Best 1169 quotes in «novel quotes» category

The plot is not very important to me, though a novel must have one, of course. It's just a line to hang the washing on.

The problem isn't finding out where you are gonna go-its figuring out what you are gonna do once you get there that is! (Jamie Sullivan)

The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?

The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.

There are few punishments too severe for a popular novel writer.

There are many things behind a good novel, but in particular there is a lot of work - a lot of patience, a lot of stubbornness, and a critical spirit.

There are some short essays that are very grave, and most contemporary novels are lighter than air.

There's something really nice about writing something on Wednesday and watching it being performed live for a studio audience on Tuesday. You never really get that with novels.

There're no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels, and then I read them again, and it's the best thing.

There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, "Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth." It's funny.

The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.

There is no better way of elevating the novel than by making it into a construct which contains ideas.

There isn't, unfortunately, any way of discovering whether you can write a publishable novel except by writing it.

There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better.

There's never a false note in a Berg novel.

The smallest quantity of alcohol scares away novel ideas.

'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.

the slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon

The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel.

The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.

"The State of the Jews" was not a title of a country. It was a title of a futuristic novel.

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.

The writer's job is not to write a novel, hold it up and say, “Here I am,” but to write a novel, hold it up and say, “Here YOU are.

The truth is, I wrote a novel when I was 23. It's hideously bad. Truly rotten.

Though my short stories are the more readable, my novels do have more to say; and they will, if anyone has the patience for it, repay a rereading.

Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.

Today I began the novel that I determined to be great.

To be a classic, a novel should be original.

We're all just animals. That's all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That's where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.

To have her meals, and her daily walk, and her fill of novels, and to be left alone, was all that she asked of the gods.

Vampire? Such a provocative word, wrapped in too many clichés and girly novels.

We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?

We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: The more connected we become, the lonelier we are.

Typically in my novels the narrator tells a story by remembering, and the memories are colored by this and colored by that. So the whole universe of the novel tends to be framed by the narrator's memories and thoughts.

Watergate is an immensely complicated scandal with a cast of characters as varied as a Tolstoy novel.

We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works

We are not telling Tudor history; we are creating ' Wolf Hall ' from novels, which are already a rereading of Tudor history.

We have to diversify, we have to find work we can do that helps other people while helping ourselves, work that has to do with writing that isn't necessarily just writing saleable novels or getting huge advances.

We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.

When I write, I get glimpses into future novels.

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.

What you can do with a short story that you can't do with a novel is punch someone in the gut, in the best of ways.

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

When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks.

When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.

What do you do when Mom leaves you alone like this? (Kat) I write romance novels. (Acheron)

When I'm filling notebooks I'm trying to pin down what I'm really interested in and to find those details that are so hard to come by, details that I can look at and believe are right on the mark. Things which bring a novel to life. They can take a while to come.

When I worked as an editor, I read new novels being published in India every few days. They excited me tremendously for the first fifty pages or so, and boasted some true linguistic genius at times, but none of those writers could occupy more than one mind at once.

When you read a novel, you know what to expect because you've been reading novels for a long time.

When someone asks me to list the 10 best novels ever written, I always refuse to answer.