Novels Quotes

One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you've forgotten what happened.

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.

I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

Many of the comedies I had made in Sweden were slightly based on semi-autobiographical experiences, so adapting novels was a very different experience.

Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.

I obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.

I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.

In the past, it was only in science fiction novels that you could read about ordinary people being able to go to space... But you laid the foundation for space tourism.

All of my novels are democracies.

So, in some ways, the political songs tend to be a bit more like reportage, whereas the love songs tend to be like novels, you can pick them up off the shelf and go into them any time.

I have written two medical novels. I have never studied medicine, never seen an operation.

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

The easy answer is that writing novels is a lot more fun than practicing law.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.

I didn't know anything about Opus Die except from pop culture, like Dan Brown novels, which I knew wasn't really knowing anything about Opus Die.

Art, a book, a painting, a song, can definitely inspire change, whether it's a small change or a big change but you know there's novels I've read or a scene in a film that I've seen where I definitely inspired something and made a change or addressed an issue in my life or done something cliche like make a phone call.

I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they're not blueprints for action, ever.

Comic books and graphic novels are a great medium. It's incredibly underused.

I like the idea of making big budget films with a heart. I like graphic novels more than comic books.

Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.

I used to go with my parents and loved it, I was in school plays, and I started reading plays before I started reading novels. I'll defend it to the hilt. When theatre is good it is fabulous.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

When you put on the suits, when you pretend you're honest and you're robbing at a far higher level, these guys deserve to... well, to be in my novels, and I have special fates reserved for them.

People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.

When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.

In February of this year I returned to China to research my next book. The authorities know about the novels of mine that have been published in the west, including the latest one, Beijing Coma, about a student shot in Tiananmen Square, but so far have allowed me to return.

There are now 30-year-old Mexican writers who do great novels in which Mexico isn't even mentioned.