Novel Quotes
The most important basis of any novel is wanting to be someone else, and this means creating a character.
Antonio Tabucchi
People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.
Anthony Powell
As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.
Joyce Carol Oates
Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single.
James Lee Burke
The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.
David Herbert Lawrence
I had the notion that I wanted to write the great dirty American novel, so I went to Roanoke College on the GI Bill.
Tom T. Hall
I was a little bit wary of playing Nicholas. In the script, which I think is true of the novel and the film, he's the only character not singing and dancing in a musical style. Playing someone who is the personification of good is a little difficult.
Charlie Hunnam
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.
Philip Greenspun
It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative.
Nicholas Mosley
You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.
Richard Russo
Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.
Jack Prelutsky
Be the responsibility on their heads who raise this novel and extraordinary question of reception, going to the unconstitutional abridgment, as I conceive, of the great right of petition inherent in the People of the United States.
Caleb Cushing
I've always felt that life is a novel, and part of it is written for you, and part of it is written by you. It's up to you to write the ending, ultimately.
Lynn Johnston
Restoration I did because I really loved e novel and I like Michael Hoffman, who directed it, but it wasn't a really challenging part for me. I'm not critical of the film: I just don't think I gave a very interesting performance.
David Thewlis
I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.
E. L. Doctorow
I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.
Truman Capote
All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy.
Manuel Puig
There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.
C. S. Forester
One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.
Gloria Naylor
I hope to read a Harry Potter novel soon, to see what it's all about. I admit to being annoyed that many good light fantasy writers have had trouble getting published, in England and elsewhere, when it is obvious the readers were waiting for us all along.
Piers Anthony
I find interesting characters or lessons that resonate with people and sometimes I write about them in the sports pages, sometimes I write them in a column, sometimes in a novel, sometimes a play or sometimes in nonfiction. But at the core I always say to myself, 'Is there a story here? Is this something people want to read?'
Mitch Albom