Home / Topics / Novel Quotes

Novel Quotes

Browse 6108 quotes about Novel.

Novel Quotes

“While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them. And there was a period when I read many of them. I absorbed the form, and I liked it, it was a good one, mostly the hard-boiled school, you know, Chandler, Hammett, and their heirs. That was the direction that interested me most.”

Knows Writing Hard School Form Reading Novel Periods Detectives Heirs Writing Poems

Author:Paul Auster

“After the initial critical learning period of youth is over, the areas of the brain that need to be 'turned on' to allow enhanced, long lasting learning can only be activated when something important, surprising, or novel occurs, or if we make the effort to pay close attention.”

Ifs Needs Long Important Effort Pay Attention Brain Knowledge Novel Youth Periods Areas Critical Lasting Surprising Initials Long Lasting

Author:Norman Doidge

“I write what I want to write. Period. I don't write novels-for-hire using media tie-in characters, I don't write suspense novels or thrillers. I write horror. And if no one wants to buy my books, I'll just keep writing them until they do sell--and get a job at Taco Bell in the meantime.”

Ifs Want Writing Book Character Jobs Novel Media Periods Horror Sells Suspense Ties Bells Thrillers Using Me Tacos Taco Bell Suspense Novels

Author:Bentley Little

“Deep attention, the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities, is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times. Hyper attention is characterized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom.”

“It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.”

People Giving States Nations Justice Novel Mankind Example Periods Worthy Enlightened Benevolence Exalted Great Nations Farewell Address Magnanimous

Book:Washington's Farewell Address to the People of the United States of America

Source: Washington's Farewell Address to the People of the United States of America

“This is, if not a lifetime process, it's awfully close to it. The writer broadens, becomes deeper, becomes more observant, becomes more tempered, becomes much wiser over a period time passing. It is not something that is injected into him by a needle. It is not something that comes on a wave of flashing, explosive light one night and say, 'Huzzah! Eureka! I've got it!' and then proceeds to write the great American novel in eleven days. It doesn't work that way. It's a long, tedious, tough, frustrating process, but never, ever be put aside by the fact that it's hard.”

“A lot of period pieces we see are adaptations of novels - we always know the story.”

Knows Stories Novel Pieces Periods Adaptation

Author:Joanne Froggatt

“Over a four-month period, I sat down and wrote every day. And then there was a novel, and all of a sudden, there were agents and offers.”

Novel Four Months Periods Offers Down And Agents Sat

Author:Melissa Marr

“I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted. When I cease to be carried along, when I no longer feel as though I were taking down dictation, I stop.”

Feels Should Writing Novel Creative Periods Cease Suits Interrupted Dictation

Author:Francois Mauriac

“Usually, ordinary histories don't get the emotional feel of a period. That's what a novel can do.”

Feels Can Do Novel Emotional Periods Ordinary

Author:Alix Kates Shulman

“I'm pretty hardcore. I stick exactly to what I'm doing. So I write a novel in one period, and then I'll write stories in another period. I only work on one thing at once, because I'm afraid that I wouldn't finish what I'd started.”

Writing Stories Novel One Thing Periods Sticks Hardcore

Author:T.C. Boyle

“Jonathan Coe's genial, likeable novel can only be described as a kind of lit-prog-rock concept album... Coe recreates the period with such loving accuracy that I frankly suspect him of having planted a secret microphone in the tin Oxford Mathematical Instruments box I carried around in my school days... As always with Jonathan Coe, the sheer intelligent good nature that suffuses his work makes it a pleasure to read.”

“[The movies] make the sort of comment only a novel can make, an allusion to the world in which people live, the psychological and economic motivations, the influences of the period in which they lived.”

People World Motivation Novel Influence Economic Periods Psychological Comment Allusion

Author:Orson Welles

“Because I had grown up with Jane Austen novels and period dramas, I was very familiar with that period and that world.”

World Novel Periods Drama Familiar Jane Austen Jane Austen Novel

Author:Gugu Mbatha-Raw

“I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, "Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry."”

Ifs Way Writing Wells Said Force Process Answers Novel Students Mines Periods Novelists Jane Bookstores Questions And Answers Smiley

Author:Edward Hirsch

“It's true that the young who now flock to script writing, or producing and directing, to fulfill the demands of these new devices would, in an earlier period, have been submitting to magazines and working on their first novels. But even in the midst of all these "digital products," the wonder of it is that there are still so many young writers who continue to believe in the venerable print novel as the corridor to fame and fortune.”

Writing Firsts Believe Has Beens Stills Young Wonder Novel Products Periods Fame Demand Fortune Scripts Magazines Digital Midst Devices Print Flocks Corridors Young Writers

Author:Cynthia Ozick