Novel Quotes
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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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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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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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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.
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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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All great novels are great fairy tales.
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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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My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.
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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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For me a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.
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There is no better way of elevating the novel than by making it into a construct which contains ideas.
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There are few punishments too severe for a popular novel writer.
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A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play.
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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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I could read at a very early age and I loved stories, losing myself in stories, novels.
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I certainly wake up every morning and thank God that I'm not a novelist because the theater is tough, but novel writing is infinitely harder. Especially with the economics of serious fiction being what they are in America.
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Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don't know what the hell is going on.
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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.
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My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.
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We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.
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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.
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Whether it's a letter, song lyrics, part of a novel, or instructions on how to fix a kitchen sink, it's writing. You keep your craft honed, you acquire the discipline to finish things. You turn into a self-taskmaster.
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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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Writing a novel is like heading out over the open sea in a small boat. It helps, if you have a plan and a course laid out.
