Novel Quotes

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.

When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

I write short stories when a little idea occurs to me, that I know isn't a part of a novel that will stand by itself and should be concentrated.

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

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.

I wrote a novel for my degree, and I'm very happy I didn't submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with my professors who had to read it.

I can write for a long time on one novel and not get tired.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

I am writing my second novel for children for Simon and Schuster.

Journalism can go right up to the door of the room in which the decisions are made. A novel can go inside the room - and inside the character's heads.

For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.

Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel.