Best 1169 quotes in «novel quotes» category

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly.

Nobody can be so beautiful from the outside and so hollow from inside. Not even in a third-rate novel.

Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published. I wrote four novels that nobody wanted, sent them out all over, collected hundreds and hundreds of rejection slips.

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

No novel is a clone of any preceding one, though with a background cast of characters and things that has grown to thousands, there are many familiar aspects.

No one goes to the toilet in novels. You'd think none of us had bladders.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

Not only may she unconsciously register a favorable impression with my associates and me, but she may also suggest something by her work that will lead to some new and novel feature in a forthcoming production.

Novels are a marathon, while comic scripts are a sprint.

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

Novels teach the youthful mind to sigh after happiness that never existed.

Novel writing wrecks homes.

Novel writing is solitary work.

NOVEL, n. A short story padded.

"Novels and gardens," she says. "I like to move from plot to plot.

Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things. And here we are with our crash helmets on, with concertina wire all around us.

Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.

Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.

Novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written.

Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.

Novels allow me to create a whole world.

Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.

Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself.

No wonder you want to be a writer. How can you not, with all that behind you? You practically are a novel already.

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

Novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories.

Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.

Of course we all know that's not how life works. The novel that is our life can end at any time. Sometimes even on page one.

One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.

One of the most puzzling things about a novel is that "the way it really was" half the time is, and half the time isn't, the way it ought to be in the novel.

One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.

Our past is a novel that we are constantly revising.

Our need to identify with representative figures is something that never goes away. We still find those in novels. We find those in television. We find them in movies. We find them all over the place.

Overnight Success Happens Only in Fairy Tales, Trashy Novels, and Bad Movies.

People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.

People compose poetry, novels, sitcoms - for love.

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

Publishers love to compartmentalize, and Second Chance was not an easy novel to define.

Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.

Post-apocalyptic novels tell you that in the future there is some great war. I would tell you that most cops say that it's going on right now.

Repeated reflection and inquiry have led me to the somewhat novel opinion, that value depends entirely upon utility.

Raymond Carver had the quote that I loved about how he felt that a short story was the moment right before someone's life was about to fall apart. You can't really do that with a novel, but with a story you're just left hanging.

Read. Read. Read. Read. Read great books. Read poetry, history, biography. Read the novels that have stood the test of time. And read closely.

Recently, I haven't had too much time to read. But I love a good romance novel.