Quotes About Novel

I use the setting of a small rural Norwegian community - the kind of place that I know so intimately. I could never write a novel set in a big city, because, frankly, I don't know what it would be like.

That seems to be the definition of 'novel' for me: a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.

A certain luxury when you get to writing a novel is to have the space to have your characters just banter.

Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.

Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.

My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it. Part of why she left him was this delusion of greatness and identifying it very directly with being an artist.

When I was 30 or so - by that time I had become an assistant D.A. - I decided I would try to write a novel. To be clear: I did not decide to become a novelist. Honestly, it never crossed my mind that I could actually earn a living as a professional novelist.

The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.

Really, what you should tell a novelist is, 'Keep going until you finish the draft. Don't show it to anyone.'

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well.

'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.

'Emma' is my favorite Jane Austen novel - one of my favorite novels period; a novel about intelligence outsmarting itself, about a complicated, nuanced, irresistible heroine who does everything wrong.

I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges.

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.

I've loved 'Vanity Fair' since I was 16 years old. You know, we're all colonial hangovers in India, steeped in English literature. It is one of these novels that I read under the covers at my convent boarding school in Simla.

'Pastoralia' by George Saunders is one of my favorite novels.

All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.

The financial markets tend to be just a backdrop for a novel, for a heist or something that isn't necessarily integral to it. On the whole, I don't think the financial world has been well served by novels.

I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.

All my friends who wanted to write had got nowhere trying to write the great European novel. So I deliberately steered clear of that and set out to write something story-led.

It's got a lot more room for nuance and an assumption that people have started from the beginning. 'Bloodline' ends up being like a really good novel.

I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.

'Sharp Objects' is honestly one of my most exciting reading experiences.