Quotes About Novel

If you're writing a full-length novel, you don't need to bend over backward trying to be clever in the first line or two. Readers will understand that there's a lot of story to tell, and they'll give you some space to do that. Don't rush the opening.

Marcus de Obregón is appealing and, yes, instructive, but is not entirely successful because the author often forgot he was writing a novel, not his memoirs.

I had to keep checking the copyright page to remind myself this novel [Karl Moritz's Anton Reiser ] was published in 1785, not 1985.

So: an epic novel of the Tathagata? Yes, but not a very good one. Kerouac would have done better.

4. You've had enough of the big city and decide to return home. Waiting for a bus, you pick up a discarded copy of Larva and, because you have a long bus-ride ahead of you, begin reading. You quickly discover it is not a conventional novel. Do you: (a) discard it and stare out the window all the way back home? (b)

And if the novel [ The Education of Cyrus ] remains dull by modern standards, we have to remind ourselves Xenophon didn't set out to write a "novel" — there was no such thing yet in his culture — but was feeling his way to a new form somewhere between factual history and fanciful epic. Our hat is always off to innovators.

It's the first novel [ Satyricon by Petronius] in which the size of a male character's genitals is noted, a detail you hardly ever get in George Eliot's novels.

But surely, to ascribe certain events, clearly the outcome of deliberate human acts, to the Fates or the gods does the immortals a disservice as well—indeed, it approaches impiety. It is certainly not 'truth' in any meaningful sense. I might as well simply make it all up, as if I were writing a novel about imaginary people, set in some invented land!

Wraeththu have been with me for the greater part of my life. My first rather ham-fisted (and half-finished) stories about them began in my mid-teens. It wasn't until I was twenty-six that I began work properly on the full-length novel that became The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, first volume of the Wraeththu trilogy, which was published in 1987. This was followed by The Bewitchments of Love and Hate and the Fulfilments of Fate and Desire.

The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

The way this whole novel thing came together was, I sold them one bill of goods and then didn't communicate very well. I am like Captain Run-on Sentence.

I started blogging in 2006 when I had sold my first novel but it had not yet been published, in those anxious months in between while I learned the whole process.

I wrote 'Don't Look Back' in November 2011, and when I wrote the novel, it wasn't contracted, so there was a freedom in that - no expectations or anything like that. It was also my first contemporary novel I'd written and sold, which was to Disney/Hyperion in January of 2012.

Writing one's first novel, getting it sold, and shepherding it through the labyrinths of editing, production, marketing, journalism, and social media is an arduous and nerve-wracking process.

You have to remember that Shadow and Bone' was the first book I sold. And it was, in fact, the first book I ever finished writing, despite many attempts before that to finish a novel. And when I was writing it, I didn't know if anybody was going to buy one book, let alone all three.

Ford Maddox Ford's 'The Good Soldier' is my favourite novel. I first read it in the 1950s and have read it about 20 times since. It's possibly the best-constructed book in the English language.

Writing a novel is solitary, but I don't mind that.

Writing a novel can be solitary at times compared to screenwriting, but I don't mind that.

My solo novel 'Icons' was optioned by Alcon Entertainment, the folks who made the 'Beautiful Creatures' movie, and that's gotten as far as a script, but no news yet.

Only in the mystery novel are we delivered final and unquestionable solutions. The joke to me is that fiction gives you a truth that reality can't deliver.

For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. But I don't intend my novels as puzzles. I intend them as invitations to dance.

Innovation requires a novel approach to scientific problem solving, higher level of resource commitments over much longer time durations.

I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art.

Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.