Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Life is not like a novel, but a novel can be like life. The best ones always are.
I read all the time. Sometimes I get asked if I've thought about writing a novel.
Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality.
History is a novel which did take place; a novel is history that could take place.
The facts of life are to the biographer what the text of a novel is to the critic.
My experience is that an original and compelling idea for a novel is a rare thing.
I have survived by representing these sufferings of mine in the form of the novel.
I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.
It's all sex for me. Politics is sex. Race is sex. It's the novel. It's the novel!
There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right.
Ever since I was in my teens I had plans at one point in my life to write a novel.
The Eleventh Plague hits disturbingly close to home An excellent, taut debut novel.
Yes, I was good at reading people. I studied them so I could put them in my novels.
For a bookworm like Mother, a Brontë novel sister was better than a biological one.
I've never had time to read. But no one ever kept me from finishing a novel I loved.
A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.
Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.
Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.
After writing each novel, I would spend days poring over suggestions from my editor.
The new novel is sought more eagerly, and devoured more greedily, the New Testament.
The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.
Why did people ask "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing.
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.
I am almost six-novels-old. It took me until the third novel to call myself a writer.
Trollope wrote so many novels and other works that they tend to crowd each other out.
Whether early or late, the Parker novels are all superlative literary entertainments.
I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.
It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.
When I am writing novels I don't read a lot of novels so I try to catch up in-between.
Every time I read a Jane Austen novel, I feel like a bartender at the gates of heaven.
You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.
Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.
My new novel 'Red Hook Road' began many years ago as a short article in the newspaper.
I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.
I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character.
A first novel should be brash and ambitious, and announce the arrival of a new talent.
It's the pursuit of love and happiness that is the driving force of the romantic novel.
I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.
For some it is harder to write a novel than to row a bathtub across the North Atlantic.
One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.
Publishers love to compartmentalize, and Second Chance was not an easy novel to define.
I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read.
A short story is the shortest distance between two points; a novel is the scenic route.
The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.
In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a character's and let his perceptions take over.
The novel is never really in the first draft. The novel really happens in the revisions.