Novel Quotes

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Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction: if it could be told, How much would novels gain by the exchange! How differently the world would men behold!

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.

Ernest Hemingway

I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.

Don't make a novel to establish a principle of political economy. You will spoil both.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

'Oh! it is only a novel!…only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda:' or, in short, only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking. In two months I will be eighty years old. Probably I will not write another novel, and so mankind will be safe.

Every housemaid expects at least once a week as much excitement as would have lasted a Jane Austen heroine throughout a whole novel.

Bertrand Russell

A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images. And in a good novel, the whole of the philosophy has passed into the images. But if once the philosophy overflows the characters and action, and therefore looks like a label stuck on the work, the plot loses its authenticity and the novel its life. Nevertheless, a work that is to last cannot dispense with profound ideas. And this secret fusion between experiences and ideas, between life and reflection on the meaning of life, is what makes the great novelist.

I let myself go at the beginning and write with an easy mind, but by the time I get to the middle I begin to grow timid and to fear my story will be too long...That is why the beginning of my stories is always very promising and looks as though I were starting on a novel, and the middle is huddled and timid, and the end is...like fireworks.

How novel and original must be each new mans view of the universe - for though the world is so old - and so many books have been written - each object appears wholly undescribed to our experience - each field of thought wholly unexplored - the whole world is an America - a New World.

Henry David Thoreau

It must essentially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent.

I've made my best notes sitting outside cafes on busy streets, or in murky bars in foreign cities. I sorted out a big series of problems in the novel I'm just finishing while sitting drinking a long line of solitary beers in a bar in a small coastal town. The hangover was pretty brutal, but I'm not sure I'd have found the solutions any other way. Part of the job of being a writer is learning how your head works - when to push it, when to step back. This kind of self-management is actually far harder, I think, than learning how to write decent prose.

Michael Marshall Smith

I have retired to Nemours to work upon a novel called The Age for Love, and it is on this subject that I wished to consult you, my dear master.

Childhood lays itself out, like a novel, he suggests, complete with central observer, fixed characters, and linear plot. Later, life disperses itself into anecdotes. At twenty-one, it no longer strictly matters whether the author went first to Ireland and then to Spain, or Spain first. And after thirty, he could stitch the pages in backward for all we care.

A novel takes the courage of a marathon runner, and as long as you have to run, you might as well be a winning marathon runner. Serendipity and blind faith faith in yourself won't hurt a thing. All the bastards in the world will snicker and sneer because they haven't the talent to zip up their flies by themselves. To hell with them, particularly the critics. Stand in there, son, no matter how badly you are battered and hurt.

I'll never write another novel on an electric typewriter. I'd rather use a sharp stick and a little pile of dogshit.

We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.

I always remember how a novel written by John Braine in the 1950s about working-class life in England, which was called Room at the Top, which was translated into Swedish as The Attic!

Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.

By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word.

I was trying to solve the problem of this book. (My Life as a Man) When it seemed I never would, I stopped and wrote Our Gang; when I tried again and still couldn't write it, I stopped and wrote the baseball book; then while finishing the baseball book, I stopped to write The Breast. It was as though I were blasting my way through a tunnel to reach the novel I couldn't write. Each of one's books is a blast, clearing the way for what's next.

The two most common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased wickedly and that it taught nothing, had broken down before the discovery, except in illiberal sects, that the novel is fitted both for honest use and for pleasure.