Quotes About Novel

I've always said that my ideal reader would be someone who after finishing one of my novels would throw it out the window, presumably from an upper floor of an apartment building in New York, and by the time it had landed would be taking the elevator down to retrieve it.

I'll write to you. A super-long letter, like in an old-fashioned novel

Like a Chinese box, the world of the novel contained smaller worlds, and inside those were yet smaller worlds. Together, these worlds made up a single universe, and the universe waited there in the book to be discovered by the reader.

Things like this don't happen all that often in one lifetime. This is the magnificent world of a picaresque novel. Just brace yourself and enjoy the smell of evil. We're shooting the rapids. And when we go over the falls, let's do it together in grand style!

Anyone in their right mind would never undertake to write a novel in the first place. Given the circumstances, therefore, it is perfectly acceptable to be deranged as long as you are aware of that fact.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

I never show my books to Ricky. His writing is very different, and anyway, he's only read one novel in his life: 'The Catcher in the Rye.'

I had wanted to write 'The Possessed' as fiction, but everyone told me that no one would read a novel about graduate students. It seems almost uncivilized to tell someone writing a novel, 'No, you have to call this a memoir.'

My writing is sort of 'Sidney Sheldon meets Anne Tyler.'

As soon as I started writing Julia, by which I mean while writing its first sentence, I felt a sudden, reassuring charge of excitement. I knew it was going to work.

The historical background is one of the easier aspects of writing a novel. Far more difficult is dreaming up the smaller, character-based scenes, scenes that rise entirely from one's own imagination.

I never conceived of not writing a novel. I believed - oh, God, I believed, it was an article of faith! - I was born to write a novel.

There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.

I can get really obsessive. I like writing many drafts, and I try not to because it is very time-consuming, especially when you're working on a novel. But I do like to take a story and reorder it, put things in different places. This allows me to see things in a new and sometimes surprising way.

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.

The first is that instead of writing a sequel, which is what most people do, this is in fact a prequel. Although we didn't know that when we began the process.

I sometimes start keeping a journal about the writing process itself. Particularly when I get the ideas, and I am trying to brood over the chaos phase. In writing a novel, you really have to brood over a lot of chaos of ideas and possibilities.

My writing process hasn't changed - it's is the same whether I'm working on a Y.A. novel or, as now, a new novel for adults. A lot of reading, a lot of research if the subject warrants it, a lot of sticky notes and scraps of paper - and get to work.

'The Golden Compass' became a bad experience because the studio didn't have faith in the strength of the ideas of the novel, which is ironic because it's one of the greatest fantasy novels ever written, if not the greatest, and they took the religion out of it and tried to turn it into a popcorn movie.

Tarjei Vesaas has written the best Norwegian novel ever, 'The Birds' - it is absolutely wonderful: the prose is so simple and so subtle, and the story is so moving that it would have been counted amongst the great classics from the last century if it had been written in one of the major languages.

I read all of the nonfiction that I could find on Chechnya, and all the while, I was searching for a novel that was set there. I couldn't find a single novel written in English that was set in the period of the two most recent Chechen wars.

The influence of John Hughes is fully felt in the melodrama 'Donnie Darko.' This first film written and directed by Richard Kelly is a wobbly cannonball of a movie that tries to go Mr. Hughes one better; it's like a Hughes version of a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.