Novel Quotes

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

My favorite period is World War II, and I'm in the middle of writing my fourth novel set in that era.

Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel.

Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.

When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.

Traditionally, people have been adapting novels and short stories forever. Now, they're doing it simultaneously, with an eye towards writing the movie before the novel has even come out or been finished. It's a function of this hyper-accelerated society we live in, where everyone is trying to short circuit the process.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest.

But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.

Whenever you have two characters in a book, whether it's a novel or nonfiction, you run the risk that the reader is going to like one more than the other. They're going to read one chapter and say, 'I can't wait to get back to the other guy.'

If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn't concern the central issues, it wouldn't be worth publishing.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

The way this whole novel thing came together was, I sold them one bill of goods and then didn't communicate very well. I am like Captain Run-on Sentence.

People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

My first film goes into production in October. It's called White Boy Shuffle and it's based on a novel about a young black kid and it's sort of reminiscent of Catcher in the Rye.

Many characters in the novel are representative of types that exist in India. He represents the caste system in India with an air of superiority, the caste system in India and the people thinking that western things are better.

I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books, I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.

I started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to write.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

A good novel editor is invisible.

In a novel, it's hard to keep track of everybody.

The 'information novel' shouldn't be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream.

I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe.

Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.