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Life is God's novel. Let him write it. -- Isaac Bashevis Singer
I was saving the name of 'Geisel' for the Great American Novel. -- Dr. Seuss
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. -- W. Somerset Maugham
Novel writing wrecks homes. -- C. S. Forester
Novel writing is solitary work. -- Mohsin Hamid
Novel writing is World Building & Word Weaving (Neil Postman's terms). -- J.M. Varner
Novel writing is like heroin addiction; it takes everything you've got. -- James N. Frey
Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know. -- C. S. Forester
Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal. -- Dave Eggers
Axiom : Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise. -- E. M. Forster
Novel writing is a kind of private pleasure, even if nothing comes of it in worldly terms. -- Barbara Pym
Novel-writing is a settling, lovely space. I call it self-indulgent - I feel mildly guilty about it. -- Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
If only a group of people were more important to me than the idea of a Novel, I might begin a novel. -- Sylvia Plath
The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout. -- Julio Cortazar
A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images. -- Jim Rohn
I'll write to you. A super-long letter, like in an old-fashioned novel -- Haruki Murakami
If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden. -- Haruki Murakami
The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. -- Jane Austen
It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it. -- Piers Anthony
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
I've decided to take advantage of outsourcing. My next novel will be written by a couple of guys in Bangalore, India. -- Tom Robbins
The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. -- Jose Saramago
Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world. -- Paul Auster
We are not telling Tudor history; we are creating ' Wolf Hall ' from novels, which are already a rereading of Tudor history. -- Damian Lewis
I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views. -- Edith Wharton
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
I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic. -- Winston Churchill
The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain. -- Michel Houellebecq
I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel. -- Alice Munro
I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life. -- Iris Chang
If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely. -- Don DeLillo
Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them. -- Julien Green
A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective. -- Edward Teller
The lust and attraction are often a given in a romance novel - I want to dig into the elements of true friendship that form a foundation for a solid, gonna-last-forever romantic relationship. -- Suzanne Brockmann
I think one of the keys to better writing is releasing all of your ideas and to not be afraid. Dream big. This could be the greatest novel in the world you know. -- Adora Svitak
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person. -- Anais Nin
I was born January 6, 1937, eight years after Wall Street crashed and two years before John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the plight of a family during the Great Depression. -- Lou Holtz
Many characters in the novel are representative of types that exist in India. He represents the caste system in India with an air of superiority, the caste system in India and the people thinking that western things are better. -- Anita Desai
I had been an abject fan of Robert Stone since the early eighties, when I borrowed a copy of 'A Flag for Sunrise' to read on a plane to Rome. I was twenty-something, with a first novel under my belt. -- Madison Smartt Bell
I think every age has a medium that talks to it more eloquently than the others. In the 19th century it was symphonic music and the novel. For various technical and artistic reasons, film became that eloquent medium for the 20th century. -- Walter Murch
Some people claim that it is okay to read trashy novels because sometimes you can find something valuable in them. You can also find a crust of bread in a garbage can, if you search long enough, but there is a better way. -- Jim Rohn
It may sound very strange, but I love the freedom that writing a novel gives me. It is an unhindered experience. If I come after a bad day, I can decide that my protagonist will die on page 100 of my novel in a 350-page story. -- Ashwin Sanghi
The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesn't want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free. -- Rachel Cusk
When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development - an insight came from that book. -- Robert Reed
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
As an actor, there is room for a certain amount of creativity, but you're always ultimately going to be saying somebody else's words. I don't think I'd have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I'd love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions. -- Daniel Radcliffe
Sometimes, a novel is like a train: the first chapter is a comfortable seat in an attractive carriage, and the narrative speeds up. But there are other sorts of trains, and other sorts of novels. They rush by in the dark; passengers framed in the lighted windows are smiling and enjoying themselves. -- Jane Smiley
I recently spoke at a university where a student told me it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had recently read a novel called American Psycho,and that it was a shame that young Americans were serial murderers. -- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I wrote 'Yellow Submarine' for the Beatles. I wrote the screenplay for 'The Games,' about the Olympic Games. I wrote 'Love Story,' both the novel and the screenplay. I wrote 'RPM' for Stanley Kramer. Plus, I wrote two scholarly books and a 400-page translation from the Latin, and I dated June Wilkinson! -- Erich Segal
