The filmmaking process is a team effort. A screenwriter cannot possibly do exactly what he wants as if he was writing a novel.

I think 'Charming Billy' ultimately is a novel about faith and what we believe in and, above all, what we choose to believe in.

I can't think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.

Between history and the novel stands biography, their unwanted offspring, which has brought a great embarrassment to them both.

Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.

If you have to deal with our friends at ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it's like a Kafka novel. Files just disappear.

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

I was trying to make a novel about something no one wanted to read about into something they couldn't put down or look away from.

For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. But I don't intend my novels as puzzles. I intend them as invitations to dance.

What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.

I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the novel is a local thing.

Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn't be.

Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.

When I'm working on a novel of my own, I try to read mostly nonfiction, although sometimes I break down and peek at something else.

The novel is the first art form that is an honest-to-god commodity. That's what makes it different from both high art and folk art.

I started a novel right before 'The Imitation Game,' so it's funny now, four years later, to be coming almost back to finishing it.

A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.

I used to write books and plays in my mind, but I doubt that any of them would have been above the level of the cheapest dime novel.

There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, 'Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth.'

I love James Baldwin essays, but also his novels. I recently read "Another Country." I couldn't believe how ahead of his time he was.

I've never been good with deadlines. My early novels, I wrote by myself. No one knew I was writing a novel; I didn't have a contract.

If you enjoy math and you write novels, it's very rare that you'll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance.

Working on a green screen set, yeah, it's almost like reading from a novel, taking those black words and creating a world around you.

I get very weird and defensive about what I'm working on - I wouldn't even tell my secretary what the next page of my novel was about.

The most autobiographical thing I've ever written is my second novel, called 'An Ocean in Iowa.' That is pretty close to my childhood.

I am the woman with the cool vintage glasses... I am the proud wife beside her husband... I am the writer who has written a new novel.

The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary.

A novel is a conversation starter, and if the author isn't there for the after-party, both the writer and the reader are missing a lot.

If you want meaning, you read poetry or a novel or something, you don't read song lyrics. You're supposed to listen to them with music.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.

I took inspiration from 'Fountainhead,' the way in which Ayn Rand conveyed her political philosophy through an immensely popular novel.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.

If I had the luxury of working as a full time writer, I think you would see novels appearing on a much more regular, and frequent, basis.

I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.

Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.

I wrote a novel for my degree, and I'm very happy I didn't submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with my professors who had to read it.

Ive always got a novel under way, but if I try to work on it every day, exclusively, I falter. So I always keep more than one thing going.

What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that.

Well, for people who want to write best sellers, the best advice I can give is to say that the novel has to engage the reader emotionally.

I have a backlog of novels which I would love to be working on and would be working on if I were not obliged to hold down a full time job.

Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.

I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses; and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.

I have resolved to pick one novel and just read it over and over again for the rest of my life, because I cannot remember anything anymore.

I don't like novels that tie everything up in a plot-y way. I always think that's not really true of life, particularly of people in power.

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