Quotes & Sayings About A Great Novel

Introducing a great artist, Alexander Wainwright in THe Fate of Pryde.

In his landscapes, Alex expresses the totality of everything in the universe. At the same time, within each leaf, each drop of water or human hair, he conveys a light or glow, which seems to come - how shall I put this - from another dimension. And each brushstroke contains every ounce of his own life and vitality.

From The Fate of Pryde, the second in The Trilogy of Remembrance.

Enter the giveaway to win one of ten personalized, autographed copies of this novel starting July 31st to August 31st. You can sample the first fifty pages of it at my page. — Mary E. Martin

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil. — Azar Nafisi

People didn't know certain things about me, which ... I was out of creative writing class in school, Syracuse University; had a B.A. in English and wanted to write the great American novel but I also loved rock and roll. I was in bar bands all through college, playing fraternities and have to know all the songs in the top 10. That kind of thing. — Lou Reed

It was a pity that most people didn't actually go to libraries anymore, not when they could sit in the comfort of their own quarters and access files electronically. Want to read the new hot interstellar caper novel, or the latest issue of Beings holozine? Input the name, touch a control, and zip - it's in your datapad. . . .
There were, of course, old-fashioned beings who would still actually trundle down to where the files were. On some worlds the most ancient libraries kept books - actual bound volumes of printed matter - lined up neatly on shelves, and readers would walk the aisles, take a volume down, sniff the musty-dusty odor of it, and then carry it to a table to leisurely peruse.
There weren't many of those readers left, and they were growing rarer all the time . . . But there were some who still knew how to actually turn a page - and for those who were willing to do so, the rewards could be great indeed. — Michael Reaves And Steve Perry

Atticus Lish is a true original and this is a tremendous book, relentless, moving, written in prose of marvelous integrity. Now that America and the novel are dead, I hope we can have more great American novels as alive as this one. — Sam Lipsyte

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing. — James Salter

People think that they will sit down and produce the great American novel in one sitting. It doesn't work that way. This is a very patient and meticulous work, and you have to do it with joy and love for the process, not for the outcome. — Isabel Allende

As Narrative (Novel, Passion), love is a story which is accomplished, in the sacred sense of the word: it is a program which must be completed. For me, on the contrary, this story has already taken place; for what is event is exclusively the delight of which I have been the object and whose aftereffects I repeat (and fail to achieve). Enamoration is a drama, if we restore to this word the archaic meaning Nietzsche gives it: "Ancient drama envisioned great declamatory scenes, which excluded action (action took place before or behind the stage)." Amorous seduction (a pure hypnotic moment) takes place before discourse and behind the proscenium of consciousness: the amorous "event" is of a hieratic order: it is my own local legend, my little sacred history that I declaim to myself, and this declamation of a fait accompli (frozen, embalmed, removed from any praxis) is the lover's discourse. — Roland Barthes

Reading a great novel gives the same feeling you have when you fall in love. — Luigina Sgarro

I went into journalism in a grandiose way. I thought maybe I'd do a little journalism whilst I write the great novel of all time you see
one has to keep oneself afloat. — Neal Ascherson

Of course I planned to write the Great American Novel; that lasted about a week, at which point I decided I had nothing to say that could possibly qualify. So I wrote a romance instead. — Jasmine Cresswell

But the reason that writers like Harlan and Lee don't outline is that they enjoy the serendipity, the surprises that arise when they're not constricted by the steel girdle of an outline. And I get that too. Some of the best plot twists in my work have been ones that I didn't plan on, including the ending to PARANOIA. One of the great pleasures of writing fiction is living in the story so that you "experience" it the way your characters do. — Joseph Finder

I think the novel is a wonder....it has vitality to an extraordinary degree, and glamour, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality....And as for the sheer writing, it's astonishing. [About The Great Gatsby] — Maxwell Perkins

I never tried to ingratiate myself with great writers. When a great writer has nothing to say, he does something else, like chopping firewood. A great writer doesn't try to find something to write about, he only writes when he has to. I was no great writer. I've always had the need to unload my thoughts, and so had to live with a kind of mental incontinence, but I've never felt forced to write a novel. Nor, for that matter, have I ever chopped firewood. — Jostein Gaarder

