Novel Quotes

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

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.

I had read the novel and I had heard David Lean was going to direct it - and it came as a surprise to me because American actors, if given the chance, can do style as well as anybody and speak as well as anybody.

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

In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a character's and let his perceptions take over.

I still write the occasional short story, and poked at a novel once, but it's just not what I want to do.

Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.

I've always wanted to write a novel. It's overwhelming and daunting, and it's one of those things that every writer fantasizes about doing.

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I've learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.

Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

My work schedule has changed over the years. The one constant is, when at work on a novel, I try to work seven days a week, so as not to lose touch with that world. Within that, I'm flexible on hours and output.

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.

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

Novel writing should never be confused with journalism. Unfortunately, in the case of Primary Colors, a fair number of journalists confused.

Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.

Jigsaw Lady is the working title of a science fiction novel I've had in my head for darn near 15 years. I think I'll start work on it next year (in all my spare time) but I'd like to get it finished some day.

Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.

The turning point was when I hit my 30th birthday. I thought, if really want to write, it's time to start. I picked up the book How to Write a Novel in 90 Days. The author said to just write three pages a day, and I figured, I can do this. I never got past Page 3 of that book.

There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.

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 think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

Let's put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20.

I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out if me with steel pipes.