live their lives, the way they relate to other people, their aspirations, their hopes, et cetera.
Mike Leigh
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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
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Every once in awhile you find a novel so magical that there is no escaping its spell. The Night Circus is one of these rarities - engrossing, beautifully written and utterly enchanting. If you choose to read just one novel this year, this is it
Danielle Trussoni
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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
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The spirit of Jane Eyre looms over Once Upon a Day. Lisa Tucker keeps the plot of this gothic novel bubbling with tons of juicy family secrets.
Stewart O'Nan
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I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
Hilary Mantel
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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
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If you try to write a novel in L.A., you're a chump; everyone is speeding by, and you're driving a rickshaw.
Ethan Canin
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The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?
Nicholson Baker
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A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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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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Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.
Vita Sackville-West
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There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel,
S. S. Van Dine
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I created a character whose motives were pure and good and she was going to go out and save the whole world. But the truth is, you can't save the whole world, but you can save one. And that was the whole thrust of the novel - to save just one.
Lurlene McDaniel
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All my novels are very much directly related to my inner life, even though I'm inventing characters, even though it's fiction, even though it's make-believe, it nevertheless is coming out of the deepest recesses of myself.
Paul Auster
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Conversation should be pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, free without indecency, learned without conceitedness, novel without falsehood.
William Shakespeare
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The fundamental purpose of a novel like Count Julian is to achieve the unity of object and means of representation, the fusion of treason as scheme and treason as language.
Juan Goytisolo
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In some ways I'm a frustrated scientist or mathematician. The amount of times I've thought I'd go back to university and do theoretical physics because I like the big questions, but really I know now that that's not quite me. What's me is to do it in novels.
Scarlett Thomas
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If you're a playwright, unless you're really lacking in get-up-and-go, you can always get your play up somewhere. You can't necessarily make a living doing it, but theater is about meeting an audience. Plays are not easier to write necessarily, they take less time to write. If you get them up, it's a much more rough-and-tumble kind of existence. I think it's, from my perspective, easier than novel writing.
Tony Kushner
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How are we to write The Russian novel in America As long as life goes so unterribly?
Robert Frost
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When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time.
Kingsley Amis
