Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The same parts of my brain get as excited as when I study bio or read a novel and write a paper on it.
Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites.
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.
If you read the novel, you have expectations. And, if you've seen something first, it's just hard to do.
It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same time
The function of the novel is the exploration of the human condition. Really, that's what it's all about.
Many of my short stories (all unpublished) were horror, and the novel I'd just finished was horror, too.
That seems to be the definition of 'novel' for me: a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.
A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.
I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.
One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.
I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to 'unreliable.'
I have only one bit of advice to beginning writers: be sure your novel is read by Rodgers and Hammerstein.
If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?
Other genres are plot-driven, but the entire focus of a romance novel is on the characters and their arcs.
The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.
I received so many positive comments about the quotes that I decided to continue to use them in my novels.
Novels seem to exist because of this need to know and connect, and so story becomes charged with necessity.
I always write my novels with music (I don't listened to the music seriously.) Music seems to encourage me.
Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.
I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.
Just about everybody has written a first novel that they throw away before writing their actual first novel.
I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose.
I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
When you read a novel, your own imagery is the most important. It's what makes reading such a wonderful thing.
If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn't concern the central issues, it wouldn't be worth publishing.
A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving.
I read novels but I also read the Bible. And study it, you know? And the more I learn, the more excited I get.
I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.
If I'm hanging around too much, my wife and kids say, 'Hey, why don't you go downstairs and start a new novel?'
Neither transitions nor transformations will be manageable without novel forms of global governance and markets
I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.
I feel like humor is a part of life. I don't think it comes through as much in the novels as it does in my head.
There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.
A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market - it knows nothing about target markets.
My springboard is always the script. Even if the script is taken from a novel, I often haven't read the novel...
'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.
My writing often contains souvenirs of the day - a song I heard, a bird I saw - which I then put into the novel.
Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.
Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.
I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.
He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
I never discuss a novel while I'm writing it, for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it.
Few novels or plays could exist without at least one troublemaker in the group, and perhaps life couldn't either.
The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.
I never plan my novels because if I know what is going to happen, it bores me rigid. I let the story tell itself.
The greater the novel, the more it is apt to embody the special, non-replicable properties of the written medium.
'Atlas Shrugged,' let's face it, was probably the most important novel of the 20th century that was never a film.