Best 1169 quotes in «novel quotes» category

Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.

Ironically, writing a novel is not a way to sort out your confusion.

Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?

I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows

I say sometimes that I'm a poet but I work in the novel form. That's what I do. That's what makes sense to me. I think of myself as someone who makes particular interventions into genres that already exist.

I set out to write a screenplay but, since my early 20s, had dreamed of writing a novel.

I sort of hate the novel when it doesn't push, restlessly, against the tradition and the traditional.

I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

I started realising that the themes running through all of my novels were really haunting and obsessing me about my own life.

It feels like every single song is a chapter from a truly important novel.

It had been fourteen years and I hadn't had anything published. I had 250 rejection slips. I got my first novel published and it was called Kinflicks. It turned out to be a best seller.

It goes without saying that a fine short poem can have the resonance and depth of an entire novel.

I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

I think you can tell, when you meet someone, whether they read novels or not. There is some little hollowness if they don't.

It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel.

It’s Fitzgerald’s thin-but-durable urge to affirm that finally makes Gatsby worthy of being our Great American Novel. Its soaring conclusion tells us that, even though Gatsby dies and the small and corrupt survive, his longing was nonetheless magnificent.

It's more like I write multiple first drafts, handwritten. So with my first novel, I wrote whole drafts from different points of view. There are different versions of that novel in a drawer on loose-leaf sheets. I won't even look at the first draft while I'm writing the second, and I won't look at the second before writing the third.

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character. Then again, there is a huge gap between me as a person and what I do in the novel.

It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.

It's weird - I don't feel like I'm a better or more confident writer because I'm publishing something. I think, for most writers as well, it's like reinventing the wheel every time. I have no idea what I'm doing writing a novel, and in some ways, it's the only way to do it.

It took me six novels before I felt confident of my voice as a writer.

It was like being in a Jane Austen novel, but one with far less clothing.

I think of my novels as entertainments.

It is clear that a novel cannot be too bad to be worth publishing. . . . It certainly is possible for a novel to be too good to be worth publishing.

It is not as easy to emigrate with steel mills as it is with the manuscript of a novel.

It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.

It’s a rare reader who doesn’t go to the novel looking for a kind of encouragement to live.

It seems to me that the basic plot of all historical novels is a romance swept aside by history.

It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.

It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.

It's true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.

It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.

I turned to the Partition experiences, which were churning in my mind. Then came my first novel Train to Pakistan.

I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.

I usually tame my off-kilter sense of humor for novels.

I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me. Alice Munro, I felt that way about from an early time. Grace Paley.

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've had some tremendous adventures, good and bad. It's part of the novel, and a novel isn't interesting if it doesn't have some good and bad. And you don't know what good is if bad hasn't been a part of your life

I've never abandoned the novel.

I've never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never.

I've never put Northern Ireland into a novel because it's not my territory. I come from the South, so my imaginative territory is very much the Republic of Ireland rather than the North. Even though, if I wrote a novel about the North, it might sell more.

I've never read a young adult novel, though. I'm sure I would love it, but I've never read one.

I've always felt that life is a novel, and part of it is written for you, and part of it is written by you. It's up to you to write the ending, ultimately.

I've always wanted to write a novel. It's overwhelming and daunting, and it's one of those things that every writer fantasizes about doing.

I've never written an autobiographical novel in my life. I've never touched upon my life. I've never written a single scene that I can say took place.

I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character.

I've never really understood that whole thing of writers avoiding other writers' novels while they're working on their own.

I've read all of Sarah Waters's novels which have been translated into Korean.

I've written some short stories about my personal experience, but it's not something you can use everywhere. Every novel, every work of fiction, needs its own food.