Novel Quotes

I found my first novel difficult. I don't want to make it sound like it's any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on.

I love Richard Yates, his work, and the novel, Revolutionary Road. It's a devastating novel.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam.

I want to write more books, see my first novel made into a film, fight more campaigns, work in more countries. I want to be able to recall experiences that have endured for their pleasure and range and intensity.

One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently.

I even feel guilty if I'm reading a novel, because I think I should be reading Homer again. I don't really know what free time is, because I don't have something to measure it against.

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.

The characters you refer to as predatory and unsavory are useful. They're the ones who make a novel into a thriller. They're active, and most of the common virtues, the signs of a good person, are not.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

When I'm working on a novel of my own, I try to read mostly nonfiction, although sometimes I break down and peek at something else.

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

To make a love story, you need a couple of young people, but to reflect on the nature of love, you're better off with old ones. That is a fact of life and literature - and of the novel ever since it fell in love with love in the 18th century.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

When I read 'Watchmen,' it changed my view of so many things. It was the first time I'd read a graphic novel really like that.

There are hours when I must force the novel out of my mind and be interested in the children.

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.

That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.

I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'

Late night is no different than making a film, really, except that it's faster, and if you do a crap one, you can do a better one tomorrow. Writing a novel and doing stand-up - that stuff is very similar.

I'm working on a new novel, in its 3rd draft, but it's hard to write while doing 7th Heaven.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

I may have one more 'Star Trek' novel in me, but it would be in the old universe, not the new one.

A novel is often a longer process in handling self-doubt.

The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel.

The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.

I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.