Novel Quotes

If you want to write the next great novel, but you think, No, this won't work because no one will buy it or it won't be any good, then you talk yourself out of taking a risk.

When my first novel was published, I went in great excitement round bookshops in central London to see if they had stocked it.

You know, the point of a novel - or to me, the point of a novel, the gift of a novel is to go really deeply inside people's lives and inside their personal experiences.

Well I think after leaving prison, and having written three diaries about life in prison, it became a sort of a new challenge to write another novel, to write a new novel.

When I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

However novel it may appear, I shall venture the assertion, that, until women assume the place in society which good sense and good feeling alike assign to them, human improvement must advance but feebly.

A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.

The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700.

Well, the research into it affected me. And the novel, it very much strengthened my faith.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

Each novel is harder than its predecessor because I must work harder at not repeating myself. However, I enjoy the challenge. This is the greatest job in the world.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life.

It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political.

I have often heard that the novel is dead. But I see novels produced, I don't know how many a week, in France. I have the impression it's carrying along quite well.

I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing.

I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it.

When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

When I'm working on a novel of my own, I try to read mostly nonfiction, although sometimes I break down and peek at something else.

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

To make a love story, you need a couple of young people, but to reflect on the nature of love, you're better off with old ones. That is a fact of life and literature - and of the novel ever since it fell in love with love in the 18th century.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

When I read 'Watchmen,' it changed my view of so many things. It was the first time I'd read a graphic novel really like that.

There are hours when I must force the novel out of my mind and be interested in the children.

Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.

Oh, that sound? I'm in the hot tub, reading a novel.

I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.