Novel Quotes

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.

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

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

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.

In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

It was only after five years in the army, when I was having to do a very boring job in a very boring place, that I thought: 'Why not try writing a novel?' partly out of youthful arrogance and partly because there had been a long line of writers in my mother's family.

I sold my very first novel when I was 24 or 25 years old.

I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.

If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.

The stories have been told so often by those of us who supported President Reagan over the years that they seem mundane, almost like a fictional novel or a movie script.

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.