Novel Quotes

I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.

One novel that I think is an overriding influence in my life is 'All the King's Men,' the most beautiful book written in the U.S.

When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.

Many of my short stories (all unpublished) were horror, and the novel I'd just finished was horror, too.

I have survived by representing these sufferings of mine in the form of the novel.

Like any good spy novel, the Cox Report alleges that Chinese spies penetrated four U.S. weapons research labs and stole important information on seven nuclear warhead designs.

And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.

The novel is always pop art, and the novel is always dying. That's the only way it stays alive. It does really die. I've been thinking about that a lot.

Babylon 5 is probably the biggest, most ambitious television science fiction series ever made. It's one big novel told over five years with 110 different stories told within it.

Recently, I haven't had too much time to read. But I love a good romance novel.

HBO and I have a deal to at least try to make a television series from the Leonid McGill stories. We're going to start with the first novel, 'The Long Fall.'

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

If you have to deal with our friends at ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it's like a Kafka novel. Files just disappear.

Yes, after some time spent last year on other commitments, most of them speaking engagements, I am now about halfway through a novel that I hope will come out in 1998.

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

We have no general conceptual thrust for the band, other than trying to make music that keeps our interest. When things are novel, they are probably things we have discovered by accident or investigation rather than by design.

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it.

Last week I was just someone who had had a first novel published.

Here was a fragment of Goddess myth that, through all its permutations, had somehow escaped being turned on its head. It was the perfect springboard for the sort of novel I wanted to write.

I don't assume, because I can write screenplays, that I know how to write a novel. It's a very different world. There's a craft involved in storytelling, and it's a different kind of craft. But yes, someday I will do that. It just might be awhile.

All novels are about crime. You'd be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don't see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That's the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

For all the social changes in China can be traced to their early beginnings in the days when the new tools or vehicles of commerce and locomotion first brought the Chinese people into unavoidable contact with the strange ways and novel goods of the Western peoples.

I don't fret over lost time - I can always use the situations in a novel.