Quotes About Novels

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.

I grew up on genre - on Westerns, spy thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy novels, horror novels. Especially horror novels.

It’s the ability to bring events and characters to a resolution that draws me to writing, especially writing for children. I don’t want to ever be didactic, but if there’s something I do want to say, it’s that you can bring things around. You can make a change. Adult novels are about letting go. Children’s novels are about getting a grip.

I read Claire Messud's 'The Emperor's Children,' I read Joseph O'Neill's 'Netherland' - but to me, they're not 9/11 novels. In 'The Emperor's Children,' 9/11 felt to me like a piece of the plot; the novel wasn't wrestling with what 9/11 meant. And 'Netherland' felt the same way. I liked both books a lot but I don't see them as 9/11 novels.

Novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories.

I have a lot of novels that I haven't finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it's not going anywhere. I don't publish everything I write. I must have six unfinished novels at least.

My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are. No matter how hard I try to do otherwise, the books always wind up being "a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society."

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

I can't imagine otherwise - I guess Virginia Woolf could write wonderful novels where the women never have sex, and her novels work. But for me, I don't think I could write a plot without sex happening somewhere.

I'm not reading any novels right now, though not for lack of trying. Unless they're really good, my attention in most novels tends to sputter out after a hundred pages or so - an awful admission for someone who is trying to write one, but it's true.

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.

Will Shatner, Jonathan Frakes of Star Trek have already put novels out.

My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books.

At one point I intended to write precursor and sequel novels, about the establishment of the Web and its next evolution, but I am very unlikely to now; they would take place in a different universe.

Well, in Angel of Hope, Amber ends up going in her sister's stead. The focus of that book and the next one coming out, Angel of Love, is how she finds her way out of her sister's shadow and into herself. That's really what those two novels are based on.

I don't do research for my novels. Obviously, in my other line of work as a reporter and a columnist, I've had the opportunity to get to know both social workers and TV talk-show hosts.

I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely.

She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.

I'm just trying to tell a good story and make thought-provoking, entertaining films. I just try and draw upon the great culture we have as a people, from music, novels, the streets.

Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

Usually I read biographies of interesting people. I am not attracted to novels - make-believe, or recreations of what people think life should be.

I looked at the world of books and just went, Oh my gosh, if I'm writing novels, I'm on the same shelves as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Petronius - whereas with comics, they've only been doing them for a hundred years, and there's stuff that nobody's done before. I think I'll go off and do some of the stuff no one's ever done before.

My writerly aspirations are pretty simple: to provide as many readers as possible with the same sort of wonderful immersion that I myself get from fantasy novels - and to make enough money to help feed my kids while doing so.

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

But are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid? [Referring to Gothic novels, fashionable in England at the beginning of the 19th century, but frowned upon in polite society.]

I really believe that readers are smart and sophisticated enough to realize that the author is not the narrator of his novels.

My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.

If I wanted to be in movies, I'd have gone into scriptwriting: the fact that I write novels should be a big hint about what I prefer to do!

Character is character and voice is voice, which translates nicely from writing novels to writing TV. But the process is different. You have a writer's room, people pitch you jokes and you collaborate.

I'm never going to be a Tom Clancy. And I wouldn't really want to be - not that I have anything against him, and I wish him continued success - because that's not why I'm writing novels. I'm doing it because I have to. I feel like I have to, anyway.

On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.

...when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our life's work.

Reading old travel books or novels set in faraway places, spinning globes, unfolding maps, playing world music, eating in ethnic restaurants, meeting friends in cafes . . . all these things are part of never-ending travel practice, not unlike doing scales on a piano, shooting free-throws, or meditating.

The possibility of the impossible, dreams and illusions, are the subject of my novels.

I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.

There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called "powerful" novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog.

I myself love getting cookbooks and novels that some congenial person has already tried and liked.

While I was drawn to the Renaissance, my first (unpublished) novels took place in modern times. When the subject of alchemy started creeping into my stories, an astute mentor observed that the bits about alchemy might fit better in another time frame. When I finally decided to weave the pieces about the medieval science into historical settings, a successful novel began to emerge. (And I dusted off that art history book, and put it to use once again.)

I'd like to think that my films are personal enough to exist without hearkening back to their respective novels.

Poorly written novels--no matter how pious and edifying the behavior of the characters--are not good in themselves and are therefore not really edifying.

The Florida in my novels is not as seedy as the real Florida. It's hard to stay ahead of the curve. Every time I write a scene that I think is the sickest thing I have ever dreamed up, it is surpassed by something that happens in real life.

We're all just animals. That's all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That's where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.

In Among the White Moon Faces, I wrote about my desire to be a writer as rooted in my obsessive hours of reading English novels and poetry. It was that spur, that desire, that pushed me to set aside love and marriage in my early twenties.

I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.

I have a scenario but almost always it's entwined with at least one person to begin with. Then I sort of expand from there and I'm thinking about books novels. I've got these scrolls of paper that I hang up in my office and this is my idea room, my nightmare factory, and I have a big title at the top of the scroll and on the left hand side I have these character sketches on the characters, and then once I figure out who they are I can figure out what they want and once I figure out what they want I'm able to put obstacles in the way of that desire, and that's where plot springs from.

To grasp organizational life as it is, read novels (!) .... It is my fervent belief that we will never design rational processes that "overcome" such irregularities-don't bother telling that to a consultant. Hence, we should embrace the real, nonrational, nonlinear world with vigor and glee-and develop enterprise and career strategies accordingly.

To tell you the truth, I'm not unhappy about it. I'm not even sure that I like the idea of adapting novels into films. It's very difficult to do, and it usually doesn't work. There are exceptions, but generally speaking, one feels disappointed with the result.