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.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

A good novel editor is invisible.

In a novel, it's hard to keep track of everybody.

The 'information novel' shouldn't be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream.

I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe.

Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.

Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.

No novel is a clone of any preceding one, though with a background cast of characters and things that has grown to thousands, there are many familiar aspects.

And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

A novel makes it possible to understand not just events, but the people who control the events; not only their choices, but also their motives.

If you enjoy math and you write novels, it's very rare that you'll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance.

I might just write a novel next. I don't know!

The two most common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased wickedly and that it taught nothing, had broken down before the discovery, except in illiberal sects, that the novel is fitted both for honest use and for pleasure.

A scrupulous man will never produce a great novel.

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.

The novel moves like all the arts. It's transforming itself all the time.

Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.

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