Novel Quotes
-
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.
-
There are few punishments too severe for a popular novel writer.
-
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.
-
If you try to write a novel in L.A., you're a chump; everyone is speeding by, and you're driving a rickshaw.
-
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.
-
Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don't know what the hell is going on.
-
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.
-
When I began to write seriously, 40 years ago now, my chosen form was the novel.
-
When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time.
-
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
-
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.
-
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.
-
There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel,
-
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.
-
There is no better way of elevating the novel than by making it into a construct which contains ideas.
-
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.
-
Let's try common sense. A novel concept.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I could read at a very early age and I loved stories, losing myself in stories, novels.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
