Novel Quotes

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.
Milan Kundera

Human, Philosophy, Problems

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

Reading, Hot, Sound

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

Time, Character, Story

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

Write, Movie, Yours

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
Angela Carter

History, Experience, Yourself

Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.
Haruki Murakami

Time, Society, America

It's true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.
Haruki Murakami

Time, True, Simple

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).
Haruki Murakami

Music, Write, Cats

A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
Paul Theroux

Possible, Essence, Captures

I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn't novel.
Ernest Gaines

Writing, Thought, Old

The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you're opposed to it. But when you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.
Margaret Atwood

Life, Fight, Writing

As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.
Julie Burchill

Age, Great, Teen

The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.
Anne Tyler

Write, Dinner, Restaurant

For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.
Howard Nemerov

Work, Business, Why

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.
Flannery O'Connor

Experience, Writing, Hair

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

Life, True, Between

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

Good, Best, Study

I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.
George Saunders

Saying, Writing, Working

That seems to be the definition of 'novel' for me: a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.
George Saunders

Story, Seems, Brief

Let's put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20.
Eric Carle

Work, Words, Put

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.
Rose Tremain

Process, Panic, Enjoyable

It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.
Anthony Trollope

When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.
Joyce Carol Oates

Work, Long, Short

As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.
Joyce Carol Oates

Work, Time, Good

Celebrity is absolutely preposterous. Entertainment seems to be inflating. It used to be the punctuation to your life, a film or a novel or a play, a way of celebrating a good week or month. Now it feels as if it's all punctuation.
Hugh Laurie

Life, Good, Play

I have resolved to pick one novel and just read it over and over again for the rest of my life, because I cannot remember anything anymore.
Hugh Laurie

Life, Remember, Cannot

The truth is, I wrote a novel when I was 23. It's hideously bad. Truly rotten.
Sloane Crosley

Truth, Bad, Truly

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

Accident, Consider, Novelist

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
Joan Didion

Work, Business, Daily

I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.
Joan Didion

Mean, Victory, Start

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