Novel Quotes
-
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'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.
-
As far as the novel is concerned in my own country, I think it's in a pretty healthy state.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
-
Let's try common sense. A novel concept.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don't know what the hell is going on.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel,
-
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.
-
I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.
-
There's a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain.
-
After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.
-
I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.
