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

Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
Vladimir Nabokov

I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out if me with steel pipes.
Patton Oswalt

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
Toni Morrison

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

A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.
Richard Schickel

When you get something like MTV, it's like regular television. You get it, and at first it's novel and brand new and then you watch every channel, every show. And then you become a little more selective and more selective, until ultimately... you wind up with a radio.
David Lee Roth

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.
Neil Gaiman

What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism.
Philip Pullman

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.
Edith Wharton

What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that.
Nicholas Sparks

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
Doris Lessing

When I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.
Francis Ford Coppola

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

I completed my first novel when I was 19 years old.
Danielle Steel

Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.
Lynn Abbey

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

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.
Lynn Abbey

I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.
Lynn Abbey

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.
George Sand