Novel Quotes

Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.

I've seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn't occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me, so I don't feel like going back and dredging them up.

Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.

Comics are stories; they're like novels or anything else. So the first thing you have to do is become a good storyteller.

Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.

We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.

The 'Barnaby' books were always intended to be graphic novels.

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.

The photobook occupies that deep area between the novel and the film.

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market - it knows nothing about target markets.

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

Life's like a novel with the end ripped out.

I think you can tell, when you meet someone, whether they read novels or not. There is some little hollowness if they don't.

We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.

Read history, works of truth, not novels and romances

However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.

All of my novels are democracies.

I've read every one of Donald Goines' books. So as soon as I heard there was an opportunity for one of his novels to be turned into a movie, I jumped at the opportunity.

I read novels but I also read the Bible. And study it, you know? And the more I learn, the more excited I get.

I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.

The ordinariness of living to be old is too novel a thing to appreciate.

The devil is always discovering something novel against the truth.

Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote.

Any man's life, told truly, is a novel.

A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.

I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read.

A writer should bury his thoughts deep and convey them through the characters in his novel.

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

There're no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels, and then I read them again, and it's the best thing.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

Life is not like a novel, but a novel can be like life. The best ones always are.

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

History is a novel for which the people is the author.

A novel is a book with a lot of pages.

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.

Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don't know what the hell is going on.

The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.

I do not know what to say in a case so surprising, so unlooked for and so novel.

I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'

I never plan my novels because if I know what is going to happen, it bores me rigid. I let the story tell itself.

If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it.

We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works

I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.

Let nothing novel be introduced!

A Marxist has never written a good novel.