Writing a successful novel is a great challenge, and you have to be a bit of a poet, a bit of a critic, a bit of a dramatist, a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a social scientist, to pull it off. — Anis Shivani

[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job ... into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen. — Milan Kundera

It's an eclectic film and I think we served the novel really well. And we had a great cast who worked for free. Everyone read it and said, I'm in, from Nick [Nolte] to Albert [Finney] to Omar [Epps] to Barbara [Hershey]. We really had fun and shot it in a very short time. I think the subject matter is more topical today, more to the point, than it was 30 years ago, when it concerned the Vietnam War. — Bruce Willis

Before 1975, if you knew the name Howard Sackler it was because he was the author behind the 1969 Broadway play The Great White Hope, which won Sackler the Tony and New York Drama Critics Circle award as the year's Best Play as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A friend of film producer David Brown, Sackler accepted the offer to do a re-write on Jaws author Peter Benchley's script for the film version of his novel. Sackler's main contribution to the story was the back story that the shark fisherman, Quint, derived his hatred for sharks from having survived the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis in July of 1945 (in the film, Quint errantly states the date as "June the 29th, 1945"). — Louis R. Pisano

I'm asked all the time, 'Doesn't it feel great to finish the novel?' And the answer to that is, 'No.' It's sort of a loss to stop a 10-year project, which is an imaginary project in the sense that it's a work of my imagination. — Bob Shacochis

Every page of a great novel should be crafted like a beautiful melody, to linger on long after the music stops playing. — Johnny Flora

'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write. — John Irving

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it. — Herman Melville

A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz.
Which is partly the point. Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. — Chinua Achebe

Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed. — Neil Gaiman

It was possible to explore the 'great tradition' of the English novel and believe that in doing so you were addressing questions of fundamental value
questions which were of vital relevance to the lives of men and women wasted in fruitless labour in the factories of industrial capitalism. But it was also conceivable that you were destructively cutting yourself off from such men and women, who might be a little slow to recognize how a poetic enjambement enacted a movement of physical balancing. — Terry Eagleton

A scrupulous man will never produce a great novel. — Julien Green

Great. My life has suddenly become a young-adult novel. — R.J. Gonzales

Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry. — Chad Harbach

If a poem is concentrated, a closed fist, then a novel is relaxed and expansive, an open hand: it has roads, detours, destinations; a heart line, a head line; morals and money come into it. Where the fist excludes and stuns, the open hand can touch and encompass a great deal in its travels. — Sylvia Plath

A great work must be novel without being far-fetched, frequently sublime, but always natural. The author must know the human heart, and how to make it speak; he must be a poet, without letting any of his characters speak like poets; and he must be a master of his language, using it purely and harmoniously and not letting the rhyme interfere with the sense. — Voltaire

For me, where genre ends and literature begins doesn't matter. What matters is whether a given novel hits me with high impact. If it does, it probably is fulfilling the purpose of fiction. It has drawn me into a story world, held me captive, taken me on a journey with characters like none I've ever met, revealed truths I've somehow always known and insights that rock my brain. It's filled me with awe, which is to say it's made me see the familiar in a wholly new way and made the unfamiliar a foundational part of me. It both entertains and matters. It both captures our age and becomes timelessly great. It does all that with the sturdy tools of story and the flair of narrative art. — Donald Maass

Bet on technical insights that help solve a big problem in a novel way, optimize for scale, not for revenue, and let great products grow the market for everyone. — Eric Schmidt

Approaching my second novel was, admittedly, a bit of a struggle. But having an amazing team at Atheneum Books, especially my very patient, brilliant editor Namrata Tripathi, took a stressful situation and turned it into a really great learning experience for me. — John Corey Whaley

although we move forward through a story, the entire story is already complete - we hold it in our hands. In this sense, fiction, the great life-giver, also kills, not just because people often die in novels and stories but, more important, because, even if they don't die, they have already happened. Fictional form is always a kind of death, in the way that Blanchot described actual life. "Was. We say he is, then suddenly he was, this terrible was." That is the narrator of Thomas Bernhard's novel "The Loser," describing his friend Wertheimer, who has committed suicide. But it might also describe the tense in which we encounter most fictional lives: we say, "She was," not "She is." He left the house, she rubbed her neck, she put down her book and went to sleep. — James Wood

