All Quotes

Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.
‐‐ Jojo Moyes

Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver.
‐‐ J. G. Ballard

Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.
‐‐ Martin Amis

Novelists want to be published and need a publisher to decide to print 20,000 copies. So you need to entertain on some level. I want to reach out and connect.
‐‐ Paolo Bacigalupi

Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.
‐‐ Jonathan Dee

Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
‐‐ Joan Didion

Novels are longer than life.
‐‐ Natalie Clifford Barney

Novels are make-believe and play for adults.
‐‐ Mohsin Hamid

Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I'm not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.
‐‐ Dani Shapiro

Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.
‐‐ Zadie Smith

Novels are nothing but evolution, but there does come a point when that stops, and the story is sealed within the pages of the book. That doesn't happen with a play. Even performances are different every night.
‐‐ Sarah Waters

Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.
‐‐ Charles Stross

Novels are pirated all the time, but it's hard to imagine that you're at work and you open up the attachment that your brother sent you and it's the new Phillip Roth novel.
‐‐ Adam Mansbach

Novels are so much unrulier and more stressful to write. A short story can last two pages and then it's over, and that's kind of a relief. I really like balancing the two.
‐‐ Aimee Bender

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.
‐‐ Arundhati Roy

Novels are the means by which we can escape the moment we are imprisoned in, but at the same time, the roots of a novel are in the world in which it is written. We write, and we read, to understand the world we live in.
‐‐ Romesh Gunesekera

Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.
‐‐ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Novels aren't pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline. A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it's a good starting place for me.
‐‐ Alan Lightman

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.
‐‐ Sue Monk Kidd

Novels by British writers are among my favorites because our family has enjoyed travel in England and because they are written with an economy of words as if they were written with a pen instead of a computer. Penelope Fitzgerald is a favorite.
‐‐ Beverly Cleary

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.
‐‐ Maria Semple

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.
‐‐ Cory Doctorow

Novels give you the opportunity to create a whole world. Because you create people, you make them talk... You decide who they are, whether they live or die. It's the closest thing to feeling like a god that you can come to.
‐‐ Gioconda Belli

Novels have much more space than short stories, which gives you more leeway with the number of characters you can include. Even 'furniture' characters can be described and given speaking parts to develop background or atmosphere.
‐‐ Nancy Kress

Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.
‐‐ Graham Swift

Novels often have leisurely openings; a TV drama needs an arresting opening.
‐‐ Andrew Davies

Novels taught me that history is dramatic. I wanted my students to know that, too.
‐‐ Laura Amy Schlitz

Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up.
‐‐ Hilary Mantel

Novels tend to end as the Paternoster begins: with the kingdom of God on earth.
‐‐ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.
‐‐ Joyce Carol Oates

Novels will remain my meat and potatoes, what sustain me imaginatively.
‐‐ Benjamin Percy

Novels written by university professors and set in the groves of academe are far more rigidly predictable than anything but the most routine science fiction novel, but they have escaped the stigma of being labeled as genre.
‐‐ John Clute

Novelty is adaptive when things are changing and you need to adapt yourself. Tradition is essential to lay down the stability to raise families and form cohesive social groups.
‐‐ Tim Jackson

Novelty is always welcome but talking pictures are just a fad.
‐‐ Irving Thalberg

Novelty is the great parent of pleasure.
‐‐ Robert South

Novelty is the universal cry - novelty by hook or by crook! It is an exceedingly common mania among people of inordinate wealth to exact incessantly new or so-called new dishes.
‐‐ Auguste Escoffier

November 11, 1802, I arrived at Judge Patterson's at Lisle. This respectable family treated me with every mark of distinction and friendship, and likewise all the people did the same. I really want for words to express my gratitude.
‐‐ Deborah Sampson

November is auspicious in so many parts of the country: the rice harvest is already in, the weather starts to cool, and the festive glow which precedes Christmas has began to brighten the landscape.
‐‐ F. Sionil Jose

November is Hip-Hop History Month, where we give celebration to what hip hop has done to bring together people of the world, people of all nationalities, young people, all the political systems and politicians on the planet.
‐‐ Afrika Bambaataa

November is Jewish book month, so Jewish Community Centers all around the country have book fairs where they invite authors and sell books in advance of the holidays.
‐‐ Anita Diament

Now '90210' is returning with an all-new cast of slightly more plausible teens. I'll be honest: I wish the old cast was back. Ideally, this spin-off would be an Ice Storm-esque exploration of the West Beverly gang's bleak adult lives.
‐‐ Diablo Cody

Now a cholera epidemic was sweeping through Southeast Asia and south Asia in the early 1970s, so I started medical school and I joined a laboratory to work on this.
‐‐ Peter Agre

Now a 'funnyman' can get a laugh before opening his mouth - looking funny. Lou Costello was one of your great funnymen. Harry Langdon, Larry Semon; they were all funnymen - they looked funny. W.C. Fields was never a comedian. Slim Summerville was a comedian, yet looked funny. Now if you have both attributes, you are in good shape.
‐‐ Milton Berle

Now a great debate has been born. The thesis is Democratic Socialism. The antithesis is free-market capitalism. The Obama Democrats have posed the challenge. It is now up to the Republicans to pick it up and fight along these lines.
‐‐ Dick Morris

Now, a leader must cause things to happen and lives to be affected. Something should move and change. He must see that those under him do not fail. But it should be done in the Lord's way.
‐‐ James E. Faust

Now a lot has changed and I can separate a lot of things.
‐‐ Jennifer Capriati

Now, a lot of people have given up on government. And if you're one of those people, I would ask that you reconsider, because things are changing. Politics is not changing; government is changing.
‐‐ Jennifer Pahlka

Now, a lot of what we are doing right now, quite frankly, is because of what happened on Christmas. Many of the things were kind of in the works. We were already planning, for example, the purchase and deployment of advanced imaging technology. You call them body scanners. We call them AITs (Advanced Imaging Technologies).
‐‐ Janet Napolitano

Now a movie goes out to two, three thousand theaters and by Friday night at 10 o'clock they know if you are in or out. That desperate competition is, I think, horrendous. It's awful.
‐‐ Mark Rydell