Novels Quotes

For the novels I wrote before selling anything, I didn't outline much. I had a vague idea of the story.

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.

Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.

I did not have a chance to write novels until my youngest child started school fulltime.

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

I'm writing a movie about Mozart going to New York in the '60s. I've been reading so many novels.

I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality.

I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.

I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.

I've seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn't occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me, so I don't feel like going back and dredging them up.

The writer I feel the most affinity with - you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they're 18th century novels - is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he's the guy who does it for me.

I don't like the word rock opera, but I'm trying to write on that level that's reserved for plays still, or novels.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

If I had killed Crow off I can think of least six novels I would never have written, 400,000 words' worth of very necessary experience.

Well, the medium of film is so different than a book that just by bringing it into visual storytelling is to change it up. I think in a book, in any book, you can have a reactive character. Some of the great novels of all time have had that, but in a film you can't do that.

I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges.

Actually my first eight books were historical novels, but they were never published.

The real question is: How do you react? What do you do next? Evade responsibilities? Bury yourself in work? What do you do? All three of my novels take up that question, although none gives an answer.

Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.

Heaven knows, I've exposed myself in my novels through the use of fantasy and imagination... now my new book is about what really happened to me... not my heroines.

I also read modern novels - I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize.

My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.

I can't change the past, and I don't think I would. I don't expect to be understood. I like what I've written, the stories and two novels. If I had to give up what I've written in order to be clear of this disease, I wouldn't do it.

My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

Writers of novels and romance in general bring a double loss to their readers; robbing them of their time and money; representing men, manners, and things, that never have been, or are likely to be.

I do have some theatrical background. I've written plays and seen plays and read plays. But I also read novels. One thing I don't read is screenplays.

My dream remains to inform and entertain through fiction in the form of novels and movies that compete in the marketplace of ideas.

There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.

If you like my novels, I commend your good taste.

To me, the newspaper business was a way to learn about life and how things worked in the real world and how people spoke. You learn all the skills - you learn to listen, you learn to take notes - everything you use later as a novelist was valuable training in the newspaper world. But I always wanted to write novels.