Whenever I come across someone speaking negatively about escapism or looking down on those who seek a temporary escape from this world, I can't help but look at them as absolute fools. To deny someone the right to find temporary peace in escapism is to deny human nature itself as well as all the benefits of such a beautiful concept. Often times, these instances show them saying that "it'll only make things worse" or "it's not gonna change anything", except, a lot of times, that's not the case at all. How many times has someone shut themselves away from the world by listening to a song they hold dear only to return more ready to face the world than before, how many times has someone learned something about themselves through the fictional events of a novel that they wouldn't have other wise, how many times has society experienced great change through people who dreamed of making the world a better place, only to eventually make those dreams into a reality. — Justin Allen

One of my big revelations was that nobody cares whether you write your novel or not. They want you to be happy. Your parents want you to have health insurance. Your friends want you to be a good friend. But everyone's thinking about their own problems and nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, 'Boy, I sure hope Sam finishes that chapter and gets one step closer to his dream of being a working writer.' Nobody does that. If you want to write, it has to come from you. If you don't want to write, that's great. Go do something else. That was a very liberating moment for me. — Sam Lipsyte

Schopenhauer wrote that to desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake. He was correct. — Michael LaRocca

The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation. — James Buchan

I never really understood that massive collaboration involving hundreds of people is what makes movies possible, and it's also why I would agree that curiosity is not the most important human trait; the urge to collaborate is. Heck ... only we have the ability to cooperate to make like online communities and space telescopes and imaginariums and movies. So the great thrill of this whole experience [my novel being made into a movie] for me was ..seeing humanity do what it's best at, which ultimately is not competing but cooperating. — John Green

I am still bowled over by this great young adult novel by David Levithan called 'Every Day,' which is about a character with no gender or body who wakes up every day in the body of a different person. It's a really impressive execution of a really great premise. — John Green

I have always been considered a bit of an outsider, and a general failure at everything I put my hand towards. In fact, you might even go so far as to say that I'm a lesser being of great insignificance! I state this because, when writing a story, you should always start the first line off with at least one basic truth.
-First lines from the novel Sukiyaki — Andrew James Pritchard

Before David McCullough went on to fame, fortune, and literary awards with books like John Adams and Mornings on Horseback, he wrote a tragic and riveting account of the great 1889 flood in Pennsylvania, The Johnstown Flood. Kathleen Cambor describes the same disaster in a novel, In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden. — Nancy Pearl

I developed a mania for Fitzgerald - by the time I'd graduated from high school I'd read everything he'd written. I started with 'The Great Gatsby' and moved on to 'Tender Is the Night,' which just swept me away. Then I read 'This Side of Paradise,' his novel about Princeton - I literally slept with that book under my pillow for two years. — A. Scott Berg

All that's needed now is a great novel that will capture the imagination of the public - move them, enrage them, thrill them, terrify them, scandalize them. A story that will seize them by the hand and lead them into the streets where they've never dared set foot, a tale that throws back the sheets from acts never shown and voices never heard. A tale that fearlessly points the finger at those who are to blame ... — Michael Farber

Lonesome Dove is a great book that had the rare fortune of being made into a great movie. And now, through Bill Wittliff's photographs, we have a third generation of Lonesome Dove artistry. The same creative power and conviction that allowed Larry McMurtry to transform a workaday scenario for an unproduced screenplay into one of the greatest novels of our time, and that transformed that novel into the greatest western movie ever made, are on display in this collection. A Book of Photographs from Lonesome Dove is a masterpiece begot by a masterpiece begot by a masterpiece. — Stephen Harrigan

