Quotes on Novel

When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.

I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.

Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.

Listen closely. There’s a remote possibility that you might learn something: First, I don’t give a damn if my work is commercial or not…I’m the writer. If what I write is good, then people will read it. That’s why literature exists. An author puts his heart and guts on the page. For your information, a good novel can change the world. Keep that in mind before you attempt to sit down at a typewriter. Never waste time on something you don’t believe in yourself.

Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss!

Life is God's novel. Let him write it.

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

Most contemporary novels are not really "written." They obtain what reality they have largely from an accurate rendering of the noises that human beings currently make in their daily simple needs of communication; and what part of a novel is not composed of these noises consists of a prose which is no more alive than that of a competent newspaper writer or government official. A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel-reader is not prepared to give.

Creativity is generating ideas that are novel and useful. I define originals as people who go beyond dreaming up the ideas and take initiative to make their visions a reality.

Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.

After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I'd much rather listen always.

If you're writing a detective novel or horror or sci-fi, you want to expand or reinvigorate the genre in your own little way.

I often use nameless places in my work as a way of allowing the readers to create more of the novel and to make it potentially about their experiences, what they know, a city that they have perhaps seen on television.

Browse Amazon reviews, and you'll see a surprising number of readers who believe one novel can summarize a country, its culture, and its people.

I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business. The day you die.

Believe me, when I say; There are no two powers That command the soul. One is God The other is the tide. -Anon From the novel Abarat

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.

The process of writing a novel is like taking a journey by boat. You have to continually set yourself on course. If you get distracted or allow yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. It's not like highly defined train tracks or a highway; this is a path that you are creating discovering. The journey is your narrative. Keep to it and there will be a tale told.

By asking a novel question that you don't know the answer to, you discover whether you can formulate a way of finding the answer, and you stretch your own mind, and very often you learn something new.

All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.

When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.