Novel Quotes

I have often heard that the novel is dead. But I see novels produced, I don't know how many a week, in France. I have the impression it's carrying along quite well.

I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing.

I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it.

I do write long, long character notes - family background, history, details of appearance - much more than will ever appear in the novel. I think this is what lifts a book from that early calculated, artificial stage.

My first novel took 12 years to complete because life got in my way.

You can be interested in a Jane Smiley novel whether or not anyone says a word. She enters into her characters' thoughts with great understanding and depth.

I wrote a novel about Israelis who live their own lives on the slope of a volcano. Near a volcano one still falls in love, one still gets jealous, one still wants a promotion, one still gossips.

The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town.

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.

Oh, that sound? I'm in the hot tub, reading a novel.

I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.

Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.

I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second.

My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I've taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, 'The Hornet's Nest,' I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.

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 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.

In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.

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.