Quotes About Novel

I wrote 'The Match,' my cricket novel, between 2002 and 2005. In retrospect, almost an age of innocence in cricket and a time when it was rare to find the game deep in fiction.

I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn't quite call me a rare-book collector. But I did once work in a rare-books library, and I wrote a novel about a rare book.

Part of writing a novel is being willing to leap into the blackness. You have very little idea, really, of what's going to happen. You have a broad sense, maybe, but it's this rash leap.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

The biographical novel is a true and documented story of one human being's journey across the face of the years, transmuted from the raw material of life into the delight and purity of an authentic art form.

My first book was the most successful debut novel in the U.K. ever and every one of my books has reached number one in the U.K. Clearly the British know brilliance when they see it.

I wrote a novel, Ghost Road Rules, and as soon as it was done and polished, I began reaching out to agents. I ignored the frequent advice to 'shoot low and try for a low-level agent because they're the only ones that will take a flyer on a new author.' That sounded like bad advice to me.

I didn't really get London until I read Dickens. Then I was charmed to death by it.

When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.

As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know.

'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both.

Well, for people who want to write best sellers, the best advice I can give is to say that the novel has to engage the reader emotionally.

I read a lot. I am an inveterate reader. I always have a novel going.

When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.

It's a fantastic privilege to spend three or four hundred pages with a reader. You have time to go into certain questions that are painful or difficult or complicated. That's one thing that appeals to me very much about the novel form.

Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.

You never want to be in a position where your reader feels like you're passing judgment on your own characters. Any novel where you feel like the author is talking to the reader over the characters' heads is in a bad place.

When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.

A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.

Your opening should give the reader a person to focus on. In a short story, this person should turn up almost immediately; he should be integral to the story's main action; he should be an individual, not just a type. In a novel, the main character may take longer to appear: Anna Karenina doesn't show up in her own novel until chapter eighteen.

Normally, I have a lot of alpha readers on my books. These are people that, once I finish a novel, I let them look at it and give me a reader response.

I think there are readers out there and I don't think the book is dead. And more importantly I don't think readers have to choose between literary and commercial fiction.

You can't believe anything that's written in an historical novel, and yet the author's job is always to create a believable world that readers can enter. It's especially so, I think, for writers of historical fiction.