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 certainly think we're going to see more and more graphic novels and more illustrated novels.

Do you write novels?" I said. "Novels, Lord no," she said. "I can't even stay married.

I think overtly political novels - those that never transcend or contest their author's conscious intentions and prejudices - are problematic. This is not just true of the innumerable unread books in the socialist realist tradition, but also of novels that carry the burden of conservative ideologies, like Guerrillas, Naipaul's worst book, where the author's disgust for a certain kind of black activist and white liberal is overpowering.

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.

A lot of Chinese martial arts films were based on Chinese martial arts novels. And these novels created a world of putting history, calligraphy, and martial arts into one.

I am delighted if people find that kind of sustenance in novels, but perhaps it's because they don't read the Scripture that they are comparing it to, which would perhaps provide deeper sustenance than many contemporary novels.

The Neapolitan novels have a lot of references to things outside, to things of the world, to culture, politics, the city of Naples. People have mentioned that Naples is like a character in the novels.

I'd probably still be a financial journalist now if it weren't for writing novels. Mmm. Fun! I'm much happier writing novels!

My only passions were books and music. As you might guess, I led a lonely life… Not that I knew what I wanted in life - I didn’t. I loved reading novels to distraction, but didn’t write well enough to be a novelist; being an editor or a critic was out, too, since my tastes ran to the extremes. Novels should be for pure personal enjoyment, I decided, not part of your work or study. That’s why I didn’t study literature

Fiction allows us to see the world from the point of view of someone else and there has been quite a lot of neurological research that shows reading novels is actually good for you. It embeds you in society and makes you think about other people. People are certainly better at all sorts of things if they can hold a novel in their heads. It is quite a skill, but if you can't do it then you're missing out on something in life. I think you can tell, when you meet someone, whether they read novels or not. There is some little hollowness if they don't.

In the end, of course, all novelists will be judged by their novels, but let's not forget that we will also need new ways of assessing the latter. There are people who will continue to write nineteenth-century novels in the early twenty-first, and even win major prizes for them, but that's not very interesting, intellectually or emotionally.

Until you can become accountable to yourself and only yourself, you're probably not going to live a fully vital life. So much of literature is about accountability. The moral issues in most novels are about people becoming responsible for their own behaviour. One of the forces against being responsible for your own behaviour is the force of the past, in the way that the past tries to form you.

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.

I write in order to understand the images. Being what my agent . . . somewhat ruefully calls a language playwright, is problematic because in production, you have to make the language lift off the page. But a good actor can turn it into human speech. I err sometimes toward having such a compound of images that if an actor lands heavily on each one, you never pull through to a larger idea. That's a problem for the audience. But I come to playwriting from the visual world - I used to be a painter. I also really love novels and that use of language. But it's tricky to ask that of the theatre.

Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks.

A news junkie, I read, daily, the 'Times/Sunday Times,' the 'Guardian/Observer,' 'Mail,' and the 'Argus' - both to keep up with crime in Brighton, where I set my novels, and because I think it is vital to support local papers - they provide a unique accountability for councils, emergency services and so much else, and are dangerously undervalued.

I usually have more than one thing I'm working on at once - I've been working on three different novels. When I get stuck on one, I hop back and forth.

I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.

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

In most conventional novels, God is not allowed to be nuts. Nor are nuts allowed to be God.

I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

Getting 10,000 listeners for a free podcast novel is a lot easier than selling 10,000 hardcover novels at $25 a pop.

I can remember the times when I started including humor in novels that were suspenseful. I was told you can't do that because you can't keep the audience in suspense if they're laughing. My attitude was, if the character has a sense of humor, then that makes the character more real because that's how we deal with the vicissitudes of life, we deal with it through humor.

The most obvious difference between writing novels and memoirs is that my memoirs are true stories, and explore certain experiences I've lived, and thus operate within the boundaries of memory and fact.

I don't write romance novels.

I read what I like to write: romantic suspense. I also love thrillers and novels of suspense, but I can't handle extreme violence and torture.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books ... I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life.

Movies, novels, TV shows - these are the water fountains of today. We thirst for stories which speak to us by representing us, but we go to the water fountains in the centre of town looking for that, and we're turned away, sent to the ghetto.

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also - if this isn't too grand a word - our tragedy.

The truth about being a writer is you do not choose the stories you tell, but stories choose you. You do not choose, therefore, characters either. Novels are like dreams you dream with your eyes open; they are books which appear in your head with the same apparent immediateness as they appear in your dreams at night. A writer always writes their obsessions and the truth is that all throughout life we end up writing the same thing in different ways.

Well, I kind of approach both of them similarly in (that) I always see it as a movie first because that's my background. Cindy Kelley, who has been my writing partner on my novels, she works more on the prose side and the description side of the storytelling because, obviously, there's a lot more of that in a novel than in a screenplay. You only have up to 120 pages in a screenplay.

almost all American writers tend to overwrite, to tell too much. I get the disillusioned feeling that novels, today, are sold by the pound, like groceries. It actually takes a great deal more discipline to be able to leave out rather than to throw in everything. This means that you have to say in one sentence precisely what you mean, instead of saying sort of what you kind of mean in hundreds of sentences and hoping the sum total will add up.

I sometimes think it ironic for an ex-seaman, longshoreman, truck driver, policeman, bus driver, etc... to find success writing children's novels.

Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them-almost all women; a vast number of clever, hardheaded men.

Novels should be judged rigorously. Either a book works or it doesn't. The fact that something is true in the real world should not lend authority to it in fiction.

Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.

The idea of the writer who writes nineteen novels, with various ups and downs and levels of experimentation, isn't around so much now. There's a focus, I think, on fewer books, with more pressure on each book to succeed. With that there comes, I think, a certain pressure towards shapeliness in fiction. Towards neatness. And I think writers feel that, and it can effect how they write.

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

I would only read the novels that people classify as 'beach books' if I were being held prisoner and the only alternative was the 'Book of Mormon.'

There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.

The novels were all right for a while until she found out that most of them were like the movies - all about the pretty ones who really own the world.

I started out in life as a poet, I was only writing poetry all through my 20s, it wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them.

When I write a book I'm always questioning the project as a whole. I always feel I might have to just throw it away and forget about it, and I've done that with novels I've started and worked on for a long time. It's an option I need in order to write freely.

I started to write a series of fantasy novels when I was eleven. I have never taken anything artistic as seriously; since then, writing has felt like an attempt to get back there, to my bedroom, my maps, those races and languages and runes.

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.)

In America they have to know just what you are-- novelist, poet, playwright... Well, I've been all of them... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.

People assume that science is a very cold sort of profession, whereas writing novels is a warm and fuzzy intuitive thing. But in fact, they are not at all different.