The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.
Jose Saramago

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

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

I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.
Thomas B. Macaulay

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

The impulse of the journalist is to be novel, yet to relate his curiosities to the urgencies of the moment; the philosopher seeks what he conceives to be true, regardless of the moment.
Daniel Bell

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

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.
Eudora Welty

Before trying a novel I wrote a couple of plays.
James Merrill

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

Am I worried people will say I'm repeating myself? Sure. One thought I had was to publish it as a novel but eventually I just decided to do what I wanted to do.
Elizabeth Wurtzel

If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn't concern the central issues, it wouldn't be worth publishing.
Alan Paton

It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.
Lawrence Durrell

The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary.
Francois Truffaut

My first novel took 12 years to complete because life got in my way.
Donald McKay

I took two years away from making films to write a novel.
Neil Jordan

The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.
Mason Cooley

When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.
Daphne du Maurier

Today I began the novel that I determined to be great.
Zane Grey

Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel.
Sara Paretsky