A novel is really like a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.

The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.

If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a 'movie version' of a novel?

There isn't, unfortunately, any way of discovering whether you can write a publishable novel except by writing it.

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

I don't plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system - it's a quest.

I don't cry too often reading books, but I did reading Francisco Goldman's autobiographical novel, 'Say Her Name.'

I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece.

Daisy had known the novel was silly even as she had read it, but that had not detracted one bit from her enjoyment.

The Buccaneers was an Edith Wharton novel, and she never finished it, and a screenwriter adapted it for television.

What you can do with a short story that you can't do with a novel is punch someone in the gut, in the best of ways.

An image often propels the novel, gets it started. For me, it's an image that has a lot of emotion connected to it.

We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.

Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

Usually people who do bad things make good writers.I did a lot of bad things, which is why my novels are interesting.

There're no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels, and then I read them again, and it's the best thing.

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

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

In fact, with each of my novels I have been surprised by something that happens that I had not thought of beforehand.

'The Buccaneers' was an Edith Wharton novel, and she never finished it, and a screenwriter adapted it for television.

I do believe in that thing about the reading audience being very important to the formation of the novel at its birth.

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.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

'Bag of Bones' was a big, distorted yet wonderfully entertaining novel that rode high on the bestseller lists in 1998.

I wrote my first novel and my second novel in Chicago. It was the place where I became a writer. It's my favorite city.

'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.

If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?

All writing is an act of self-exploration. Even a grocery list says something about you; how much more does a novel say?

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.

I find that in a novel I can get more of life, perhaps not such intense life, but certainly more of life than in poetry.

To have her meals, and her daily walk, and her fill of novels, and to be left alone, was all that she asked of the gods.

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel.

Comics are stories; they're like novels or anything else. So the first thing you have to do is become a good storyteller.

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

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

The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.

Design is about crafting an experience that is unfamiliar enough to feel novel, yet familiar enough to instill confidence.

The ingredients that make a good poem often differ from those that make a good essay and from those that make a good novel.

I've never really understood that whole thing of writers avoiding other writers' novels while they're working on their own.

The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer; it's possessed by the reader.

I began my first novel when I was 15. It went through three drafts, of around 40,000 words each. If I find it, I'll burn it.

I love bookstores and booksellers. In my novel 'Dirty Martini,' I thanked over 3,000 booksellers by name in the back matter.

I think you can tell, when you meet someone, whether they read novels or not. There is some little hollowness if they don't.

The larger truth, the universal truth that you can give in a novel, is far greater than what you can give through journalism.

I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.

Occasionally, I just need to escape from my work or be reminded of the comparative bliss of my own life, so I pick up a novel.

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