The turning point was when I hit my 30th birthday. I thought, if really want to write, it's time to start. I picked up the book How to Write a Novel in 90 Days. The author said to just write three pages a day, and I figured, I can do this. I never got past Page 3 of that book. -- James Rollins
I started a novel back in high school. It wasn't very good. It was the opposite of good. The writing itself wasn't too bad, and the characters were interesting. But the story was a mess, and it was full of fantasy cliches. Dwarf with an axe. Barbarian warrior. I don't ever think I'd bother finishing that. It's just not worth my time. -- Patrick Rothfuss
At the school I attended, the clergyman who ran the cathedral school in Shanghai would give lines to the boys as a punishment. They expected you to copy out, say, 20 or 30 pages from one of the school texts. But I found that rather than laboriously copying out something from a novel by Charles Dickens, it was easier if I made it up myself. -- J. G. Ballard
We never had books at home, but my dad, seeing how keen I was to read, took me to Islington Library when I was about eight and we pulled out two - a Biggles and a science fiction novel. I never got the ace fighter pilot but fell in love with all things to do with the future and space. Isaac Asimov soon became my guiding star. -- Gary Kemp
A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way. -- Haruki Murakami
Writing a novel is agony. -- George Orwell
The novel is rescued life. -- Hortense Calisher
I've never abandoned the novel. -- V. S. Naipaul
Let nothing novel be introduced! -- Pope Pius XII
A good novel editor is invisible. -- Terri Windling
I invented the historical spy novel. -- Alan Furst
NOVEL, n. A short story padded... -- Ambrose Bierce
My medium is prose, not the novel. -- David Shields
France lost a great novel last night. -- Victor Hugo
The central problem of novel-writing is causality. -- Jorge Luis Borges
Every novel is a debtor to Homer. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The novel is resilient, and so are novelists. -- John Banville
The Great Gatsby, the finest novel ever written. -- W. P. Kinsella
Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel. -- Susan Sontag
Ideas can come while reading a good novel. -- Ben van Berkel
A great novel is worth one thousand films. -- Oscar Hijuelos
A Marxist has never written a good novel. -- Isaac Bashevis Singer
Any man's life, told truly, is a novel... -- Ernest Hemingway
A novel is a tricky thing to map. -- Reif Larsen
Facebook is the novel we are all writing -- Katie Roiphe
Someone ought to write a novel about me, -- Catherynne M. Valente
Oh you know, I've been writing a novel. -- Jarvis Cocker
I don't write a novel every two years. -- Jayne Anne Phillips
A novel is a machine for generating interpretations. -- Umberto Eco
Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel. -- Andre Maurois
Just because it's a novel--can't it also be different? -- John G. Deaton
There's no reason you should write any novel quickly. -- John Irving
Glenda Adams has written a wicked and witty novel. -- Diane Johnson
I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.' -- Jeff Bezos
A scrupulous man will never produce a great novel. -- Julien Green
So, I outlined a horror novel and started writing. -- George Stephen
The smallest quantity of alcohol scares away novel ideas. -- Hermann von Helmholtz
The battle with the bottle is nothing so novel. -- Elvis Costello
Human beings have their great chance in the novel. -- E. M. Forster
The crime novel has always been my favourite genre. -- Sara Paretsky
The novel remains a very special form for me. -- Howard Gordon
There's never a false note in a Berg novel. -- Augusten Burroughs
An old novel has a history of its own. -- Alexander Smith
A novel is a mirror walking down a road -- Michael Ondaatje
Florida is a great place to set a novel. -- John Lutz
For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination ... -- Ellen Glasgow
A novel is a performance you have to plan. -- John Darnielle
Writing a novel is a lot like reading one. -- Katherine Center
Everyone deserves to be the hero of a novel. -- William Nicholson
The fire burns as the novel taught it how. -- Wallace Stevens
Life's like a novel with the end ripped out. -- Danny Orton
To be a classic, a novel should be original. -- Ruth Rendell
Dare to ask, "Where is my novel too simple?" -- Scott Westerfeld
The devil is always discovering something novel against the truth. -- Pope Leo I
The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it. -- Ernest Hemingway
The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting. -- Mason Cooley
Has all the trappings of a mystery novel, doesn't it? -- Patricia Cornwell
Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going. -- Penelope Lively
A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced. -- Anne Enright
The novel is a penetrating study of morals and ethics. -- Bille August
I don't think anyone has written a great graphic novel. -- Ted Rall
This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren't. -- Michael Crichton
Travelling is like a novel: it's what happens that counts. -- George Sand
Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life. -- George Sand
England offers new comforts. I could write a novel there. -- Sylvia Plath
A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think. -- Mohsin Hamid
Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day. -- Henry David Thoreau
A novel is often a longer process in handling self-doubt. -- Robert Sheckley
Good novel are written by people who are not frightened. -- George Orwell
The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair. -- Jose Bergamin

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