I even read aloud the part of the novel I had rewritten, which is about as low as a writer can get and much more dangerous for him than glacier skiing unroped before the full winter snowfall has set over the crevices.
When they said, 'It's great, Ernest. Truly, it's great. You cannot know the thing it has, I wagged my tail in pleasure and plunged into the fiesta concept of life to see if I could not bring some attractive stick back, instead of thinking, 'If these bastards like it what is wrong with it?' That was what I would think if I had been functioning as a professional although, if I had been functioning as a professional, I would never have read it to them. — Ernest Hemingway,

This book is so huge, that the mythology took many months to create. There are literally hundreds of characters , and many different worlds described in great detail. It's not the sort of thing that you can simply dash off. I hand-write everything. Now, I've done three drafts on Imajica, which comes to about 14,000 pages. When you're working on a novel, you really must give your life over to the project. This is my eleventh book, and I'm fortunate to know that the audience is there for it. I'm not just writing in the dark. — Clive Barker

John Green has written a powerful novel - one that plunges headlong into the labyrinth of life, love, and the mysteries of being human. This is a book that will touch your life, so don't read it sitting down. Stand up, and take a step into the Great Perhaps. — KL Going

With undead armies, psychotic angels and exploding airships, Scar Night is a gripping, ripping yarn which rattles along at a great pace. Tether all that to the knock-out image at the heart of the novel-Deepgate, a Gothic city built on a network of chains over a great abyss-and you have urban fantasy at its best. — Hal Duncan

Poison Pill is a great reading. The novel ranges from Russian oligarchs to the American worlds of drug research and the equity markets, all of it in a mode of high suspense. — Scott Turow

Many great authors of the 19th century wrote under conditions of strict censorship. The great thing about the art of writing a novel, is that you can write about anything. All you have to say is that it's fiction. — Orhan Pamuk

Sometimes I say that writing a novel is the same as constructing a chair: a person must be able to sit in it, to be balanced on it. If I can produce a great chair, even better. But above all I have to make sure that it has four stable feet. — Jose Saramago

I freely admit that I took great license in writing 'The Dark Queen,' more so than my other historical romance novels. This is largely because I viewed the book as a fantasy novel as much as an historical. I do feel that writers should strive for as much accuracy as possible but, in the end, remember that we are writing fiction. — Susan Carroll

It is my contention that a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen. A novelist must have the intestinal fortitude to cut out even the most brilliant passage so long as it doesn't advance the story. — Frank Yerby

There were absolutely amazing photographs everywhere, on everyone's Facebook page and everyone's iPhone and Instagram, just floating around in cyberspace for eternity. People took hundreds and thousands of digital pictures; one or two, even twenty or a hundred, were bound to be great. All anyone had to do was click through them all and post the ones they liked, deleting the rest. But using film meant you never knew what was going to be a good picture, let alone a great one, until you were standing there looking at a contact sheet with a magnifying glass and deciding which to print.
Maybe nobody cared anymore, but then again, writers probably felt the same way when word processors were invented. Anyone with a story and a keyboard could write their memoir now, write the great American novel, or tweet a 140-character trope that gets retweeted and it read by hundreds of people every hour of every day. — Nora Raleigh Baskin

I woke up last night and thought: 'I must call somebody in my next novel Casablanca.' It's such a great name. I don't want to call anybody Fred or Jane or Susan, so when three people get into bed together, you don't know who they are. — Jackie Collins

It may not be the "Great American Novel" they talk about, because its scope is not broad enough to take in all of America, but it pictures the people and the customs and the drama of upstate New York in the days preceding and following the Civil War with a simplicity that, to my mind, is true art. — Clyde Brion Davis

In her book The Writing Life (1989), Annie Dillard tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student, "Do you think I could be a writer?" "'Well,' the writer said, 'do you like sentences?'" The student is surprised by the question, but Dillard knows exactly what was meant. He was being told, she explains, that "if he likes sentences he could begin," and she remembers a similar conversation with a painter friend. "I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, 'I like the smell of paint.'" The point, made implicitly (Dillard does not belabour it), is that you don't begin with a grand conception, either of the great American novel or masterpiece that will hang in the Louvre. You begin with a feel for the nitty-gritty material of the medium, paint in one case, sentences in the other. — Stanley Fish

This reminded him of Alvis Bender's contention that stories were like nations - Italy, a great epic poem, Britain, a thick novel, America, a brash motion picture in technicolor ... — Jess Walter

