Novel Quotes - page 8

With any novel that you begin, you can't foresee how difficult or easy it's going to be, and you can't really prepare yourself. You just have a take it one step at a time and know that it's all right to keep going - you can always fix it. (Jane Smiley)

Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.

Jane Smiley

Somehow, knowing that Alzheimer's is coming mocks all one's aspirations - to tell stories, to think through certain issues as only a novel can do, to be recognised for one's accomplishments and hard work - in a way that old familiar death does not.

Jane Smiley

I felt more doubtful than usual with 'Goon Squad,' because I knew that the book's genre wasn't easily named - Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? - and I worried that its lack of a clear category would count against it. My hopes for it were pretty modest.

Jennifer Egan

Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.

Jennifer Egan

I pretty much drink a cup of coffee, write in my journal for a while, and then sit at a computer in my office and torture the keys. My one saving grace as a writer is that, if I'm having trouble with the novel I'm writing, I write something else, a poem or a short story. I try to avoid writer's block by always writing something.

Jess Walter

Once I learned, I went online and ordered every romance novel I could find. They're fairy tales for grown-ups.

Gena Showalter

Each novel is harder than its predecessor because I must work harder at not repeating myself. However, I enjoy the challenge. This is the greatest job in the world.

Jonathan Kellerman

My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game.

Joshua Ferris

I love to run and I have some tips to keep it fresh and novel. I rarely use the same route twice. That keeps things new.

Dean Karnazes

I'm not looking to write the great American novel, win a Pulitzer or teach history. I write to entertain my readers. (Dorothy Garlock)

With a novel, no matter where I am in it, I'm fretting about it. Every time I write a book, it starts with great forward momentum. Then there seems to be a period where it slows down a bit, and other things intervene. Then I gain momentum.

Douglas Kennedy

Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.

E. Lockhart

Proust is a hero of mine. I read 'A la recherche' in one go, and I'm a very slow reader. It had an astonishing impact, reading it on my own and being my main company. I think Proust is the most intelligent person to ever have written a novel.

Edward St Aubyn

The Pacific Northwest, and particularly Whidbey Island, is extremely suited to be a location in a novel.

Elizabeth George

The novel is like a melancholy form. It's about some kind of disillusionment with the way things are versus the idea of how they could be or how they used to be.

Elif Batuman

I tried once in my life to write a novel. I had written something like 80 pages of it when my laptop got stolen. When I told people this, they acted as if something tragic had happened, but I kind of felt relieved, grateful to the thief who saved me from another year of something that felt more like homework than fun.

Etgar Keret

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

Eugenio Montale

I don't fret over lost time - I can always use the situations in a novel.

Jerzy Kosinski

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.

Karin Fossum

All novels are about crime. You'd be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don't see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That's the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world. (Carl Hiaasen)

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

Alice Hoffman

That is the joy of reading fiction: when all is said and done, the novel belongs to the reader and his or her imagination.

Alice Hoffman

My first book was the most successful debut novel in the UK ever and every one of my books has reached number one in the UK. Clearly the British know brilliance when they see it.

Kathy Reichs

My favorite period is World War II, and I'm in the middle of writing my fourth novel set in that era.

Ken Follett

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