Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My novel got published, and I became a paid writer, which was nice, and then it came out, and nobody bought it, so I became an unemployed writer again.
I probably listen to Burn more than any of them, because it was so new me, so novel. To see my name on an actual record was such an incredible feeling.
He wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything except herself.
My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they've read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!
How often one reads a contemporary full-length novel and thinks quietly, mutinously, that it would have worked out better at half or a third the length.
The short story is still like the novel's wayward younger brother, we know that it's not respectable - but I think that can also add to the glory of it.
I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative.
What I like to write about is stuff I know. I don't think I could write a novel. I don't think I have it in me to come up with those kinds of characters.
The way this whole novel thing came together was, I sold them one bill of goods and then didn't communicate very well. I am like Captain Run-on Sentence.
Sylvie's knowledge, like Izzie's, was random yet far-ranging, 'The sign that one has acquired one's learning from reading novels rather than an education.
I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.
Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: You have to learn the rhythms of respiration - acquire the pace. Otherwise you stop right away.
Rohinton Mistry's celebrated novel 'Such a Long Journey' was pulled off the syllabus of Mumbai University because local extremists objected to its content.
After starting as a journalist for newspapers and magazines, I began to write books and had success with a novel and four nonfiction books for young adults.
Unlike novel characters, comic book characters last an eternity. When a character is changed beyond recognition, there's no longer the merchandising aspect.
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
You're looking for something, I don't know what I'm looking for, but I'm looking. Writing is a lot about that. When you write a poem. When you write a novel.
HBO and I have a deal to at least try to make a television series from the Leonid McGill stories. We're going to start with the first novel, 'The Long Fall.'
The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700.
One of the most puzzling things about a novel is that "the way it really was" half the time is, and half the time isn't, the way it ought to be in the novel.
When I was young, I knew William Burroughs really well. And William's secret desire, which he never quite did, was to write a straightforward detective novel.
Growing up in the English countryside, I feel like I'm in a Jane Austen novel when I walk around. I just feel comfortable and confident in those surroundings.
No novel is a clone of any preceding one, though with a background cast of characters and things that has grown to thousands, there are many familiar aspects.
I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.
Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.
'Of Mice and Men,' Steinbeck's fifth novel, adheres to a simple dramatic structure, which observes the classic Aristotelian unities of time, place and action.
However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory -not on the order of actual occurrence.
When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.
The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town.
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel.
Who are those ever multiplying authors that with unparalleled fecundity are overstocking the world with their quick succeeding progeny? They are novel-writers.
I think my novel, 'Walden Two,' has made people stop and look at the culture they have inherited and wonder if it is the last word or whether it can be changed.
If I'd had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and experiences into a novel. But I didn't so I slapped it up on the Web.
Edan Lepucki sets her debut novel, 'California,' somewhere in the 2060s. The nearness of this era helps make her vision both more discomfiting and more credible.
I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing.
Many athletes are seeking new and novel ways of pushing their limits, and the challenge of running back-to-back races is certainly one way to test the boundaries.
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.
There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.
I have often heard that the novel is dead. But I see novels produced, I don't know how many a week, in France. I have the impression it's carrying along quite well.
We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.
I make up stories that take place in real space with real people. If I could convert this into a technique for experimental novels, I might really be onto something.
I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.
All that time that we spend tweeting our thoughts and emotions to our next of kin, we could be writing the great American novel, starting a business, or just living.
We all know that small cars are good for us. But so is cod liver oil. And jogging. I want to drive around in a Terminator, not the heroine in an E. M. Forster novel.
I'm ashamed to admit this, but I didn't read a novel all the way through until after high school. Blasphemy, I know. I'm an author now. Books and words are my world.
A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.
I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.
I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life.
There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.