Novel Quotes

In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.
J. K. Rowling

Tell, Resist, Urge

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.
Lord Chesterfield

Good, Live, Long

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life.
Haruki Murakami

Life, Today, Writing

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
Milan Kundera

Wisdom, Stupidity, Question

Only in a novel are all things given full play.
David Herbert Lawrence

The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.
David Herbert Lawrence

Human, Why, Far

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
Henry James

Life, Reason, Existence

Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.
Chinua Achebe

Worry, Once, Story

As an actor, there is room for a certain amount of creativity, but you're always ultimately going to be saying somebody else's words. I don't think I'd have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I'd love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.
Daniel Radcliffe

Love, Poetry, Saying

Sir Walter, with his 61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career than most of his brethren.
Arthur Conan Doyle

Life, Career, Working

Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss!
Oliver Goldsmith

Beauty, Happiness, Nature

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.
Manuel Puig

Short, Problems, Rather

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.
Fred Allen

Person, Understand, Why

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

Good, Political, Enough

My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I've taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, 'The Hornet's Nest,' I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.
Jimmy Carter

Good, Long, Pretty

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

Wanted, Read, Wrote

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

Life, Often, Novels

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

Heart, Book, Rich

Personally, I'd never seen a graphic novel. I knew they existed because friends of mine like Jonathan Ross collect them and some very literate and intelligent people really rate the graphic novel as a form.
Stephen Fry

Friends, Knew, Seen

Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
W. H. Auden

Good, Night, Short

Women want love to be a novel, men a short story.
Daphne du Maurier

Love, Women, Men

I really want to write a novel. I also want to learn to play the mandolin.
Emma Watson

Play, Learn, Write

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

Funny, Great, Battle

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.
Elizabeth Bowen

Idea, Simply, Surface

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

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

Three, Inside, Romance

Oh, that sound? I'm in the hot tub, reading a novel.
Jane Smiley

Reading, Hot, Sound

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
Henry James

May, Accusation, Hold

The most difficult novel I have had to write in terms of just getting it done was The Vampire Lestat. It took a year to write.
Anne Rice

Done, Difficult, Write

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.
Leslie Fiedler

Between, Often, Books

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