Quotes About Novel

I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.

SOON was the first novel where I used a rough outline. Usually I have characters and an idea and write as a process of discovery. Like working without a net.

I don't outline or plan ahead when I write a novel. The more I know about what's going to happen, the less interesting it is to me; and if it's less interesting for me, it will be that way for the reader.

Many writers will get a contract by selling chapters and outlines or something like that. I wrote the entire novel, and when it was all finished, I would give it to my agent and say, 'Well, here's a novel; sell it if you can.' And they would do that, and it was good because I never had anyone looking over my shoulder.

I had just got married when I started writing my fourth novel. I'd come back from honeymoon, moved into our first house - a gorgeous little carriage house in London - and made my office on the third floor, overlooking the treetops in North West London.

the writing process behind The Tilted World.

This is clearly not the most expedient route—we learned that writing a collaborative novel doesn't amount to doing half the work, but rather, doing twice the work—but it was a wild new kind of work, a work that takes the other's half, and raises it by half. This felt intimate—showing

turn the story into a novel, and we agreed because the characters we'd created for that short story were still hanging around our brains. They had more to say.

My husband and I collaborated on a novel and we didn't fight. We fought more while "collaborating" on the assembly of an IKEA baby crib (that crib almost did require marriage counseling).

unearthing some of the most disturbing moments in Austrian history. He had made a sort of subspecialty of studying intellectuals persecuted in the pre-Nazi era, and we discussed his fascinating work on the assassination of Hugo Bettauer, the writer and editor whose dystopian 1923 novel, Die Stadt Ohne Juden (The City Without Jews), remains one of the most uncanny predictions of a historic catastrophe ever written.

You're a fresh one, Nick.' ~ John Cole

There are more men lurking in sheds in my garden than in any D.H. Lawrence novel.

Each novel is a message in a bottle cast into the great ocean of literature from somewhere else (even if it was written and published last week in your home town); and what makes the novel available to its readers is not shared values or beliefs or experiences but the human capacity to conjure new worlds in the imagination. A fully realized novel provides readers with everything they need for their imaginations to go to work.

the first circle, I had written the word ideation, and above the third was implementation. The middle circle is what we found most fascinating, or perhaps novel, and above it was the word activation. We labeled this the "Three Stages of Work." Each circle was filled with half a dozen other words to describe what it meant.

Up until then, whenever anyone had mentioned the possibility of making a film adaptation, my answer had always been, 'No, I'm not interested.' I believe that each reader creates his own film inside his head, gives faces to the characters, constructs every scene, hears the voices, smells the smells. And that is why, whenever a reader goes to see a film based on a novel that he likes, he leaves feeling disappointed, saying: 'the book is so much better than the film.

A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other dishevelled, bespectacled writers. He says very 'deep' things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published.

Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.

If I could read your mind, what a tale your thoughts could tell. Just like a paperback novel, the kind that drugstores sell.

The critic interested in a novel manifestation holds his criteria and taste in reserve. Since they were formed upon yesterday's art, he does not assume that they are ready-made for today.

Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.

The novel is always pop art, and the novel is always dying. That's the only way it stays alive. It does really die. I've been thinking about that a lot.

Surely the novel should be a form of art - but art was not enough. It must contain not only the perfection of art, but the imperfection of nature.

I want to be an art-hero - I want to change the form of the novel.

This was my first novel [The Dissemblers ]. I've never seriously written short stories, and actually find short stories much more intimidating as an art form than novels.