That's what scares me the most, Paul. That I'll just pass through life and all the people I know will just disappear, without a trace, without me ever telling them how much they mean to me, no matter how small the time spent was or how great the friendship was. That they'll be gone and they'll forget me and I'll end up with nothing."
I saw in my head Charley laughing, Charley sticking his head out the window and screaming, Charley playing a video game so intensely he was a foot from the screen. Moments flashed before my eyes in a quick, unrelenting sequence.
I shook my head. "I know. Believe me, I know. — J.C. Joranco

Writing a novel is like going a great distance to take a small shit. — Harlan Ellison

It's a pity that the land of great leaders like Chandragupta Maurya, Ashoka and Akbar, has to be led by a dummy PM. - Shruti Ranjan — Tuhin A. Sinha

Beneath Albright's office, the colliery sprawled across the hillside, red brick buildings scattered as though hurled from a great height, a hotchpotch of mismatched structures spattered on the valley floor. At the bottom stood the winding house, wheels motionless, above it, the engineering sheds and workshops, canteen and bath house. All lay empty. No buzz and hum of machinery. No voices raised in laughter or dispute. Gwyn found it unsettling: his lads had been out a month and a half and already the power had drained from the place. In the stillness, he caught the echo of footsteps. The crunch of boots on gravel. Generations of long-gone Pritchards clocking in and out. He was bound to Blackthorn by the coal that clogged his veins and by a bond of duty. The strike left him as diminished as his pit, day dragging after idle day. — Kit Habianic

For (strange as it may sound to many people, who tend to think of critics as being motivated by the lower emotions: envy, disdain, contempt even) critics are, above all, people who are in love with beautiful things, and who worry that those things will get broken. What motivates so many of us to write in the first place is, to begin with, a great passion for a subject (Tennessee Williams, Balanchine, jazz, the twentieth-century novel, whatever) that we find beautiful; and, then, a kind of corresponding anxiety about the fragility of that beauty. — Daniel Mendelsohn

I was in Los Angeles making 'Dead Again' and the producer, Lindsay Doran , asked me if I'd be interested in adapting this book, .. Austen is my favorite author and I thought, 'Well, of course, I'd be very interested, but I don't know how. I don't know where to start, A, writing a screenplay and B, sort of adapting it from a great novel. — Emma Thompson

I don't think anyone has written a great graphic novel. — Ted Rall

Anthony Ryan is a new fantasy author destined to make his mark on the genre. His debut novel, Blood Song, certainly has it all: great coming of age tale, compelling character, and a fast-paced plot. If his first book is any indication of things to come, then all fantasy readers should rejoice as a new master storyteller has hit the scene. — Michael J. Sullivan

A sensible person does not read a novel as a task. He reads it as a diversion. He is prepared to interest himself in the characters and is concerned to see how they act in given circumstances, and what happens to them; he sympathizes with their troubles and is gladdened by their joys; he puts himself in their place and, to an extent, lives their lives. Their view of life, their attitude to the great subjects of human speculation, whether stated in words or shown in action, call forth in him a reaction of surprise, of pleasure or of indignation. But he knows instinctively where his interest lies and he follows it as surely as a hound follows the scent of a fox. Sometimes, through the author's failure, he loses the scent. Then he flounders about till he finds it again. He skips. — W. Somerset Maugham

Florida is a great place to set a novel. — John Lutz

The great thing about using the past is that it gives you the most colossal freedom to invent. The research is necessary, of course, but no one writes a novel to dramatically illustrate what everybody already knows. — Peter Carey

Once in every few publishing seasons there is an Event. For no apparent reason, the great heart of the Public gives a startled jump, and the public's great purse is emptied to secure copies of some novel which has stolen into the world without advance advertising and whose only claim to recognition is that The Licensed Victuallers' Gazette has stated in a two-line review that it is 'readable'. — P.G. Wodehouse

My favorite sports novel is End Zone by Delillo. It's such a great looking book too, the black cover with the football player on it. It's just a fantastic little book. — Chad Harbach

I write all of my novels and stories, as you have seen, in a great surge of delightful passion. Only recently, glancing at the novel, I realized that Montag is named after a paper manufacturing company. And Faber, of course, is a maker of pencils! What a sly thing my subconscious was, to name them thus. And not tell me! — Ray Bradbury

To me reading is an almost sacred activity and the great novel is its high mass.

