Quotes About Novel

When I was young, I knew William Burroughs really well. And William's secret desire, which he never quite did, was to write a straightforward detective novel.

A disturbing novel about dreams and wishes, a nightmarish distaff monkey's paw of a book that it's impossible to forget. Lisa Tuttle remains our preeminent chronicler of family madness and desire.

I write largely plot-driven stories.

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

No, I won't ever write another 'Lily Bard.' I said everything I had to say about Lily.

Only a crazy man would write a novel in Lincoln's voice.

Since I can't write the greatest American novel, I'm going to write the longest American novel.

I prefer a great novel, but many novels come with a bunch of novel-y writerliness that feels sort of macho to me, so I do end up reading lots of shorter things.

Me pasé la mañana luchando con la sensación de volutas descarriadas de un mundo intentando filtrarse por las grietas de otro. ¿Conocéis la sensación de empezar un libro nuevo antes de que el recuerdo del último haya tenido tiempo de cerrarse detrás de vosotros? Deja uno el libro anterior con ideas y temas —personajes incluso— atrapados en las fibras de la ropa y cuando abre el libro nuevo siguen ahí.

I get the feeling I do on finishing a novel with a brick-wall happy ending - I mean the kind of ending when you never think any more about the characters.

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

The novel is a fucking killer. I try to show it every respect.

But then it came time for me to make my journey—into America. [... N]o coincidence that my first novel is called Americana . That became my subject, the subject that shaped my work. When I get a French translation of one of my books that says 'translated from the American', I think, 'Yes, that's exactly right.

Branch is stuck all right. He has abandoned his life to understanding that moment in Dallas, the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century. [...] There is also the Warren Report, of course, with its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of words. Branch thinks this is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he'd moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.

Constraints are powerful clues, limiting the set of possible actions. The thoughtful use of constraints in design lets people readily determine the proper course of action, even in a novel situation.

To infuse a novel with a significance that speaks to many requires, paradoxically, that you ignore what the public wants and focus instead on what matters to you.

To see how differently folks experience a work of fiction, check their comments on Goodreads. Are those people all reading the same novel?

Over and over I played her favorite Arvo Pärt, as a way of being with her; and she had only to mention recently read novel for me to grab it up hungrily, to be inside her thoughts, a sort of telepathy

This is a novel of asymmetric warfare.

So a story starts with change, which leads to a goal, which raises a story question in the reader's mind. But how do you end the novel? You do so by answering the story question you posed at the outset.

Now consider your reader's psychological reactions when confronted with a concept-threatening change in the opening of your novel. Mr. Reader begins to worry. So far, so good; he may be willing to worry for a long time. But in today's hurried, impatient world, that Reader can't be expected to worry passively about the same vague and unchanging bad situation for several hundred pages. He needs something a bit more concrete to worry about.

as the Charles Dickens formula for success has it: "Make them laugh. Make them cry. But, most of all, make them wait."6

Madeleine Tully turned fourteen yesterday, but today she did not turn anything. Oh, wait. She turned a page.