Novel Quotes - page 2

We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own. (John le Carré)

It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.

Lawrence Durrell

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Angela Carter

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

John Irving

Repeated reflection and inquiry have led me to the somewhat novel opinion, that value depends entirely upon utility.

William Stanley Jevons

The end of a novel, like the end of a children's dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums.

Anthony Trollope

I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

William Faulkner

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

Doris Lessing

However novel it may appear, I shall venture the assertion, that, until women assume the place in society which good sense and good feeling alike assign to them, human improvement must advance but feebly.

Frances Wright

The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.

George Steiner

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it. (Toni Morrison)

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

Saul Bellow

I was very influenced by The Magic Mountain. It's a book that had a huge impact on me. I loved that as a shape for a novel: put a bunch of people in a beautiful place, give them all tuberculosis, make them all stay in a fur sleeping bag for several years and see what happens.

Ann Patchett

A novel is a mirror walking down a road.

Michael Ondaatje

I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing.

Manuel Puig

One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently.

Manuel Puig

All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy.

Manuel Puig

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

Penelope Lively

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

Penelope Lively

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

Penelope Lively

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all. (Rose Tremain)

To sing a song is quite different than to write a poem. I'm not and never will be a novelist, but to write a novel is not the same thing as writing a play. There is a difference in form, but essentially what you're after is the same thing.

Sam Shepard

As for writing about temptation, there's no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.

Tom Perrotta

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.

Jane Smiley

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

Alice Hoffman

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