Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jojo Moyes

Rejection is part of the process, so you can't let it crush you. My first three novels never made it into publication, but my fourth, 'Sheltering Rain,' was translated into 11 languages.

Research is usually a policeman stopping a novel from progressing.

It'd be impossible to capture the feel of 'All Quiet on the Western Front' in a novel starring Mace Windu; 'All Quiet' is a tragic coming-of-age story.

Edmund White

I didn't get anything published until I was thirty-three, and yet I'd written five novels and six or seven plays. The plays, I should point out, were dreadful.

I wrote my first five horror novels while I was teaching.

Robin Hobb

I actually think that short stories transfer to film much better than novels do.

Billy Bob Thornton

I'm more influenced by novelists than I am by filmmakers.

Deborah Moggach

My first novel, 'You Must be Sisters,' was started in Pakistan. I've wrote several novels and a TV drama set or partly-set there.

Edward Norton

A lot of why I do something is just the novelty of the experience.

Barbara Pym

She had always been an unashamed reader of novels ...

Denis Diderot

Only God and some few rare geniuses can keep forging ahead into novelty.

Ezra Taft Benson

Many novels and modern publications are corrupters of morals or distorters of truth.

Alice Oswald

People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.

Alexander McCall Smith

With '44 Scotland Street' I found myself having to work out how a daily novel works, and it is completely different to a conventional novel.

Kurt Vonnegut

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

Laurence Housman

On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world.

Graham Swift

The novel that's contemporary in the sense of being wholly 'of now' is an impossibility, if only because novels may take years to write, so the 'now' with which they begin will be defunct by the time they're finished.

Tobias Wolff

And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.

A. S. Byatt

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

Rick Yancey

It's been a while since I've written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, 'Okay, now I'm going to write something for us old folks.' I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.

Aleksandar Hemon

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

Anthony Zuiker

This won't be a novelty stunt where he opens the show up and disappears.

We're not going to get them just because they're a novelty item. We have to be responsible with our budget.

For the novels I wrote before selling anything, I didn't outline much. I had a vague idea of the story.

Ian Mcewan

You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.

Irish novelist John Banville has a creepy, introverted imagination.

Alan Furst

Let me put it this way: I don't plan to retire. What would I do, become a brain surgeon? I mean, a brain surgeon can retire and write novels, but a novelist can't retire and do brain surgery - or at least he better not.

Alan Furst

Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that?

Ray Bradbury

In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.

Eleanor Catton

When I was writing 'The Luminaries,' I read a lot of crime novels because I wanted to figure out which ones made me go, 'Ah! I didn't know that was coming!'

Charles Palliser

To make it interesting and worth doing, writing a novel has to be a leap into the unknown. I have to be unsure if I can write it; otherwise, I won't want to.

Pearl Cleage

I didn't have a dream of being a press secretary, I had a dream of being a playwright; I had a dream of being a novelist and a poet.

Orhan Pamuk

I think novelists should be disciplined and self-imposed working hours. I work a lot, but I don't feel that I'm working. I always feel that there is a child in me, healthy, and I'm playing.