Top 265 Novel Quotes

I don’t feel I write fast. I write in longhand and do so much revision. On the page, it’s so old-fashioned. I could write a whole novel on scrap paper, scribbles and things. I keep looking at it and something develops. For me, using a word processor would mean staring at a screen for too many hours.

I’ve always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.

When you start a novel, it is always like pushing a boulder uphill. Then, after a while, to mangle the metaphor, the boulder fills with helium and becomes a balloon that carries you the rest of the way to the top. You just have to hold your nerve and trust to narrative.

I’ve written a lot of books now; I’ve been published for over 30 years. I hope with every book I learn something new, and with every new novel I try to improve the process of writing.

People have quite a simple idea about ‘Anna Karenina.’ They feel that the novel is entirely about a young married woman who falls in love with a cavalry officer and leaves her husband after much agony, and pays the price for that.

Women want love to be a novel, men a short story.

People are so afraid to say the word ‘comic’. It makes you think of a grown man with pimples, a ponytail and a big belly. Change it to ‘graphic novel’ and that disappears.

In Jenny Offill’s remarkable first novel, ‘Last Things,’ 7-year-old Grace Davitt watches her mother, Anna, descend into madness and tries to make sense of the claustrophobic world that Anna has created for her.

What greatly annoys me is sometimes you see the short story being described as a training ground for the novel. Kind of like an apprenticeship. And in lots of ways, it’s a far harder form.

When I start a new novel and find myself diverted by domestic activities, many of which I genuinely enjoy, I panic that I will never write another word.

I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don’t. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It’s a hard way to learn to write. I don’t recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.

I was a total nerd growing up. I’d rather sit home and read a novel on New Year’s Eve and say, ‘Wow, I read the whole thing in one night!’ That was my idea of a big time.

In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.

Today I began the novel that I determined to be great.

I always felt a little worm inside me: ‘Now you need to write a novel with a woman protagonist.’

‘Atlas Shrugged,’ let’s face it, was probably the most important novel of the 20th century that was never a film.

I’m not the most prolific writer in the world, and, sadly, writing a novel involves a lot of effort.

Life is God’s novel. Let him write it.

No… a novel is a long business. I’m a slow writer, even when I’m doing very well I write slowly.

Well, you know, in any novel you would hope that the hero has someone to push back against, and villains – I find the most interesting villains those who do the right things for the wrong reasons, or the wrong things for the right reasons. Either one is interesting. I love the gray area between right and wrong.

A novel is often a longer process in handling self-doubt.

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.

Sir Walter, with his 61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career than most of his brethren.

People have asked me why I made the first chapter of my first novel so long, and in an invented English. The only answer I can come up with that satisfies me is, ‘To keep out the scum.’

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

Sometimes, a novel is like a train: the first chapter is a comfortable seat in an attractive carriage, and the narrative speeds up. But there are other sorts of trains, and other sorts of novels. They rush by in the dark; passengers framed in the lighted windows are smiling and enjoying themselves.

I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.

Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.

Let’s put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20.

I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it’s not simply telling a story.

Strangely enough, the first character in Fried Green Tomatoes was the cafe, and the town. I think a place can be as much a character in a novel as the people.

In many ways, my entire graphic novel career was a long diversion. Originally, all I wanted to do was to be an underground cartoonist and maybe bring out a groovy underground mag.

When I was writing ‘The White Tiger’ I lived in a building pretty much exactly like the one I described in this novel, and the people in the book are the people I lived with back then. So I didn’t have to do much research to find them.

When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.

Many characters in the novel are representative of types that exist in India. He represents the caste system in India with an air of superiority, the caste system in India and the people thinking that western things are better.

It’s like that Simpsons joke – they’re filming a cow in a movie and they go, ‘OK, we’ll tape a bunch of cats together to make a cow’, and it’s like, ‘Why don’t you just use a cow?’. For some reason that is novel – like, ‘Oh, my guitar sounds like a piano and now if I can just get my piano to sound like my guitar’.

I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn’t have in Vietnam.

In the second grade, I would just get bored and a joke would pop into my head and I would have to say it. It was almost like I had some brilliant novel in my head that I had to get down, and I would interrupt class all the time and get in trouble.

In 1955, when I’d write a science-fiction novel, I’d set it in the year 2000. I realised around 1977 that, ‘My God, it’s getting exactly like those novels we used to write in the 1950s!’ Everything’s just turning out to be real.

Babylon 5 is probably the biggest, most ambitious television science fiction series ever made. It’s one big novel told over five years with 110 different stories told within it.

Maybe some people, when they sit down to write their great novel or make their great record or paint their great painting, they have it all planned out in their head. But for me, it’s never worked that way.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it’s O.K., but it’s of no account.

I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, so I did a lot of stuff where I entertained myself playing games, reading a lot, a lot of fantasy novel stuff.

I use the setting of a small rural Norwegian community – the kind of place that I know so intimately. I could never write a novel set in a big city, because, frankly, I don’t know what it would be like.

I just realized quite early on that I’m not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don’t write unless I really feel I need to, and that’s a luxury.

I’ve decided to take advantage of outsourcing. My next novel will be written by a couple of guys in Bangalore, India.

I like that original romance of having a pen and a legal pad and going anywhere in the world and being able to write a novel with just those two things.

I can’t understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

I just want people to finish the book and say, ‘I was entertained.’ When I set out to do it, I had no deal in place. I knew it would be tough. I read somewhere that John Steinbeck was turned down 22 times on his first novel. But I was just going to do it.

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.

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

In a novel, if you’re any good, you don’t just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.