Novel Quotes
-
There are few punishments too severe for a popular novel writer.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
-
Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don't know what the hell is going on.
-
Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.
-
There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel,
-
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.
-
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 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.
-
When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time.
-
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.
-
There is no better way of elevating the novel than by making it into a construct which contains ideas.
-
I could read at a very early age and I loved stories, losing myself in stories, novels.
-
Let's try common sense. A novel concept.
-
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.
-
The writer's job is not to write a novel, hold it up and say, “Here I am,” but to write a novel, hold it up and say, “Here YOU are.
-
Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
-
If you try to write a novel in L.A., you're a chump; everyone is speeding by, and you're driving a rickshaw.
-
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.
-
I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
-
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.
