Best 1169 quotes in «novel quotes» category

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

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

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

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

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.

I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.

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

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.

In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.

In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

In the novel, I can change things and simplify, and make events work towards whatever meanings I'm trying to get at more efficiently.

In my personal life, I'm a comic novel. But then, so are we all, because we're human beings.

In real life, coincidences happen all the time. In novels, they are leapt upon with fury.

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

In writing I found a way to make silence and to be silent. The short story has a lot more silence than the novel and that is its success.

I personally feel I still have so much to learn as a writer; each novel is better than the one before, just because I'm getting better at it.

I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable.

I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.

I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.

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

I read a lot of thrillers, especially American crime novels.

I read fiction all the time. It's true that I don't like fantasy or science fiction. I like "realistic" novels, particularly those in which nothing much ever happens.

I read mostly fiction, a lot of 19th-century novels.

I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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