Novel Quotes - page 3

Whenever I start a novel, I'm always looking for two things: a bit of science that makes me go 'what if?' and a piece of history that ends in a question mark. (James Rollins)

I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life.

Iris Chang

In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a character's and let his perceptions take over.

Elizabeth Moon

It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.

David Antin

My fellow students there were very smart, but the really novel thing was that they actually seemed to put a lot of effort into their school work. By the end of my first semester there, I began to get into that habit as well.

Eric Allin Cornell

Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.

Leslie Fiedler

I've always felt that life is a novel, and part of it is written for you, and part of it is written by you. It's up to you to write the ending, ultimately.

Lynn Johnston

Reading a novel in which all characters illustrate patience, hard work, chastity, and delayed gratification could be a pretty dull experience.

Thomas Perry

The characters you refer to as predatory and unsavory are useful. They're the ones who make a novel into a thriller. They're active, and most of the common virtues, the signs of a good person, are not.

Thomas Perry

This isn't a particularly novel observation, but the world is full of people who think they can manipulate the lives of others merely by getting a law passed.

Groucho Marx

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations. (Umberto Eco)

Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.

Umberto Eco

My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before - a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.

Henry David Thoreau

When I finally got tired of arguing with her and decided to write a novel as if I was some kind of formulaic, genre writing drone, just to prove to her how awful it would be, I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files.

Jim Butcher

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

James Salter

I wrote a novel about Israelis who live their own lives on the slope of a volcano. Near a volcano one still falls in love, one still gets jealous, one still wants a promotion, one still gossips.

Amos Oz

I once tried to write a novel about revenge. It's the only book I didn't finish. I couldn't get into the mind of the person who was plotting vengeance.

Maeve Binchy

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.

Italo Calvino

Very little comes easily to our poor, benighted species (the first creature, after all, to experiment with the novel evolutionary inventions of self-conscious philosophy and art). Even the most "obvious,” "accurate,” and "natural” style of thinking or drawing must be regulated by history and won by struggle. Solutions must therefore arise within a social context and record the complex interactions of mind and environment that define the possibility of human improvement.

Stephen Jay Gould

Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex, as she expressed it, writing way at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace.

Louisa May Alcott

Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, where Orwell failed. (Philip Roth)

A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts. But really a novel goes as dreams go in sleeping at night and some dreams are like anything and some dreams are like something and some dreams change and some dreams are quiet and some dreams are not. And some dreams are just what any one would do only a little different always just a little different and that is what a novel is.

Gertrude Stein

The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

V. S. Pritchett

Axiom: Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.

E. M. Forster

As for 'story' I never yet did enjoy a novel or play in which someone didn't tell me afterward that there was something wrong with the story, so that's going to be no drawback as far as I'm concerned. "Good Lord, why am I so bored"-"I know; it must be the plot developing harmoniously." So I often reply to myself, and there rises before me my special nightmare-that of the writer as craftsman, natty and deft.

E. M. Forster

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