Quotes About Novel

When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.

So, I outlined a horror novel and started writing.

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

The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel. The ambiguity of that is, he's writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way.

I do write long, long character notes - family background, history, details of appearance - much more than will ever appear in the novel. I think this is what lifts a book from that early calculated, artificial stage.

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

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

In a novel, on the other hand, you not only have to describe the rooms, but the clothes, the characters and what they are thinking. It's a much more in-depth process.

I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel.

I had the notion that I wanted to write the great dirty American novel, so I went to Roanoke College on the GI Bill.

The novel is the first art form that is an honest-to-god commodity. That's what makes it different from both high art and folk art.

I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas.

My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.

You know, the point of a novel - or to me, the point of a novel, the gift of a novel is to go really deeply inside people's lives and inside their personal experiences.

A novel makes it possible to understand not just events, but the people who control the events; not only their choices, but also their motives.

The 'information novel' shouldn't be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream.

Journalism can go right up to the door of the room in which the decisions are made. A novel can go inside the room - and inside the character's heads.

I even feel guilty if I'm reading a novel, because I think I should be reading Homer again. I don't really know what free time is, because I don't have something to measure it against.

Comics seldom move me the way I would be moved by a novel or movie.

'Life of Pi' was actually a very simple novel to write.

I wrote my first novel and my second novel in Chicago. It was the place where I became a writer. It's my favorite city.

My first novel, 'Leaving Atlanta,' took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African-American children dead.

A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving.

Every decade of my life I attempted to write a novel. But I had nothing to say. I was far too self-absorbed, and now I realize I was writing for others, so that they'd applaud me, see my genius, tell me how wonderful I am, or be jealous of my success.