Quotes About Novel

In the morning it was morning and I was still alive. Maybe I'll write a novel, I thought. And then I did.

Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.

What will you do? Oh, hell, I'll write a novel about writing the screenplay and making the movie. What are you going to call it? Hollywood. Hollywood? Yes...

Maybe I'll write a novel, I thought. And then I did.

Por la mañana era de día y yo seguía vivo. Quizás escriba una novela, pensé. Y eso hice.

Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious. Then

I reached over, opened it in the middle, and began reading Tolstoy's War and Peace. Nothing had changed. It was still a lousy book.

Even the idea of contagion itself was novel. "We had no belief that one Man could give [a disease] to another," the Blackfoot raider remembered, "any more than a wounded Man could give his wound to another." Because they knew of no protective measures, the toll was even higher than it would have been.

I shove my reading matter back into my messenger bag (it's a novel about a private magician for hire in Chicago—your taxpayer pounds at work) and go to stand in the doorway.

There are all sorts of other things, investigations into silent movies and TV serials (I pulled the file on "Quatermass" for shits and giggles—strictly speaking not germane to the project in hand, but I'd hit burn-out by that point and badly needed some relief reading that wasn't the eleventh Harry Dresden novel).

A disease that has never been seen before cannot be cured with everyday herbs.

There's an old folk saying that goes: whenever you delete a sentence from your NaNoWriMo novel, a NaNoWriMo angel loses its wings and plummets, screaming, to the ground. Where it will likely require medical attention.

Don't be offended if you encounter some good-natured ribbing; the idea of writing a novel in a month deserves to be laughed at.

In the context of novel writing, this means you should lower the bar from "best-seller" to "would not make someone vomit." Exuberant imperfection encourages you to write uncritically, to experiment, to break your time-honored rules of writing just to see what happens. In a first draft, nothing is permanent, and everything is fixable. So stay loose and flexible, and keep your expectations very, very low.

here's the thing: However attractive the idea of a writer's retreat may sound, having all day to poke around on a novel actually hampers productivity.

Even the geekiest of guys could get the girl if he read every romance novel that came out in any given month.

My experience of fiction was, in the beginning, so exploratory. I wasn't sitting down to a desk at Yaddo with a month, thinking I have to have a draft of a novel.

It's such a risk to write a novel that it's easy to become conservative - you're spending what would be, for me, a couple of years of my life on a single idea. Which is maybe one of the reasons I write stories - if it doesn't work, you've only lost a month.

When I was working on a Victorian-era novel, to get in the mood, I read several historical novels set in approximately the same period and place, and really enjoyed the detective novels of John Dickson Carr.

I don't know exactly where the ideas come from. One day, a sentence just popped into my head - 'There was going to be trouble, and, hell, he just wasn't in the mood for it' - and I knew I had a novel.

A lot of people have always asked, is Penn Cage me? And I say no. There's an early character in an earlier novel, 'Mortal Fear,' that's closer to me.

You have a different, much more intimate relationship with the characters in a novel than when writing a screenplay. You're able to get inside their heads in a different way. You can understand their motivations more.

When I read a novel I am not only surrendering; I am allowing my mind to be occupied by a colonizer of uncertain intent

I don't think that a novel is supposed to be a guide book to happiness any more than it's supposed to be a journal of one's personal pain and frustration, which most novels are today, unfortunately. I think the novels that are most important are those that are more on the order of those coyotes that howl on the hills outside of town. Something mysterious and wild and hypnotic.