Quotes About Novel

I know a lot of writers who would much rather be writing the Great American Novel, but they've got bills to pay and alimony, and so they take a job at a less-than-reputable paper. You know, you do what you gotta do.

It costs so much to make films. With a novel, you can write the whole thing on a ream of paper from Staples for $4.

When I started writing, I just hoped for a nice little paperback series.

'Parable of the Sower' is capital-I Important. Put it on the literary fiction shelf. Put it on the Holy Crap fiction shelf. Put it on every shelf. This is one of the all-time great American novels.

I really like 'This Side of Paradise' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I think it's a cool description of a character.

I started writing half a paragraph of a mystery novel, half a paragraph there, and they were terrible.

Find me a first novel that doesn't have parallels with the author's life.

Ultimately, I would love to do 'The Emperor of Ocean Park' by Stephen Carter.

In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.

I would have to say the novel 'War and Peace' influenced me more than any other book. This greatest of novels demonstrated to me the enormous power of literature and fired me up with a desire to become a writer, to participate in what I considered then to be the greatest of all endeavors.

A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.

I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.

'A Passage To India' by E. M. Forster - It opened my mind to a world I'd never known before.

It's not easy to craft a novel that gradually erodes the reader's comprehension of the world, of reality and identity and the passage of time.

I've always had a dislike of any form of didacticism, especially when it becomes the dominant element in writing. Character and emotional content should always be the strong elements. I think that was maybe what went wrong with my early novel, that I wanted it to be too profound, I was trying to put too much into it. I learned fairly early that one can handle only so much idea in a story. Well, or rather, I can!

It was like my life hung on the chapters of a novel - and each scene ended in a cliffhanger.

I'm reading Edmund White. It's so nice. All about Jack Holmes and his great big penis. It's like he's got a little pet in the house that he needs to take for walks sometimes, in the park. I really like it.

What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism.

Problem, purpose, conflict, goal. Use them. Think about them while you are in the planning phase of your novel; keep these elements at the back of your mind to guide you while you write. When you have written a scene, make sure they are all there, or that if one or another is missing, it is intentional and the effect is what you want.

how every character is effectively a tiny figure in a suffocating world of associations and obligations; where many an American novel might send its protagonist out into the world to make his own destiny, in S?suke's Japan he cannot move for all his competing (and unmeetable) responsibilities to his aunt, his younger brother, his wife, and society itself.

When people ask how I came up with the concept for my second novel, 'The Immortalists' - four siblings visit a fortune teller who is rumored to be able to tell anyone the date that they will die - I always wish I had a better answer.

The Kitchen was a really great concept; it just wasn't at the price point that made it accessible to people. People could visit occasionally, and some people were coming regularly. It just wasn't a novel concept for every customer.

I was writing 'Outlander' for practise and didn't want anyone to know I was doing it. So I couldn't very well announce to my husband that I was quitting my job and abandoning him with three small children to visit Scotland to do research for a novel that I hadn't told him I was writing.

I developed an interest in the history of the Negro leagues to the point where I visited the museum in Kansas City, Mo., twice and made the museum an integral part of my unheralded 2005 coming-of-age baseball novel, 'Scooter.'