Best 1169 quotes in «novel quotes» category

If you haven't written a novel by the time you're forty you never will!

If you like my novels, I commend your good taste.

If you're doing a classic play, where if you do a Chekhov, you do the words as written. You can't do that with a novel; you have to do your version of the words as written.

If you want meaning, you read poetry or a novel or something, you don't read song lyrics. You're supposed to listen to them with music.

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

I get and read an enormous number of first novels.

I get very weird and defensive about what I'm working on - I wouldn't even tell my secretary what the next page of my novel was about.

I grew up in Southern California, so the whole concept of a local music history is still kinda novel to me.

I guess I've always been an aspiring novelist. I went to Princeton and wrote a novel for my thesis.

I had all these sparkles I'd collected and wanted to work in, but when I originally started writing it and it was originally this novel about all these people set in 1666, what I was so interested in was the New Science.

I have a backlog of novels which I would love to be working on and would be working on if I were not obliged to hold down a full time job.

I hadn't written a love story before and I hadn't written a novel with a happy ending before.

I hate that rule that says write about what you know, it leads to too many British novels about marriages going slightly wrong. Write about what you don't know, just act as though you do.

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

I have learned a great deal from novels. Some of it is even true.

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 have assiduously avoided calling my books novels

I know many older writers who were very successful and whose books are now out of print, so you have to go to antiquarian booksellers to buy their fifth or eighth novel or whatever it is.

I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.

I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.

I kept starting 'Anansi Boys' as a movie and stopping, and eventually wrote the novel and was happy.

I invented the historical spy novel.

I love to run and I have some tips to keep it fresh and novel. I rarely use the same route twice. That keeps things new.

I love James Baldwin essays, but also his novels. I recently read "Another Country." I couldn't believe how ahead of his time he was.

I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.

I like all sorts of things, not necessarily just Victorian. Even though I tend to read a lot of Victorian novels, I like a lot of contemporary stuff.

I like to read dramatic novels and I absolutely love magazines.

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

Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music hall song and a few bad novels.

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

I'm a novelist at heart. How's that? And that's how I make my living, is I write novels.

I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

I'm a professional. So before I published any novels, I'd always been writing stories.

I'm constantly trying to figure out how to crack that mystery; how to make a novel that has a sense of immediacy of a short story. I try to do that and I'll try it again, but I'll never get it.

I'm sorry to say that far worse things have happened and the literature of the Holocaust is a witness to the capacity of the novel as a form.

I'm not embarrassed about the novels I wrote when I was younger, but I couldn't write them today because of my religion.

I'm not writing novels, the screenplays are my novels, so I'm gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it'd almost be okay because I did it. It's there on the page.

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

I myself love getting cookbooks and novels that some congenial person has already tried and liked.

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

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

In a general sense, to convert any short story, novel, play, or opera into a movie, you have to re-rig it. Even though they're all narratives over time, they're very different forms.

In a novel, the relationship between writer and reader is such a pure one.

In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a characters and let his perceptions take over.

I once owned a collection of 77 novels that won the Pulitzer. The only good novel of the bunch was The Grapes of Wrath.

I never plan my novels because if I know what is going to happen, it bores me rigid. I let the story tell itself.

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

In most conventional novels, God is not allowed to be nuts. Nor are nuts allowed to be God.

In most novels, the landscape, or the place, in which the story takes part is simply a backdrop to the human action.