The novel is so deeply powerful as an art form because of the investment of time and faith it demands.

A good novel can sweep you up, quarry you out, illuminate you and truly inhabit your life.

And, of course, although the writer composes the sentences of the novel the reader is a full participant in the imaginative process and far from a mere voyeur. — Gregory Day

The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all - in the end the vast majority of them simply aren't that great, and are destined to be forgotten. — Lev Grossman

When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it. — Nick Flynn

I wrote a great deal of a novel, 'Winter's Tale,' on the roof of a Brooklyn Heights tenement on Henry Street. I was a technical climber, and now and then I would put down my manuscript and get up to walk along parapets and climb walls and chimneys. — Mark Helprin

You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire - that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realise, no, it's just this book. — Michael Cunningham

I started the first drafts of the book during my sophomore year of college. I wasn't thinking at all about kids at the time. But I was thinking. A lot. About everything. I wish I could capture that head-space again; everything meant something to me in college. Every leaf, every sound, every lecture, every textbook. It's like I was on drugs, 24/7. I am glad I was able to pair that ceaseless pondering with plenty of time to write. What came of that time was the first draft of the novel, a lengthy, unnecessarily angst-driven pile of crap. Years later, with Zoloft, I approached the novel with a more level head, and came away with a much, much better novel. My advice to writers, I suppose, is write your novel when you feel like shit; edit when you feel great. — Caleb J. Ross

A great word becomes a great sentence with great meaning from great writers who have a great imagination and who enchant greatness — Mark Peter Evans

Dead. Supposedly Suicide. That's how they'll kill Michael too. Make it look like a suicide or an accident of some sort. — H.C. Deboard

The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false. — Paul Johnson

I think most writers ... write about episodes meaningful to them in terms of their own imaginations. Now that would include a great deal of what they experience, but I'm not sure there's an autobiographical intention. ... I believe I'm telling the truth when I say that, when I wrote Catch-22, I was not particularly interested in war; I was mainly interested in writing a novel, and that was a subject for it. That's been true of all my books. Now what goes into these books does reflect a great deal of my more morbid nature - the fear of dying, a great deal of social awareness and social protest, which is part of my personality. None of that is the objective of writing. Take five writers who have experienced the same thing, and they will be completely different as people, and they'd be completely different in what they do write, what they're able to write. — Joseph Heller

We're slammed at work and busy at home. Throw in an occasional outing with friends or significant others, and we're ready for bed at 10:00 PM every night. Really ready for bed. There's barely enough time in a day to cover all our mandatory obligations, so optional activities like novel writing, journaling, painting or playing music
things that feel great but no one will ever take us to task for shirking
are invariably left for another day.
Which is how most of us become 'one day' novelists. As in, 'One day, I'd really like to write a novel.' The problem is that that day never seems to come, and so we're stuck. — Chris Baty

Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that. On occasion? Sure. As relaxation? Great. But not full time - And a lot of people are doing that. And while they're doing that, I'll go ahead and write another novel. — Ray Bradbury

The internet. Can we trust in that? Of course not. Give it six months and we'll probably discover Google's sewn together by orphans in sweatshops. Or that Wi-Fi does something horrible to your brain, like eating your fondest memories and replacing them with drawings of cross-eyed bats and a strong smell of puke. There's surely a great dystopian sci-fi novel yet to be written about a world in which it's suddenly discovered that wireless broadband signals deaden the human brain, slowly robbing us of all emotion, until after 10 years of exposure we're all either rutting in stairwells or listlessly reversing our cars over our own offspring with nary the merest glimmer of sympathy or pain on our faces. It'll be set in Basingstoke and called, Cuh, Typical. — Charlie Brooker

I started a novel in the back of a notebook, and it was great because it looked like I was taking notes. And I just, I kept it up, it was sort of fantasy, it was part soap opera. It was utterly dreadful, but that's how I got hooked. — Jacqueline Carey

