Best 1169 quotes in «novel quotes» category

How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel!

I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.

I always begin [a novel] with outlines, but they change and so do my endings and beginnings.

I always joke that every novel is really about the same thing: one person's struggle against society.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

I am a toggler. I always have three or four projects going, short stories alongside novels and essays. When one project is terrible, there's somewhere else hopeful to look.

I always figure there are novels and short stories, and in those, I'm God. No one tells me what to do. I don't have to lose a page, or cut anything, it's just mine. Then there are other things where you're up against realities.

I am a professor who writes novels on Sundays

I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses; and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.

I am writing my second novel for children for Simon and Schuster.

I am glad it's [California novel] resonated with people because, for me, most apocalyptic novels aren't scary, because they feel so very far off.

I am almost six-novels-old. It took me until the third novel to call myself a writer.

I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.

I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt.

I came into screenwriting from an odd direction, because the first screenplay that I read was and is better as writing than the top one percent of literary novels.

I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.

I can't think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.

I began to write short pieces when I was living in a room too small to write a novel in.

I can't do a linear novel. I'm just going to write what I need to write.

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 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 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 end happily. They depress me so much

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 certainly think we're going to see more and more graphic novels and more illustrated novels.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I don't write romance novels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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