Novel Quotes

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it.

Last week I was just someone who had had a first novel published.

Here was a fragment of Goddess myth that, through all its permutations, had somehow escaped being turned on its head. It was the perfect springboard for the sort of novel I wanted to write.

I don't assume, because I can write screenplays, that I know how to write a novel. It's a very different world. There's a craft involved in storytelling, and it's a different kind of craft. But yes, someday I will do that. It just might be awhile.

One novel that I think is an overriding influence in my life is 'All the King's Men,' the most beautiful book written in the U.S.

When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.

Many of my short stories (all unpublished) were horror, and the novel I'd just finished was horror, too.

I have survived by representing these sufferings of mine in the form of the novel.

Like any good spy novel, the Cox Report alleges that Chinese spies penetrated four U.S. weapons research labs and stole important information on seven nuclear warhead designs.

I don't fret over lost time - I can always use the situations in a novel.

There's never a false note in a Berg novel.

I always felt a little worm inside me: 'Now you need to write a novel with a woman protagonist.'

When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.

The best project is one that asks a novel question.

I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

And it is a folly to try to craft a novel for the screen, to write a novel with a screen contract in mind.

It was my angry, Dickensian novel, I suppose. It was cathartic - I expended a lot of frustration on that one.

It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.

The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.

Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.

I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.

I was writing an earnest novel about cruises in the Caribbean and I just started writing 'Bridget Jones' to get some money, to finance this earnest work, and then I chucked it out.

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.

Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development - an insight came from that book.

Celebrity is absolutely preposterous. Entertainment seems to be inflating. It used to be the punctuation to your life, a film or a novel or a play, a way of celebrating a good week or month. Now it feels as if it's all punctuation.

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.