Quotes About Novel

There is no right or wrong way to write a novel. Each journey is different for every individual work and for every writer. The first error is never to begin; the second is never to finish.

I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for 'The Namesake,' I felt that it had to be a novel - it couldn't work as a story.

My favorite novel ever is Abraham Verghese's 'Cutting for Stone.' It takes you so many places. I stayed up to 4 in the morning to finish it.

I kept starting 'Anansi Boys' as a movie and stopping, and eventually wrote the novel and was happy.

A novel wouldn't be a book if there weren't some flights of fancy on the part of the author, stopping time to examine things, or to tell a joke.

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

I had a few stories and longer pieces published, but my first proper novel came in 2003, called 'Dead I Well May Be.'

When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.

You come out of your MFA program with a cogent clutch of stories, trying to get an agent interested, and she or he admits these are quality, sure, but this agent actually needs something the publisher can make money on. So you get kind of bullied by the market into writing a novel.

In 'Open City,' there is a passage that any reader of Joyce will immediately recognise as a very close, formal analogue of one the stories in 'Dubliners.' That is because a novel is also a literary conversation.

I think I'm a born storyteller. Inspiration is all around me. I can read a newspaper article and come up with an idea for a book.

I'm not a twentieth-century novelist, I'm not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst, and I'm not an intellectual.

I don't assume, because I can write screenplays, that I know how to write a novel. It's a very different world. There's a craft involved in storytelling, and it's a different kind of craft. But yes, someday I will do that. It just might be awhile.

' The Lucky One' is at its heart a romance novel, elevated however by Nicholas Sparks' persuasive storytelling. Readers don't read his books because they're true, but because they ought to be true.

As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel, 'The Lifeboat,' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling.

When I was in advertising, I did a great deal of work on television commercials. A co-worker and I wrote a screenplay, which led to a few more screenplays, and some were optioned by production companies. I was advised to move to California but didn't want to make the move. I decided to use another form of storytelling, so I wrote a novel.

The author always knows more than the reader does at the start of a novel, and gradually, they share that knowledge with the reader - that's storytelling.

I like to start with the first chapter, end with chapter 40. No flashbacks, nothing fancy, just a direct storytelling.

I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative.

Partly because of the way I write - I don't work with an outline or in a straight line. I work where I can see things happening, and so I get lots and lots of little bits to start with, and I'm doing the research at the same time.

After 20 years of writing academic prose and lectures, it seems very familiar and straightforward to me. Writing a novel for the first time, I was reminded of just how difficult it is to figure out how to get this stuff done when you don't really know what you're doing.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

I'd been writing fiction for 50 years, since I was 19. And when you write fiction, it becomes a way of thinking: there's always a novel around. The strange thing was that after 'Remember Me,' there wasn't.

Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has said that "The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.