Fitzgerald could sense that America was poised on the edge of a vast transformation, and wrote a novel bridging his moment and ours. The Great Gatsby made manifest precisely what Fitzgerald's contemporaries couldn't bear to see, and thus it is not only the Jazz Age novel par excellence, but also the harbinger of its decline and fall. — Sarah Churchwell

You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out. — Theodore Sturgeon

The fact is that if the writer's attention is on producing a work of art, a work that is good in itself, he is going to take great pains to control every excess, everything that does not contribute to this central meaning and design. He cannot indulge in sentimentality, in propagandizing, or in pornography and create a work of art, for all these things are excesses. They call attention to themselves and distract from the work as a whole. — Flannery O'Connor

Yeah, I'd say there's probably about a couple of hundred people I admire - but that has nothing to do with what a person does themselves. That's why I never mention these things. You can read a detective novel you really like, but it had no bearing on what you do yourself, you just think, "God, how this guy wove this together!" Or you get into the energy of it. Or you see a poem which makes a great statement about sentiment, but it's not sentimental. — Tom Verlaine

In order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for us without our permission. If we wish life to be a system, this may be a nuiseance; but if we wish it to be a drama, it is an essential. It may often happen, no doubt, that a drama may be written by somebody else which we like very little. But we should like it still less if the author came before the curtain every hour or so, and forced on us the whole trouble of inventing the next act. A man has control over many things in his life; he has control over enough things to be the hero of a novel. But if he had control over everything, there would be so much hero that there would be no novel. — G.K. Chesterton

Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale, I said. Well, I would agree. First, let me remind you that fairy tales abound with frightening witches who eat children and wicked stepmothers who poison their beautiful stepdaughters and weak fathers who leave their children behind in forests. But the magic comes from the power of good, that force which tells us we need not give in to the limitations and restrictions imposed on us by McFate, as Nabokov called it.
Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. — Azar Nafisi

Plays are literature: the word, the idea. Film is much more like the form in which we dream - in action and images (Television is furniture). I think a great play can only be a play. It fits the stage better than it fits the screen. Some stories insist on being film, can't be contained on stage. In the end, all writing serves to answer the same question: Why are we alive? And the form the question takes - play, film, novel - is dictated, I suppose, by whether its story is driven by character or place. — Israel Horovitz

I don't want to talk about it," she said. Once again he was close. Too close. So damn close. "At all," she added, hearing with some alarm that her voice had softened. Everything had softened, at just his proximity. "Ever," she whispered, and found her gaze locked on his mouth.
He had a really great mouth.
"I don't want to talk, either," that mouth said very seriously. And then he lowered his head and kissed her. — Jill Shalvis

Keep a diary, but don't just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end - as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It's great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary. — John Berendt

This seemed an obvious sign from heaven. I should stop trying to write ... So the rejection on the fortieth birthday seemed an unmistakable command: Stop this foolishness and learn to make cherry pie. I covered up the typewriter in a great gesture of renunciation. Then I walked around and around the room, bawling my head off. I was totally, unutterably miserable. Suddenly I stopped, because I realized what my subconscious mind was doing while I was sobbing: my subconscious mind was busy working out a novel about failure. — Madeleine L'Engle

People seem to read so much more nonfiction than fiction, and so it always gives me great pleasure to introduce a friend or family member to a novel I believe they'll cherish but might not otherwise have thought to pick up and read. — Chris Bohjalian

The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short. — Arthur Schopenhauer

I think romance is maligned in large part because at first glance, love seems so pedestrian. It's all around us. It's in books and songs and movies and on billboards, so how could it really hold literary value? But what people tend to forget is that the search for love - for the simple idea that there is someone out there who will see us for who we are and accept us isn't trite. It's a huge part of our lives. And it's an enormous part of our dreams.
There are so many fabulous romances out there - there's something for everyone. I really believe that. And I believe that most of the people who look down their noses at the genre haven't ever read a romance novel. I think that if they did, they'd be really surprised by how good great romance can be. — Sarah MacLean