Famous Quotes & Sayings

I wrote my first five horror novels while I was teaching.

Edmund White

I didn't get anything published until I was thirty-three, and yet I'd written five novels and six or seven plays. The plays, I should point out, were dreadful.

William Golding

However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.

Wendell Berry

There is change by necessity or adaptation, and there is contrived change or novelty.

Research is usually a policeman stopping a novel from progressing.

Jojo Moyes

Rejection is part of the process, so you can't let it crush you. My first three novels never made it into publication, but my fourth, 'Sheltering Rain,' was translated into 11 languages.

Rudolfo Anaya

In many respects, I think 'Bless Me, Ultima' is a novel about the indigenous.

Sarah Waters

I knew I'd always be a second-rate academic, and I thought, 'Well, I'd rather be a second-rate novelist or even a third-rate one'.

Eric Hoffer

To the old, the new is usually bad news.

Mark Pellegrino

Not to disparage anything, but most vampire stories tend to be romance novels that are 'Twilight'-ish with metrosexual guys.

John Updike

A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.

George Bernard Shaw

It is the sexless novel that should be distinguished: the sex novel is now normal.

We're not going to get them just because they're a novelty item. We have to be responsible with our budget.

Nelson DeMille

Lawrence Kelter is an exciting new novelist, who reminds me of an early Robert Ludlum.

Ovid

Novelty in all things is charming.

Mohsin Hamid

Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.

Philipp Meyer

When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.

Peter Ackroyd

Freud was just a novelist.

Pliny the Elder

Human nature craves novelty.

Pliny the Elder

Human nature is fond of novelty.

Terry Pratchett

It was like being in a Jane Austen novel, but one with far less clothing.

Terence McKenna

Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.

Peter Carey

I have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.

Manuel Puig

It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.

Manuel Puig

I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.

Madeleine M. Kunin

If being a woman is a factor politically, it's usually not because of a conscious bias, but because women are a novelty.

Joyce Carol Oates

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.

Heinrich Heine

Newness hath an evanescent beauty.

Alice Oswald

People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.

Alexander McCall Smith

With '44 Scotland Street' I found myself having to work out how a daily novel works, and it is completely different to a conventional novel.

David Shields

My medium is prose, not the novel.

David Mitchell

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.