Novel Quotes - page 30

I've had a lot of books rejected in my time. My first novel, which didn't get published, was, with hindsight, crashingly dull. (Helen Fielding)

For me 'Oliver Twist' is a political novel. It is a furious critique of the treatment of orphans and poor children who were forced to spend their early lives in ghastly institutions.

Henning Mankell

A kitsch novel describes the world not as it really is, but as it is hoped and feared to be.

Hermann Broch

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

Hilary Mantel

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

Hilary Mantel

Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

Hilary Mantel

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

Hilary Mantel

I was a late bloomer. I was 38 when my first book was out and 43 when my first crime novel was out. I had a story that could only be told as a crime story. I think the genre is good; it deals with the fundamental questions of life and death. The problem is there are too many bad crime stories.

Hakan Nesser

A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.

Charles Baxter

It has been the sad experience of many that much of the best and the most beautiful is lost to those whose mental food consists exclusively of the sensational paper or the cheap novel, or of that frothy mass of waste material which is thrown up like scum upon the molten metal of life--novelettes, serials, and fragments of a type which neither teach the ignorant, nor strengthen the weak, nor develop the immature.

Charles Webster Leadbeater

Writing doesn't come real easy to me. I couldn't write a novel in a year. It wouldn't be readable. I don't let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way. (Charles Frazier)

I didn't think I could pull off a novel.

Shane Dawson

My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool.

Junot Diaz

Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.

Junot Diaz

I know for a fact that - it's just the way our biases work now in the industry of literature, but certainly a short story collection does not receive the same kind of attention as a novel.

Junot Diaz

'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both.

Junot Diaz

The job of the screenplay is to identify and extract the essence of the story from the novel and reconfigure it for the screen, maintaining its essence in a different vehicle.

Barry Eisler

I think escapism is very important, certainly in my life. I love nothing more than escaping into the world of a film or a novel. To be involved in creating that for other people is a privilege.

Ben Barnes

I can write ten or twelve screenplays in the time it takes me to write one novel. This allows me to offload all of my stories. But it's also not as creatively fulfilling.

Benjamin Percy

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.

Adam Johnson

I've written some short stories about my personal experience, but it's not something you can use everywhere. Every novel, every work of fiction, needs its own food. (Burhan Sonmez)

I've always felt that the traditional novel doesn't give you enough information about the narrator, and I think it's important to know the point of view from which these tales are told: the moral makeup of the teller.

W. G. Sebald

My first novel was a challenge to myself. No one had an inkling that I was working on it.

Vikas Swarup

I don't remember learning to read, but the first thing I remember reading is a science fiction novel.

Vonda N. McIntyre

Usually, with a novel, you start with no idea what to do because your job is to create convincing characters and then they just run around getting crazy. The problem with writing a memoir, obviously, is you can't do that because you sort of know what's going to happen. Because you're the character.

Gary Shteyngart

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