Famous Quotes & Sayings

I start with theory rather than people. I don't like novels which have no theoretical or philosophical underpinning. I hate the contemporary novel where people just sit and talk to each other about their relationships.

Natsuo Kirino

I started writing juvenile novels around 1985. I never really thought of it as a career, but more as a way to make a living.

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.

Michael A. Stackpole

Authors can easily produce ebook versions of novels and shorter work which publishers don't own.

Alice McDermott

Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark... your words come out, and then nothing... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.

Ellen Potter

I don't plot my novels - I move along with my characters.

John Irving

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.

Godfrey Gao

'The Mortal Instruments' is based on a series of novels by Cassandra Clare; it has been a New York Times bestseller, so it is pretty popular.

Michel Faber

All my novels are about people who strive to heal and evolve.

Ruth Glick

I didn't know anything about romance novels until a friend suggested that I try writing one. After I read a few, I realized that my favorite part of fiction had always been the relationship aspect.

Deborah Moggach

My first novel, 'You Must be Sisters,' was started in Pakistan. I've wrote several novels and a TV drama set or partly-set there.

Graphic novels are such a visually creative world - it's really interesting what they can do in one sketch. Now I'm hooked.

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

Robin Hobb

I actually think that short stories transfer to film much better than novels do.

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.

Laurence Housman

On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world.

Graham Swift

The novel that's contemporary in the sense of being wholly 'of now' is an impossibility, if only because novels may take years to write, so the 'now' with which they begin will be defunct by the time they're finished.

Ezra Taft Benson

Many novels and modern publications are corrupters of morals or distorters of truth.

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.

Mark Pellegrino

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

For the novels I wrote before selling anything, I didn't outline much. I had a vague idea of the story.

Ian Mcewan

You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.

Alan Furst

Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that?

Eleanor Catton

When I was writing 'The Luminaries,' I read a lot of crime novels because I wanted to figure out which ones made me go, 'Ah! I didn't know that was coming!'