Quotes on Novel

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don't tell anybody what I'm doing. I'm living in my private world. And it's a great sensation.

I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.

If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).

I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.

If you invent something, you're doing a creative act. It's like writing a novel or composing music. You put your heart and soul into it, and money. It's years of your life, it's your house remortgaged, huge emotional investment and financial investment.

That seems to be the definition of 'novel' for me: a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.

Graphic novels are not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw, it seems a shame to choose one. I think it's better to do both.

I don't like 'graphic novel.' It's a word that publishers created for the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad. Comics is just a way of narrating - it's just a media type.

What, then, shall a Catholic Christian do ... if some novel contagion attempt to infect no longer a small part of the Church alone but the whole Church alike? He shall then see to it that he cleave unto antiquity, which is now utterly incapable of being seduced by any craft or novelty.

Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.

One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.

A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

This is what I love about novels - both reading them and writing them. They jump into the abyss to be with you where you are.

Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.

A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination.

A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.