Novel Quotes
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Jerusalem Maiden is a page-turning and thought-provoking novel. Extraordinary sensory detail vividly conjures another time and place; heroine Esther Kaminsky’s poignant struggle transcends time and place. The ultimate revelation here: for many women, if not most, 2011 is no different than 1911, but triumph is nonetheless possible.
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I knew from previous books not to count on anything in terms of sales. My first novel - -The Raven's Bride, about Sam Houston's disastrous first marriage - -sold well and got attention, but my second book - -Promised Lands, about the Texas Revolution - -didn't.
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I wouldn't have filmed The Color Purple if the book had been a big fat novel. The reason I read it is because it is thin.
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Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel. If you are writing a plot-driven genre novel make sure all your major themes/plot elements are introduced in the first third, which you can call the introduction. Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development. Resolve your themes, mysteries and so on in the final third, the resolution.
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Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.
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The ingredients that make a good poem often differ from those that make a good essay and from those that make a good novel.
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I wrote the first draft of the New People quickly but it had been percolating a lot longer. It's a hard question to answer because I'd been working on another novel for years and when I gave up on that, this one came very easily. But I think the work had been going on a lot longer than the actual writing.
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The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people of his experience ... The only thing the writer can do is to recombine parts, suppress some characterisitics and emphasize others, put two or three people into one fictional character, and pray the real-life prototypes won't sue.
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I once had an editor advise me, as I was revising one of my early novels, to add more characters. I played around with the idea. As soon as I'd decided a few fresh faces and give them something to do, I realized that what my editor had really asked for was more plot. Ding. More characters equals more action.
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In some ways I'm a frustrated scientist or mathematician. The amount of times I've thought I'd go back to university and do theoretical physics because I like the big questions, but really I know now that that's not quite me. What's me is to do it in novels.
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The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.
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The novel is very much alive, indeed. In Toronto at the Sixth Annual International Festival of Authors (October 1985) I listened to novelists by the dozen.
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I have this prejudice that trilogies are long, three-volume novels.
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If you like my novels, I commend your good taste.
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Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
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I have never read a really good novel written by a man where women are portrayed as they truly are. They can be portrayed externally very well - Stendhal's Madame de Renal, for example - but only as seen from the outside.
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Anything whatsoever may become the subject of a novel, provided only that it happens in this mundane life and not in some fairyland beyond our human ken.
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I suppose drama can either take the place of a novel or can be very closely allied with it. It's quite customary to turn a successful novel into a film or a television series because you can dramatize and pictorialize a novel.
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There are as many different ways to write a novel as there are varieties of human consciousness, so I am totally delighted if people want to use words that come from genres to describe how this book functions because those words are accurate.
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We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality . . . the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cats may be black at night, but not to other cats.
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We me and husband had been learning about the Khazars, and I had read Michael Chabon's novel Gentlemen of the Road the year before, so all these things are kind of roiling around in my brain, and then I slipped on the ice and I broke my wrist, and it had to be surgically repaired.
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It's an eclectic film and I think we served the novel really well. And we had a great cast who worked for free. Everyone read it and said, I'm in, from Nick Nolte to Albert Finney to Omar Epps to Barbara Hershey. We really had fun and shot it in a very short time. I think the subject matter is more topical today, more to the point, than it was 30 years ago, when it concerned the Vietnam War.
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I think my writing process changes as I gain more life experience... It has taken me many years to be able to write a novel that shows the points of view of people of different ages and personalities.
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If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don't they will feel betrayed.
