Quotes About Novel

Life's like a novel with the end ripped out.

Rules cease to exist once they have outlived their value, but forms live on eternally. There are forms of the novel which impose on the suggested topic all the virtues of the Number. Born of the very expression and of the diverse aspects of the tale, connected by nature with the guiding idea, daughter and mother of all the elements that it polarizes, a structure develops, which transmits to the works the last reflections of Universal Light and the last echoes of the Harmony of Worlds.

When people write a novel, they want to have that reach and that impact. To get it with a first novel, you can either see it as an albatross or a calling card.

I don't categorize myself as an 85-year-old woman who has written an erotic novel. I categorize myself as a writer who's written an erotic novel.

I think 'Charming Billy' ultimately is a novel about faith and what we believe in and, above all, what we choose to believe in.

I can have people around a lot more because I'm not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.

I don't think my first book was chick lit.

I'm a big fan of Elmore Leonard, and I've read Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre and so on. But I'd never read a crime novel that made me feel emotional at the end.

It was my angry, Dickensian novel, I suppose. It was cathartic - I expended a lot of frustration on that one.

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.

'Sanctus' was done on speculation. I had no agent or publisher. I was being sensible, I suppose, by writing a standalone novel. I figured if that one didn't work, no one would be interested in reading a sequel.

I went abroad to Malaya and came back and tended naturally to gravitate towards the south, I suppose, near London where things seemed to be going on; but I'm still a Lancashire man, and what I want to write someday is a novel about Manchester. Very much a regional novel.

Working on my first novel, 'Groundswell' - about a woman recovering from a bad breakup who falls in love with surfing - I spent a month south of the border. And when I wasn't writing or surfing, I was eating. A lot.

For me, the short story is the depth of a novel, the breadth of a poem, and, as you come to the last few paragraphs, the experience of surprise.

I'm not sure that it's possible to write a novel about people who don't transgress or stumble, people who don't surprise themselves with the things they do, people who can explain all their actions with perfect logical consistency. At least it's not possible for me to write that sort of novel.

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.

When I wrote my first serious novel, 'Interior', I was inspired by a 1978 book of Updike's, 'The Coup', which is set in Africa and will come as a delightful surprise to anyone who has only read his Americana.

When I first began to write fiction, I didn't think I was a comic writer; I thought I was a serious writer. I was surprised when the first novel I wrote was regarded as a funny novel.

Browse Amazon reviews, and you'll see a surprising number of readers who believe one novel can summarize a country, its culture, and its people.

I like to do things that are surprising and different.

As I write each new Thorne novel, I'm determined that whatever is happening plot-wise, a new layer of the onion will be peeled away and reveal something about Thorne that is surprising to me as much as anyone else. If I can remain interested in the character, then hopefully the reader will stay interested, too.

The characters in a novel are made up, figments of the writer's imagination. I'm sure this won't come as a surprise to anyone, and it's not surprising to me either, but knowing this, feeling this, definitely made writing my second book harder.

'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' was surprisingly easy and fun to write because I was feeling such strong emotions.

He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.