All Quotes

A noble soul and real poetic talent are almost always inseparable.
‐‐ Victor Hugo

A nobler example, because a less personal one, of the pinch of poverty, is when it prevents the accomplishment of some cherished scheme for the benefit of the human race.
‐‐ James Payn

A nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places.
‐‐ Isabelle Eberhardt

A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end.
‐‐ Chaim Potok

A non-frightening zombie is a lame zombie.
‐‐ Scott M. Gimple

A nonfiction author has to bring a platform with him - radio, a TV show or some kind of recognizable vehicle to help launch them. And the agent is really necessary to represent all of the business interests of the author.
‐‐ Larry Kirshbaum

A normal day of working in Burbank is 14 hours, sometimes more. On 'The Revenant' sometimes it was eight hours, but we were shooting only five. So they were short days, but they were very strenuous because of the weather. And it was very dark.
‐‐ Emmanuel Lubezki

A normal recession disrupts people's lives, but a long recession destroys them. You lose output, prosperity, family stability, self-esteem, and many other qualities on what looks to be a semi-permanent basis.
‐‐ Matthew Yglesias

A normal way that the American free market system has worked is that we have a process of unwinding. It's called bankruptcy. It doesn't mean, necessarily, that the industry is eclipsed or that it's gone. Often times, the phoenix rises out of the ashes.
‐‐ Michele Bachmann

A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.
‐‐ Eugene Ionesco

A note of caution: We can never achieve goals that envy sets for us. Looking at your friends and wishing you had what they had is a waste of precious energy. Because we are all unique, what makes another happy may do the opposite for you. That's why advice is nice but often disappointing when heeded.
‐‐ Marcus Buckingham

A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.
‐‐ Michael Morpurgo

A notorious network of violent Islamist hoodlums, concentrated in the rough-and-tumble district of Molenbeek in Brussels, has been operating in plain sight since the 1990s, planning, plotting and carrying out dozens of elaborate jihadi missions from Afghanistan to Algeria.
‐‐ Terry Glavin

A novel and its writer are inseparable: you are your books. A play's not like that at all. 'Abandonment's not mine - it's everyone's. I wanted it to be a co-operative thing because I was tired of that anal control that I have over novels.
‐‐ Kate Atkinson

A novel can be set in motion by an incident, a character, a location, a mood - by anything at all. Sometimes the stimulus can be an idea, which will rapidly clothe itself in character and incident. 'Foreign Bodies' came about through the contemplation of the contrast between post-second world war America and Europe.
‐‐ Cynthia Ozick

A novel can do something that films and TV usually can't - a glimpse inside the characters' heads. I write very tight third person point of view, so the reader is right behind the eyes of each character, seeing what they see and feeling what they feel.
‐‐ Karen Traviss

A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.
‐‐ Anthony Marra

A novel can grant humanity even to those who
‐‐ Anthony Marra

A novel can grant humanity even to those who act inhumanely, and by making men and women of monsters, it can offer not only a ground-level view of a particular conflict, but a descent into the substratum of human nature capable of the incomprehensible.
‐‐ Anthony Marra

A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
‐‐ Paul Theroux

A novel, even a social realist one, can't simply be a comprehensive rendering of what is. A novel requires a special angle or approach, whether in structure or language or theme, to justify itself.
‐‐ Chang-Rae Lee

A novel I read when I was about 17 or 18 - 'The World According to Garp,' by John Irving - really made me want to become a writer. The character of Garp is a novelist, and at the time, the whole lifestyle of being a writer was hugely appealing to me.
‐‐ John Niven

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.
‐‐ Salman Rushdie

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.
‐‐ Helen Dunmore

A novel is a big thing. It's difficult to hold the whole story in your mind, especially when you've finished a first draft and are still giddy from the flow of creative juices.
‐‐ David Macinnis Gill

A novel is a collision of ideas. Three or four threads may be floating around in the writer's consciousness, and at a single moment in time, these ideas collide and produce a novel.
‐‐ Anita Shreve

A novel is a conversation starter, and if the author isn't there for the after-party, both the writer and the reader are missing a lot.
‐‐ Maggie Stiefvater

A novel is a great act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess. From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.
‐‐ Pat Conroy

A novel is a journey into your own soul, and you seek there to discover those things that you share with all others.
‐‐ Richard Flanagan

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.
‐‐ Stendhal

A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.
‐‐ Kenneth Tynan

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.
‐‐ Fyodor Dostoevsky

A novel is about people.
‐‐ Judy Blume

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

A novel is, hopefully, the starting point of a conversation, one in which the author engages readers and asks that they see things from a different point of view than they might otherwise.
‐‐ Anne Fortier

A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.
‐‐ Dawn Powell

A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don't want to see how it was made.
‐‐ Harlan Coben

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.
‐‐ Jim Rohn

A novel is not a rant.
‐‐ Rachel Kushner

A novel is often a longer process in handling self-doubt.
‐‐ Robert Sheckley

A novel is too much of a commitment. I tend to peruse Twitter - I check to see if I had any mentions and read the latest messages.
‐‐ Kevin Nealon

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.
‐‐ Deborah Moggach

A novel makes it possible to understand not just events, but the people who control the events; not only their choices, but also their motives.
‐‐ David Frum

A novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, 'Clarissa' - that's not a novel; it's just a bunch of letters. But it isn't! Because it's organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.
‐‐ Romesh Gunesekera

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.
‐‐ Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

A novel, of course, is a fully self-contained work of art. You pick it up off the shelf, open it, and there it is - a whole universe waiting for you to enter. A screenplay is just a blueprint for making a movie. Until the movie is actually filmed, the script really means nothing.
‐‐ John Niven

A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.
‐‐ Dan Chaon

A novel's whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme.
‐‐ Diane Johnson

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.
‐‐ Hilary Mantel

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.
‐‐ Joyce Cary