Novel Quotes

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.

A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

Even the crudest, most derivative novel is an expression of the author's hopes and fears and ideas about good and evil.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

All novels are about crime. You'd be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don't see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That's the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

For all the social changes in China can be traced to their early beginnings in the days when the new tools or vehicles of commerce and locomotion first brought the Chinese people into unavoidable contact with the strange ways and novel goods of the Western peoples.

I had the notion that I wanted to write the great dirty American novel, so I went to Roanoke College on the GI Bill.

I was a little bit wary of playing Nicholas. In the script, which I think is true of the novel and the film, he's the only character not singing and dancing in a musical style. Playing someone who is the personification of good is a little difficult.

If I'd had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and experiences into a novel. But I didn't so I slapped it up on the Web.

Life is God's novel. Let him write it.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

Be the responsibility on their heads who raise this novel and extraordinary question of reception, going to the unconstitutional abridgment, as I conceive, of the great right of petition inherent in the People of the United States.

I've always felt that life is a novel, and part of it is written for you, and part of it is written by you. It's up to you to write the ending, ultimately.

It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.

The ordinariness of living to be old is too novel a thing to appreciate.

A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.

Restoration I did because I really loved e novel and I like Michael Hoffman, who directed it, but it wasn't a really challenging part for me. I'm not critical of the film: I just don't think I gave a very interesting performance.

The novel is a penetrating study of morals and ethics.

I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.

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

I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.

All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy.

There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.