Good fiction must be entertaining, but what makes fiction special - and True - is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.
Jerry B. Jenkins

If you enjoy math and you write novels, it's very rare that you'll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance.
Mark Haddon

I've always felt that life is a novel, and part of it is written for you, and part of it is written by you. It's up to you to write the ending, ultimately.
Lynn Johnston

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.
Penelope Lively

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.
Alice Hoffman

Be the responsibility on their heads who raise this novel and extraordinary question of reception, going to the unconstitutional abridgment, as I conceive, of the great right of petition inherent in the People of the United States.
Caleb Cushing

Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single.
James Lee Burke

The characters you refer to as predatory and unsavory are useful. They're the ones who make a novel into a thriller. They're active, and most of the common virtues, the signs of a good person, are not.
Thomas Perry

Here was a fragment of Goddess myth that, through all its permutations, had somehow escaped being turned on its head. It was the perfect springboard for the sort of novel I wanted to write.
Joan D. Vinge

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.
Alice Hoffman

I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life.
Iris Chang

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.
Richard Russo

It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.
David Antin

I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.
Michael Nesmith

My fellow students there were very smart, but the really novel thing was that they actually seemed to put a lot of effort into their school work. By the end of my first semester there, I began to get into that habit as well.
Eric Allin Cornell

It's only a drawback in the States, where most people seem to have no real interest in other countries and the notion of a novel which might offer insight into life in the UK doesn't seem to appeal very widely.
Jonathan Coe

There are hours when I must force the novel out of my mind and be interested in the children.
Zane Grey

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
Penelope Lively

I was a little bit wary of playing Nicholas. In the script, which I think is true of the novel and the film, he's the only character not singing and dancing in a musical style. Playing someone who is the personification of good is a little difficult.
Charlie Hunnam

I had read the novel and I had heard David Lean was going to direct it - and it came as a surprise to me because American actors, if given the chance, can do style as well as anybody and speak as well as anybody.
Rod Steiger