Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've always wanted to write a novel. It's overwhelming and daunting, and it's one of those things that every writer fantasizes about doing.
Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.
I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.
I have read all my novels that were translated into English. Reading my novels is enjoyable because I forget almost all the content in them.
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
I don't see the direct correlation between my personal life and the novel I'm writing until I'm at the end of the novel or very close to it.
Novel writing should never be confused with journalism. Unfortunately, in the case of Primary Colors, a fair number of journalists confused.
You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which, for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.
There was a time, after I earned my graduate degree and before I sold my first novel, when it looked like I might have to get an office job.
In a novel, you can always go back and make it look like you knew what you were doing all along before the thing goes out and gets published.
The story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they're no longer the works that preceded the novel.
The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.
I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable.
I personally feel I still have so much to learn as a writer; each novel is better than the one before, just because I'm getting better at it.
So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.
Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
Reading a novel in which all characters illustrate patience, hard work, chastity, and delayed gratification could be a pretty dull experience.
Post-apocalyptic novels tell you that in the future there is some great war. I would tell you that most cops say that it's going on right now.
I write my novels personally, desperately and non-negligently. When I write my novels, I think about my novels only, and never do other works.
People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.
Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.
For me, the short story is the depth of a novel, the breadth of a poem, and, as you come to the last few paragraphs, the experience of surprise.
Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.
Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.
I don't categorize myself as an 85-year-old woman who has written an erotic novel. I categorize myself as a writer who's written an erotic novel.
I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.
My first published novel, 'American Rust,' took three and a half years of full-time work to write. But I wrote two apprentice novels before that.
I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.
If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.
The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all - in the end the vast majority of them simply aren't that great, and are destined to be forgotten.
Though my short stories are the more readable, my novels do have more to say; and they will, if anyone has the patience for it, repay a rereading.
Fortunately, economists open to new ways of thinking are finding novel ways to use supposedly irrelevant factors to make the world a better place.
John Irving once told me he doesn't start a novel until he knows the last sentence. I said, 'My God, Irving, isn't that like working in a factory?'
Because I'm a woman writing about women who do bad things, that's somehow very 'other.' When men write that, it's called a novel. It's just a book.
To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.
I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.
One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.
Good fiction must be entertaining, but what makes fiction special - and True - is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.
It is clear that a novel cannot be too bad to be worth publishing. . . . It certainly is possible for a novel to be too good to be worth publishing.
A screenplay is not a finished product; a novel is. A screenplay is a blueprint for something - for a building that will most likely never be built.
Short fiction and the novel, nonfiction and fiction, electronic texts and books - these are not opposites. One need not destroy the other to survive.
I like all sorts of things, not necessarily just Victorian. Even though I tend to read a lot of Victorian novels, I like a lot of contemporary stuff.
'Dexter,' while the pilot shares moments with the novel that created the character of Dexter, they completely abandoned the book from that moment on.
An account of an expedition is not a novel. Therefore an authentic account can never be given, let alone written down by someone who was not present.
Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.
I've never written an autobiographical novel in my life. I've never touched upon my life. I've never written a single scene that I can say took place.
There are many things behind a good novel, but in particular there is a lot of work - a lot of patience, a lot of stubbornness, and a critical spirit.
I do have some theatrical background. I've written plays and seen plays and read plays. But I also read novels. One thing I don't read is screenplays.
You can't really imagine every moment of a movie in the same way that you wouldn't expect a novelist to envision every sentence of his 800-page novel.
I keep telling myself I should try very hard to write a novel of about 210 pages... I don't seem to be capable of it, but I keep hoping it will happen.