Quotes on Novel

St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.

They take the circuits out of people’s brains that make it possible for them to think for themselves. Their world is like the one that George Orwell depicted in his novel. I’m sure you realize that there are plenty of people who are looking for exactly that kind of brain death. It makes life a lot easier. You don’t have to think about difficult things, just shut up and do what your superiors tell you to do.

I am careful about fiction. A novel is not a tract or an essay. If I want to write about land reforms, or Hindu-Muslim relations, or position of women, I can do it as it affects my characters as in 'A Suitable Boy.' I could only write about issues specifically through essays. But I'll do that only if I have something worthwhile to say.

Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.

The great thing about using the past is that it gives you the most colossal freedom to invent. The research is necessary, of course, but no one writes a novel to dramatically illustrate what everybody already knows.

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

I work very deliberately, with a plan. But sometimes I come to a point that I planned as the end and it needs softening. Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep - it can't be done abruptly.

I think each time you start a story or novel or whatever, you are absolutely at the bottom of the ladder all over again. It doesn't matter what you've done before.

I can't read novels while I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in.

It is a novel kind of supremacy, the best that life can offer, to have as servants by skill those who by nature are our masters.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

I am still bowled over by this great young adult novel by David Levithan called 'Every Day,' which is about a character with no gender or body who wakes up every day in the body of a different person. It's a really impressive execution of a really great premise.

I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.

A novel takes the courage of a marathon runner, and as long as you have to run, you might as well be a winning marathon runner. Serendipity and blind faith faith in yourself won't hurt a thing. All the bastards in the world will snicker and sneer because they haven't the talent to zip up their flies by themselves. To hell with them, particularly the critics. Stand in there, son, no matter how badly you are battered and hurt.

A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.

As to the number of novels I've abandoned... I shudder to think. I have thrown away five completed novels, and that's a gruesome enough figure. But not necessarily a waste of effort.

In real life, coincidences happen all the time. In novels, they are leapt upon with fury.

You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire - that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realise, no, it's just this book.

The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.

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.

Keep on the lookout for novel ideas that others have used successfully. Your idea has to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you're working on.