Novel Quotes
-
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
-
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.
Eudora Welty
-
There's a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain.
William Boyd
-
Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
Oscar Wilde
-
If you try to write a novel in L.A., you're a chump; everyone is speeding by, and you're driving a rickshaw.
Ethan Canin
-
Writing a page a day doesn't seem like much, but do it for 365 days and you have enough to fill a novel.
Austin Kleon
-
I always wanted to write. While I was on a long surf trip, supporting myself with various day jobs, I was working hard on a novel. My third novel, in fact.
William Finnegan
-
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
-
When I began to write seriously, 40 years ago now, my chosen form was the novel.
William Nicholson
-
An image often propels the novel, gets it started. For me, it's an image that has a lot of emotion connected to it.
Will Hobbs
-
I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
Hilary Mantel
-
Writing grew out of the pleasure of escape. My novels are very much outside of my personal experience. That is why I love writing fiction. It allows me to leave my existence and inhabit other lives.
Danielle Trussoni
-
If you like my novels, I commend your good taste.
Rita Mae Brown
-
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
-
To reflect the entire spectrum, the dynamics of the adventure novel must be invested with a philosophic synthesis of one kind or another.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
-
The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.
Alberto Moravia
