Quotes About Novel

'The New Jedi Order' was a pure publishing project: a single massive story - virtually one huge novel spread across multiple volumes - told by a succession of authors.

The novel is a seduction; a reader has to be seduced.

I actually really wish I had written 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying' as an unreliably narrated novel that is also a self-help book.

I do want to say the process of writing a novel is riddled with self-doubt and self-loathing.

A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.

When I work on a novel, I usually have one character and a setting in mind.

When I started writing 'Luck in the Shadows,' I just wanted to create an adventure story.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

I don't have any answers as to whether the Internet is a good or a bad thing, but it's certainly an important thing for the novel because novels are so much about communication, and when communication changes, the novel has to change.

I love Javier Marias; I love his novel 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.'

I have always wanted to write a novel, and I tried many times but could never find the right story. One day, I was walking on the beach, and the idea for 'Groundswell' hit me. I went into the house and started writing and never stopped.

A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist-- ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

The dream of a novel was more resilient than other kinds of dreaming. It could be interrupted in mid-sentence and snapped back into later.

Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader's attention only as long as the author sustains the reader's trust.

the novel is a liberal form…and the act of fiction writing is a performance of sympathy with people you are not .

I hate the concept of likeability—it gave us two terms of George Bush, whom a plurality of voters wanted to have a beer with, and Facebook. You'd unfriend a lot of people if you knew them as intimately and unsparingly as a good novel would. But not the ones you actually love.

Have you ever felt, in the course of reading a detective novel, a guilty thrill of relief at having a character murdered before he can step onto the page and burden you with his actual existence? Detective stories always have too many characters anyway. And characters mentioned early on but never sighted, just lingering offstage, take on an awful portentous quality. Better to have them gone.

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. That is the cause of the contradictions in the novel.

My feeling," he explained, "is that a publisher's first allegiance is to talent. And if we aren't going to publish a talent like this, it is a very serious thing." He contended that the ambitious Fitzgerald would be able to find another publisher for this novel and young authors would follow him: "Then we might as well go out of business.

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.

But why did such an imaginative group of people declare independence from one of the greatest empires on earth and establish a truly novel polity but not get rid of an institution that most of them thought was immoral and dangerous?

There is no novel of world history, which is more wonderful than our party's development to its present greatness. Speech of March 20, 1934 in Munich

I think women love a passionate love story.

I couldn't pay attention to a novel; I'd get three pages in and couldn't remember what it was about.