Novel Quotes

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

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

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

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

The crime novel has always been my favourite genre.

A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.

Personally, I'd never seen a graphic novel. I knew they existed because friends of mine like Jonathan Ross collect them and some very literate and intelligent people really rate the graphic novel as a form.

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.

Today I began the novel that I determined to be great.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

I don't think anyone has written a great graphic novel.

Reading a novel of a private experience, very, very different, the nature of it is very different.

Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.

In the West audiences think I am a stereotyped action star, or that I always play hitmen or killers. But in Hong Kong, I did a lot of comedy, many dramatic films, and most of all, romantic roles, lots of love stories. I was like a romance novel hero.

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

My favorite period is World War II, and I'm in the middle of writing my fourth novel set in that era.

Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel.

Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.

When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.

Traditionally, people have been adapting novels and short stories forever. Now, they're doing it simultaneously, with an eye towards writing the movie before the novel has even come out or been finished. It's a function of this hyper-accelerated society we live in, where everyone is trying to short circuit the process.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest.

But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.

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

Whenever you have two characters in a book, whether it's a novel or nonfiction, you run the risk that the reader is going to like one more than the other. They're going to read one chapter and say, 'I can't wait to get back to the other guy.'

I completed my first novel when I was 19 years old.

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.

Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.

The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel. The ambiguity of that is, he's writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way.