Best 1169 quotes in «novel quotes» category

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 and read an enormous number of first novels.

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

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 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 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 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 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 invented the historical spy novel.

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

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

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

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

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

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.