Quotes About Novel

After the novel was published, I came to feel that I couldn't call myself Orthodox anymore. It's so patriarchal, anti-women, anti-gay. There was something about writing 'Disobedience'... it felt like I had put it all in the book. I had done my best by it, recorded what it meant for me. I felt I was done.

A short story collection can be as exciting as a novel. It is a real complete experience, like when you listen to a real good recording, a Beatles record, and there are so many good songs.

My new novel 'Red Hook Road' began many years ago as a short article in the newspaper.

In novels, and American novels in particular, it's not just about redemption, it's about forward movement and healing oneself. Americans are very big on getting better.

I'm reading 'Ten Storey Love Song' by Richard Milward. I read his first novel, 'Apples,' after hearing a reading of his in the Hague. I really enjoyed it, so I've started this one.

Ever since 'Strange Heaven,' I haven't really reread my old work. Not so much because I don't like the writer I was, or because I find flaws in the writing, but more because I get so burnt out on a novel once I've finished writing, revising, editing and copy editing it that I genuinely never want to look at it again after it's gone to press.

But now and then there appears a novel which opens up a new world not by revealing what is strange, but by revealing what is familiar.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

When a novel lacks the indefinable, unmistakable thing we call beauty, one looks in it for sound delineation of character, or humour of situation, or verbal wit.

Crusoe's religious preoccupations seemed boring and rather silly.

La vie ressemble plus souvent à un roman qu'un roman ne ressemble à la vie. (Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.)

Taisez-vous, sotte et impertinente créature ; vos phrases de roman nous ennuient.

Chacun pourrait intéresser au roman de sa propre vie, s'il l'avait compris...

A novel is just a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.

Upon her butler's announcing the arrival of Mr Ravenscar, Lady Mablethorpe, who had been dozing over a novel from the Circulating Library, sat up with a jerk, and raised a hand to her dishevelled cap.

I really didn't write it with any intention of being published. If I'd known that was going to happen, I would have written something more sensible, because now I have to dress up as a pirate for book signings... I would have done a novel about a man who hangs around with a gaggle of models.

My son, Wolf, was born when I was past 40 and the author of a best-selling novel. That means he has grown up a middle-class child - one who sometimes asks me for stories of my childhood but knows nothing of what it means to grow up poor and afraid. I have worked to make sure of that.

I worked on 'Always and Forever, Lara Jean' for a few months before I breathed a word of it my editor or agent.

I liked the idea of exposing the beams in collaborative novel. And there are many - especially in the crime world - there are many people working together: James Patterson and his stable of sub authors; and then there are like Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman and Jason Starr.

In grad school, I took a workshop with Scott Spencer, whose excellent novel 'Endless Love' had just been turned into a film. We students were in awe of his prestige. Yet Scott himself was chagrined; for good reason, he hated the movie.

I remember during the 1970 World Cup, the whole country stopped to focus on the matches. I was nine years old. I would sit in front of the radio with my father, and we would listen to the magic of football. It was like the matches were a dramatic story being told to us. It was a kind of art, in my opinion. It was like a painting or a great novel.

When my first novel, 'Crazy Rich Asians,' was published in 2013, many readers were astonished to learn that in Asia, there were women who dressed in couture from morning till night.

My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Poppy, had us each write a 'novel,' whatever that meant to us. It must have been 10 pages long, and we bound it and colored the front. And she wrote on mine, 'I can't wait till your real novel comes out. Give me a call.'

'The Dovekeepers' is a compelling, beautifully written novel that combines history and fiction into a timeless story of survival and heroism.