The most important basis of any novel is wanting to be someone else, and this means creating a character.
Antonio Tabucchi

Life is God's novel. Let him write it.
Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.
Amy Tan

There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
John Irving

I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.
John Irving

And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
John Irving

I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second.
John Irving

I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.
John Irving

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
John Irving

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.
John Irving

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.
Marilyn Hacker

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
Saul Bellow

A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.
Saul Bellow

A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.
Edward Teller

It's no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture.
Don DeLillo

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
Don DeLillo

The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.
Andre Maurois

Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.
Andre Maurois

My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they've read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!
Ben Elton