Quotes About Novel

This is how you cook a novel. Some made up, some real life, all true.

The novel, I submit, is not merely the ultimate goal. It is also the place to start.

Don't talk to me any more about poetry for months -- unless it is other men's work. I really love verse, even rubbish. But I'm fearfully busy at a novel, and brush all the gossamer of verse off my face.

It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Starting a new novel is a little like starting a new relationship -- you have to be prepared to commit for at least three years and put up with the domestic tedium as well as the emotional highs!

and listened to one of Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch crime novels. Bosch was an LAPD detective who, over a thirty-year career that spanned about as many books, solved one major murder after another and yet his bosses still doubted his skill and integrity, regularly undermined his work, and repeatedly investigated him for misconduct. It frustrated her even more than it did him. His problem, she thought, was that he didn't know how to play politics.

Naturally, you don't sit down in "white hot inspiration" and write with a burning flame in front of you. But since I knew I could never be happy being anything but a writer, and Mockingbird put itself together for me so accommodatingly, I kept at it because I knew it had to be my first novel, for better or for worse.

My book had a universal theme. It's not a "racial" novel. It portrays an aspect of civilization, not necessarily Southern civilization.

Some people will say, "Why read a comic book? It stifles the imagination. If you read a novel you imagine what people are like. If you read a comic, it's showing you." The only answer I can give is, "You can read a Shakespeare play, but does that mean you wouldn't want to see it on the stage?"

Know your death stakes! This is going to be crucial in order for you to write your novel from the middle.

In your first ten pages you can have three sentences of backstory, used all at once or spread out. In your second ten pages you can have three paragraphs of backstory, used all at once or spread out. But if you put backstory or exposition into dialogue, then you're free to use your own discretion. Just be sure the dialogue is truly what the characters would say and doesn't come off as a none-too-clever info dump.

A further tip: Delay as much exposition as you can for the first 10 percent of your novel. If you can create a mystery about it, even better. But understand that the readers will wait a long time before getting answers as long as they are caught up in a solid plot.

Agent Donald Maass, who has written a superb book called Writing the Breakout Novel, is of the opinion

It goes without saying that a fine short poem can have the resonance and depth of an entire novel.

It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language

How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!

If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?

I . . . am always half afraid of finding a clever novel too clever--& of finding my own story & my own people all forestalled.

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book!

Darcy had never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by her [Elizabeth].

And what are you reading, Miss? Oh! it is only a novel! replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

Oh! it is only a novel! ... only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;' or, in short, only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

The novel is, above all, an intense experience of prolonged intimacy with another consciousness.