Best 1169 quotes in «novel quotes» category

In most conventional novels, God is not allowed to be nuts. Nor are nuts allowed to be God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 read a lot of thrillers, especially American crime novels.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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 started realising that the themes running through all of my novels were really haunting and obsessing me about my own life.

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.

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

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.

It feels like every single song is a chapter from a truly important novel.

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

It goes without saying that a fine short poem can have the resonance and depth of an entire novel.

I think of my novels as entertainments.

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

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 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’s Fitzgerald’s thin-but-durable urge to affirm that finally makes Gatsby worthy of being our Great American Novel. Its soaring conclusion tells us that, even though Gatsby dies and the small and corrupt survive, his longing was nonetheless magnificent.

It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.

It's more like I write multiple first drafts, handwritten. So with my first novel, I wrote whole drafts from different points of view. There are different versions of that novel in a drawer on loose-leaf sheets. I won't even look at the first draft while I'm writing the second, and I won't look at the second before writing the third.

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

It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character. Then again, there is a huge gap between me as a person and what I do in the novel.

It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

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

It's weird - I don't feel like I'm a better or more confident writer because I'm publishing something. I think, for most writers as well, it's like reinventing the wheel every time. I have no idea what I'm doing writing a novel, and in some ways, it's the only way to do it.

It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.

It took me six novels before I felt confident of my voice as a writer.

It was like being in a Jane Austen novel, but one with far less clothing.

It's true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.