Best 1169 quotes in «novel quotes» category

I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.

I do have some theatrical background. I've written plays and seen plays and read plays. But I also read novels. One thing I don't read is screenplays.

I do not know what to say in a case so surprising, so unlooked for and so novel.

I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.

I don't categorize myself as an 85-year-old woman who has written an erotic novel. I categorize myself as a writer who's written an erotic novel.

I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much

I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely.

I don't like novels that tie everything up in a plot-y way. I always think that's not really true of life, particularly of people in power.

I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.

I don't read that many novels, I'm more of a nonfiction fan.

I don't really consider any of my novels 'crime' novels.

I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.

I don't write romance novels.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

I don't see the direct correlation between my personal life and the novel I'm writing until I'm at the end of the novel or very close to it.

I don't think I will write anything that could be even remotely considered a genre novel from this point on. I think I've graduated.

I feel like humor is a part of life. I don't think it comes through as much in the novels as it does in my head.

If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?

If everybody lived as I do, surely the writing of romance novels would never have come into being.

If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it.

If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.

If I'd had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and experiences into a novel. But I didn't so I slapped it up on the Web.

I find that in a novel I can get more of life, perhaps not such intense life, but certainly more of life than in poetry.

If I had the luxury of working as a full time writer, I think you would see novels appearing on a much more regular, and frequent, basis.

If I wanted to make money I would have written another novel.

If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels.

If the novel is dying, I see no chance that dismembering it will revive it.

I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read.

If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?

If you have no conflict, you have no story. That's number one. That's a rule of novels.

If writers stuck to firsthand experience, novels would be pretty limited.

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

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 like my novels, I commend your good taste.

I get and read an enormous number of first novels.

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

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.

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

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

I invented the historical spy novel.

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

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

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 have assiduously avoided calling my books novels

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.