Novel Quotes

In a novel, my feelings and sense of outrage can find a broader means of expression which would be more symbolic and applicable to many European countries.

I wanted to write a novel. At 12 I knew, I am a writer. I said it to nobody.

When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.

Living in an entirely different physical as well as biotic environment, such a population would have unique opportunities to enter new niches and to select novel adaptive pathways.

The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel - one that reads like a mystery to most people. They're not going to learn slash q-z any more than they're going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.

Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list.

I wrote the worst novel ever.

I don't believe there can be a poetic novel without political consciousness. I have a strong political conscience.

In course of time my first novel appeared. It was a love story.

That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.

I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'

Late night is no different than making a film, really, except that it's faster, and if you do a crap one, you can do a better one tomorrow. Writing a novel and doing stand-up - that stuff is very similar.

I'm working on a new novel, in its 3rd draft, but it's hard to write while doing 7th Heaven.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

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.'