Novel Quotes
-
We have a thriving subculture of 'independent' American movies that makes an impact on America as a whole roughly equivalent to that of a the modern literary novel. These are the films sincere viewers marry, whereas, once upon a time, movies were a lifetime of one night stands.
Edward Jay Epstein
-
Let's try common sense. A novel concept.
Barack Obama
-
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.
Jimmy Buffett
-
One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.
Stanley Kubrick
-
When I began to write seriously, 40 years ago now, my chosen form was the novel.
William Nicholson
-
I took inspiration from 'Fountainhead,' the way in which Ayn Rand conveyed her political philosophy through an immensely popular novel.
Eliyahu Goldratt
-
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
-
Somebody said, 'Hey, there is a lull in your career. Why don't you write books about your [dyslexia]?' We are currently writing our 34th novel.
Henry Winkler
-
Poison Pill is a great reading. The novel ranges from Russian oligarchs to the American worlds of drug research and the equity markets, all of it in a mode of high suspense.
Scott Turow
-
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.
Paul Auster
-
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.
William Nicholson
-
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.
Rita Mae Brown
-
A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
Walker Percy
-
Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
Paul Auster
-
To write a novel is fundamentally an act of impudence. To comb one's hair is also an act of impudence, especially when it's done to try to cover a scar running across the top of one's forehead. But combing one's hair is an act of minor impudence, whereas writing is a more serious affair. We mask reality, we hide our fears, we reinvent things that have been said, and above all, the people who said them. Writing a novel implies a certain perversity. It's not something one can do with a tortoiseshell comb. It is perhaps for that reason that they take away my pen at night. Not, as they pretend, to prevent me from accidentally stabbing myself in the throat with it- but to prevent me from killing anyone else.
Paco Ignacio Taibo II
-
Life's like a novel with the end ripped out.
Danny Orton
-
A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.
Joyce Cary
-
But when I say it isn't meant for anyone's eyes, I don't mean it in the sense of one of those novel manuscripts people keep in a drawer, insisting they don't care if anyone else ever reads it or not.The people I have known who do that, I am convinced, have no faith in themselves as writers and know, deep down, that the novel is flawed, that they don't know how to tell the story, or they don't understand what the story is, or they haven't really got a story to tell. The manuscript in the drawer is the story.
Katharine Weber
-
When I adapt a novel, I don’t really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.
Francis Ford Coppola
-
When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I'm finished with a theme, I'm generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises.
Richard Russo
-
It’s rare, he says, that we “encounter a person who asserts vehemently that the mere thought of reading a novel, or looking at a picture, or seeing a movie causes him insufferable torment,” but “sensible, educated people” often say “with a remarkable blend of defiance and pride” that math is “pure torture” or a “nightmare” that “turns them off.”
Edward Frenkel
-
A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.
Charles Baxter
