Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Ruth Rendell

There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.

Godfrey Gao

'The Mortal Instruments' is based on a series of novels by Cassandra Clare; it has been a New York Times bestseller, so it is pretty popular.

Robin Hobb

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

Research is usually a policeman stopping a novel from progressing.

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.

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.

Donna Leon

I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.

Don DeLillo

One connection I see between novelists and terrorists is that we both attempt to alter consciousness.

Don DeLillo

I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.

Don DeLillo

What terrorists gain, novelists lose.

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.

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.

Cory Doctorow

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

Anthony Zuiker

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

Curtis Sittenfeld

Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist.

Amos Oz

All my novels are rooted in their time and in their place.

Andre Maurois

Novelty, the most potent of all attractions, is also the most perishable.

Anne Enright

A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.

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.

Amos Oz

Almost without exception, my novels are rooted in Israel because that's the place I know well.