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

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

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

And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.
Sandra Cisneros

Well, I'm Buddhist, Ray, and so part of my Buddhism has allowed me to look a little more deeply at people and the events in my life that created me. And I think a lot of that Buddhism comes out in the world view in this novel.
Sandra Cisneros

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

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.
J. G. Ballard

We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.
John Le Carre

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

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.
E. M. Forster

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W. Somerset Maugham

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.
W. Somerset Maugham

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.
Wole Soyinka

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

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.
Hu Shih

In a novel, on the other hand, you not only have to describe the rooms, but the clothes, the characters and what they are thinking. It's a much more in-depth process.
Sidney Sheldon

When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours.
Sidney Sheldon

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.
Wallace Stevens

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

In a novel, my feelings and sense of outrage can find a broader means of expression which would be more symbolic and applicable to many European countries.
Antonio Tabucchi